Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Chris Rock: Selective Outrage’ On Netflix, The Platform’s First Live Streaming Event

When has a stand-up comedy special seemed more like a sporting event than now? Netflix offered up both a live “pre-game” event to hype their first-ever live special, followed by “post-game” analysis. Neither of those commentaries are available to you if you missed them live, though. But you can catch what Chris Rock said live on Saturday night, March 4, 2023, at a later date. Will you feel badly if you didn’t watch it live?

CHRIS ROCK: SELECTIVE OUTRAGE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: A lot has happened in the five years since Chris Rock delivered his debut Netflix comedy special, Tamborine, following an epic five-special run on HBO that lasted from 1994-2008.

We’ve all endured the pandemic and political upheaval. But all anyone seemed to want to hear from Rock, judging from social media leading up to this live event, was how he’d address getting slapped on live television a year ago by Will Smith during the Academy Awards. We would, but not before almost an hour of jokes about “woke traps,” the ways people try to get attention now, the Kardashians, his position on abortion, his relationship with his oldest daughter, and his dating life as a single parent.

What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: Although this is Netflix’s debut as a livestreamer, other platforms have gone live with stand-up comedy before. Most notably: HBO has a rich history of going live with comedians, including George Lopez and obviously Bill Maher, whom they give free reign even on his weekly talker. Comedy Central also went live once for Brian Regan at Radio City Music Hall (I was in the audience for that one, so I cannot tell you how it played on TV, just that it went incredibly well in the room). None of those examples had as much hype as Rock’s Netflix effort, though.

Memorable Jokes: The pace really picks up once Rock focuses on his family, starting with a routine about how and why he remains pro-choice, particularly for the rights of his two daughters to have “complete control of their bodies.” Similar to Bill Burr in his 2022 Netflix special, Rock wants his audience to squirm by phrasing abortion as: “I believe women should have the right to kill babies.” But Rock’s own take comes with a unique twist in the form of a mantra: “If you have to pay for your own abortion, you should get an abortion.” That’s certainly more family-friendly bumper-sticker material than his tag for this: “Stop letting broke dicks cum inside of you.”

Lest you forget that Rock himself grew up poor (fun fact: Everybody Hates Chris starred Abbott Elementary‘s Tyler James Williams as teen Chris), the comedian juxtaposes the spoiled, privileged life of his eldest daughter, Lola, with his own impoverished upbringing. Her private school sent them on a trip to Portugal. “When I was a kid, we went to the Bronx Zoo and watched a gorilla jerk off, then had to write a paper about it,” he recalls. Chris and his brothers did get to visit Disney World once, but on a church trip, taking a two-day bus trip to get there and having to stay in a run-down motel in Alabama far from Orlando. But when Lola got into trouble, he decided she needed to get kicked out of school, “before she winds up on OnlyFans.” Almost two decades after declaring in Never Scared that his job as a parent was to “keep her off the pole,” his priorities remain unchanged, if not also updated.

But this story has a happy ending, which he explains by updating us on Lola’s life now (she’s in culinary school in Paris), and how far the Rocks have come since his mom grew up in 1950s South Carolina, where she had to visit a vet because racist laws preventing her from receiving humane dental treatment. “I’m not talking about Harriet Tubman. I’m talking about my mom.”

And of course, the final 10 minutes or so, where Rock finally addresses The Slap at the 2022 Oscars, and no matter what jokes you’ve seen or heard, Rock takes a different tack by going on the attack, reminding us all of who’s the bigger bitch in this fight. As well as why he didn’t fight back that night on live TV.

Our Take: Between Netflix’s hyping of going live (as Ronny Chieng shrewdly pointed out in “the show before the show,” broadcasting live comedy on a Saturday night isn’t exactly revolutionary) and all of the social and mainstream media teasing what Rock was going to say about Will Smith, it’d be all too easy to set yourself up to be disappointed. I know I felt that way. And seeing Rock open his performance with jokes about “woke traps” and Elon Musk’s sperm count and OJ Simpson (in 2023!) left me feeling weary for what was to come.

Because it’s also amusing in an ironic way for a comedian to make fun of kids these days for how they’re attention-seeking when you’re the one with a live Netflix special.

And I’m not sure anyone of us really care what Rock’s opinion of Caitlyn Jenner is at this point, even if he tries to imagine how he and his brothers would react if his dad became a woman.

But much like he did in Tamborine, Rock shifts his focus in the second half of his special from observations about the world to look inward at himself and how he’s reacting to the world now that he’s single again in his 50s. He justifies his desire to date much younger women (singling out Doja Cat, who’s 31 years younger than him), although his actual relationships involve women aged 45-50. Which he jokes is tougher only because adult women come with adult problems. Rock declares: “I’ve paid more college loans off than Joe Biden.”

His thoughts about the power of female beauty sound like refrains from specials past, too, even if he updates his references. This time, he suggests that Beyonce is so fine (how fine is she?!?!?), she’s so fine “if she worked at Burger King, she could still marry Jay-Z…Now, if Jay-Z worked at Burger King?”  Not that Rock needs another rapper mad at him.

Our Call: STREAM IT. One of the fun aspects of seeing comedy live is knowing that it’s all happening in that moment. Nobody’s gonna fix Rock’s Concussion/Emancipation flub in post (although if they do, that’d be funny, too). And this is only the second time Netflix has provided a post-show panel (they previously convened comedians to watch the posthumous Norm Macdonald special), allowing us to see some immediate reactions from some more famous critics. Even if they’re never going to be critical. But Arsenio Hall, in calling Rock one of comedy’s GOATs, described watching Rock this time as “he’s like half Baptist preacher, half Fred Astaire.” Who wouldn’t want to watch that?

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.