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The Shark Deck. I’m Johnny Max. I’m quick house cleaning here. If you’re just downloading the feed on Monday, this is a bonus episode where I will react to the Chris Rock reactions. I’ll lower in the feed.
You’ll find the normal Monday episode, which has no Chris Rock stuff. Before that, you’ll find my rapid reaction that I recorded Saturday night right after watching Chris Rock, and then you’ll also find the normal Sunday episodes. So you might have four episodes in your feed this morning, depending on how often you check in.
Also while doing house cleaning.
If I sound a little different, I’m using my brand new portable setup that I brought with me. I’m recording this on Sunday afternoon, around four pm while sitting in a car at the soccer tournament. And I’ve been thinking a lot about the Chris Rock Special and I’m going to stick to my guns here that the first half was pretty good. The strongest part of the special was the Megan Markel stuff, and the second half really lagged and the closer was okay. I’m taking some heat from people’s specific on YouTube who did not enjoy my review, but as we go through here, and see some other reviews, I might not be that crazy.
Let’s start with Jason Zinoman. He writes for The New York Times, and I have a lot of respect for Jason, who wrote at fifty eight. Chris Rock is one of our greatest stand ups, A perfectionist whose material, once it appeared in a special, always displayed a meticulous sense of control. He lost it here, purposely flashing anger as he insulted Will Smith, offering a theory of the case of what really happened at Academy Awards after he made a joke about Jada Pinket Smith’s hair, and in what will be the most controversial part of the set, laid much of the blame on her. A commanding theater performer who sets up bits as well as anyone, Chris Rock picked up momentum midway through Yeah, I felt about ten minutes, and he found his groove, while always hinting at Smith material to come, with a reoccurring refrain of poking fun at Snoop Dogg and Jay Z before making clear it’s just for fun.
His recurring joke, last thing I need is another mad rapper. Another running theme is his contempt for victimhood His jokes about Megan Markel are very funny, mocking her surprise that the Royal family is racist them its originators, the sugar Hill Gang of Racism. There’s a comic nastiness to Rock’s insults, some of which is studied, but other times appeared to be the product of his own bottled up anger. In this special, Chris Rock seemed more raw than usual, sloppier, cursing more often and less precisely. This was a side of him he hadn’t seen before.
The way his fury became directed at Pinkett Smith makes you wonder if this was also kind of a displacement. USA Today was not as kind their headline. Perhaps Chris Rock should have titled his new Netflix special Get off My Lawn. Wow. They wrote, that’s the tone Rock presented in Selective Outrage.
He’s crotchety, he’s mean, he’s predictable and boring. Like many of the biggest comedians of Generation X, Rock started sounding like the guy at the end of the box, screaming about kids these days in Outrage, a flimsy, flaccid special that gained nothing from being live other than providing publicity for Netflix. The problem is not that Rock made jokes about young people, are transgender people are women or duchess Megan, it’s that he made bad jokes about them. He doesn’t have to like the people he talks about. Heck, he doesn’t have to like anyone.
But if he’s going to spend five minutes on a bit about what might happen if one of his parents was transgender, the punchline has to be better then. Wouldn’t that be insane? Yeah? I thought that whole segment was weak and just a weird thing to even go there. So we’re talking about another Netflix special making transgender jokes?
What is going on at Netflix USA? Titty continues. If he’s going to joke about abortion and killing babies, the punchline has to be better than children are annoying. If he’s going to joke about Jada Pinkett Smith and excessively address the Oscar slap, the punchline has to be better than calling her a gendered slur over and over again. His material was oddly outdated from start to finish, with jokes that felt five years old, covering such targets as black China, the Kardashians, and the time when people used to post sushi pictures on Instagram.
Even personal material about dating in his fifties after a divorce is so similar to his twenty eighteen special Tambourine that it feels like a bit of self plagiarism. Yikes. The Hollywood Border wrote, Netflix attempted to build a live stunt out of Rock doing stand up material he’s been doing on the road for ten months, and the only thing that would tell you the special is live, after making viewers wait sixty one minutes for the inevitable Will Smith material, was Rock effing up the joke, a joke he’s probably made around the country dozens of times. They add, it’s not judgment, by the way, to note that a comedy special is the film version of an off, repeated, highly refined stand up set. If there’s ever a comic who did an entirely improvised film special, I don’t know who it was.
