Last night’s Real Time with Bill Maher brought up the inevitable subject of Will Smith’s Oscar hit and boy did the HBO host have a lot to say. After all, it’s the only thing Hollywood has been talking about for almost a week.
“Thank you all for coming and putting on a brave face,” Maher said as he opened the show with his monologue. “To Will Smith: stay strong and I’ll have your back.”
Maher paused for a moment. “April Fool’s joke. You’re an ass.”
He then slapped the actor, who slapped Chris Rock at this year’s Academy Awards for a “GI Jane” joke about his wife Jada’s shaved head due to alopecia. “I’m not here to humiliate Will Smith. He gets enough of that at home.”
“Every single person in America was talking about the sucker punch that was heard around the world,” Maher confirmed. “The whole ‘keep my wife’s name out of your mouth’ didn’t really work.”
Although the physical confrontation on stage happened so quickly, Maher noted that “there was more action in three seconds than there was in three hours of The Power of the Dog.”
He added, “Who would have thought that the movie that would come out of the Oscars amidst all the hustle and bustle would be GI Jane.”
Maher then scoffed at the backlash to Rock’s joke, saying that there’s not much of an insult to comparing a woman to Demi Moore at her hottest. “Alopecia is not leukemia,” he said. “I blame the toxic femininity.”
Of course, there were more important things in the world this week. “But we don’t care,” Maher joked.
The presenter later raised the issue during his panel with CNN Senior Legal Analyst Laura Coates and Andrew Yang, who concluded that liberal hypocrisy seemed to take center stage at the Oscars.
Coates was incredulous that shortly after his slap, Smith received a standing ovation for winning the Best Actor Award. “I thought, ‘Why is he even there to get the award?’ She added that after such an incident, a civilian would not respond with a hypothetical excuse like, “Oh no. I got the rest of my kid’s soccer game.”
Yang added, “Part of it was that he’s Will Smith. Anyone else would have been pushed out.”
Most recently, Maher mentioned that he was speaking to an African American friend at the Vanity Fair party and another guest presented a scenario where Rock responded to the slap by fighting back. “He couldn’t,” Maher’s friend said. “He had the whole race on his shoulders.”
You can watch Maher’s opening monologue above, and catch new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO on Fridays at 10:00 p.m. EST.
Michael is a music and TV junkie keen on most things that aren’t complete and utter boredom. You can follow him on Twitter — @tweetskoor
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