But then again, there’s very rarely been a comic whose workshopped reactions to a very public event. We’re getting print today newspapers in every city he went to. Now this next section here amen on what they wrote. They wrote, Chris Rock breaks his silence on Oscar slap is a headline I’m sure you’re going to see in every website in the known universe. Yeah.
When I first started going through the reviews early on Sunday morning, I commented on Twitter that it looked like ninety five percent of the articles had been pre written, as if you just wrote the oh, Chris Rock talked about Will Smith and then filled in the particulars, almost how like obituaries in the newspaper are handled. In case you’re not hip to that, almost every celebrity’s obituary has already been written, except for the date of death and cause of death. The reporter rights the prior work shopping is how I already knew going into the special that Rock was going to make the joke about their respective differences in stature, noting that even in animation, Smith was a shark and Rock was a zebra. This is a joke he made repeatedly and nobody cares that. In Shark Tale, Smith voices a tiny little fish who hangs out with the shark.
Voice by Jack Black. Indie Wire’s headline, Chris Rock’s Selective Outrage is an hour of buzzwords seven minutes on Will Smith and nothing special ouch. They write, even though Rock threw the microphone of the ground before striding off stage. His set wasn’t really about outrage. It was about attention.
Chris Rock, who’s been a stand up, film and TV star for longer than many of us have been alive, knows all about attention. He’s gotten and when he needs it, and endured it when it’s the last thing he wants. He’s seen stand up comedy evolve from an art form that could be constrained by practicing in bars and clubs before recording your special or playing a thousand people to something that could be recorded at random and shared with the world. And the blink of an eye. He knows how to attract attention.
He’d use it to his advantage, and the finest craft scene in Selective Outrage stems from his acknowledgment and execution of that tool. In short, he spewed broadly topical keywords for an hour, betting that Elon Musk, Steph Curry, one of the Kardashians, one of the Royals, and of course Jada Pinkett Smith would respond and extend his special’s cultural life cycle. Their tweets will be retweeted, headlines will be written about those tweets, Maybe more tweets written about those headlines, and it all leads back to selective outrage. Maybe an organization will let’s do a statement condemning his blustery noting comments about abortion, transgender people of the war in Ukraine. Maybe Fox News will do a segment.
Rock said his design to hit as many divisive topics as possible, and given its wide reaching platform on Netflix, odds are extremely high that people will talk about it, at least for a little bit, and while courting indignation via persuasive buzzwords. Certainly, as an all Rock did, selective Outrage was in no way built to last. Half the jokes were obsolete before he even finished saying them five minutes on O. J. Simpson in this economy and why does everybody over the age of forty still feel the need to talk about pronouns one of his jokes.
Yeah, kind of hackey. I’m rich, but I identify as poor. My pronoun is broke any my pronoun is is just. I mean, when Roseanne bar did it, we hated it, right, Yeah, Chris, Sorry, dude. The wobbly frame and extra beats actively hurt what was already a pretty average joke toss on a crowd that seemed more bored than anxious, and certainly not loud enough to give the impression of a triumphant stand up routine.
Yeah, I did think the crowd mix was a little low. I noticed that early and then I kind of forgot about it. But that’s a good note. Selective outrage fell flat in more ways than one in theyre ads. I’ll be curious if the sound mixing is amped up in post production for the vast majority of viewers who didn’t tune in live their grade A CS.
One other comment that I saw on the Internet that I’m going to borrow here and I think makes a lot of sense in the postgame show, why did you have David Spade and Dana Carvey host it? Especially when our Seniel Hall was sitting right there. It’s kind of weird, right, all right? That’s your bonus episode against your recap. There’s a normal Monday episode in the feed.
There’s a normal Sunday episode in the feed. And I also dropped my rapid reaction to the special in the feed, so you might have three more things to listen to if you’ve heard it all. Well, I’ll meet you back here toorrow. Follow the show for free on Apple, podcast, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you get your shows. See you tomorrow.
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