“So, the slap.” That’s not my opening but Maureen Dowd’s, the NYT Pulitzer-winning journalist. So, before I get down to The Slap, a few words about why this is an awful opening.
For one, it’s too easy and obvious. It takes time to find the perfect opening sentence, whether it be a column, a short story or a novel. Dowd obviously had no time to spare. The problem with such openings is that it’s like a format, which can be applied to any event. A column on recently concluded elections will read: “So, the elections.” A column on the Ukraine conflict will begin: “So, the war.”
Another point related to cliché and the “nut graf”. In journalism, the nutshell paragraph is a paragraph (it usually appears at the beginning of a piece) that explains the context of the story. Most Indian reports of the incident began the nut graf thus: “Unless you have been living under a rock, you must have heard that Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars for making a joke about his wife...”. That “living under a rock” is such an overused line that it means nothing at all. If anything, it makes me want to disappear under a rock and live there forever. It’s very cool there, especially in the summer. And you save on your air-con bills.
Now, on to the slap. I didn’t find the joke offensive. Will Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, an actress herself, has a medical condition called alopecia areata, which causes hair loss. The host, comedian Chris Rock, called her G.I. Jane, after the film of the same name, which features Demi Moore as G.I. Jane. Demi sports a shaved-head look in the film. Rock’s references were cool, not pejorative. He might as well have called her Sinead O’ Connor if it was Grammys night. But it was the Oscars and so he made a movie reference.
Having got the irritating nut graf out of the way let me get down to my take. I’m sure that more people are watching G.I. Jane now out of sheer curiosity. They might end up exploring Jada’s back catalogue as well. It’s been reported that ticket prices have already surged for Rock’s stand-up tour. As far as American pop culture is concerned, The Slap displaced Kanye West’s rants against former Kim Kardashian and her new boyfriend, Saturday Night Live star, Pete Davidson, off the gossip charts.
Meanwhile, Smith has been banned by the Academy for 10 years. This means that he cannot attend the Oscars or any other Academy event. He’s also lost his right to vote in the Oscars. Earlier, Smith had resigned from the Academy himself, thus avoiding the ignominy of a suspension or expulsion.
I’ve watched the clip many times over. The neatness of it all is striking. Will lost control but it came across as so controlled, so beautifully choreographed. He strides up on stage, plants exactly one slap and returns to his seat and delivers a one-liner twice: “Keep my wife’s name out of your f****ing mouth.” The slap isn’t too hard; it’s not that Rock falls over or anything. In fact, he recovers quickly to say that television history had been made. But was it a slap or a fist? At the point of contact it looks like a fist; Will then unfurls his fist as he brings his hand down to make it look like a slap. It all happened in the blink of an eye.
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The neatness and self-discipline of The Slap should be compared to what happened at the iHeartRadio Music Festival a decade ago. Green Day’s set is shortened to allow Usher to perform. A message on a giant monitor tells the band that they have a minute to wrap up. The frontman, Billie Joe Armstrong, loses the plot and goes on one of most famous tirades in rock history: “Look at that f***ing sign right there –one minute. I’ve been around since f****ing 198-f****ing-8. I’m not f****g Justin Beiber, you mother f****ers. Let me show you what one f****ing minute f****ing means.” Armstrong then proceeds to smash and mangle his guitar before storming off the stage (and checking into rehab the next day). That was an act of pure punk defiance, compared to which The Slap was more like a ballet performance. The audience even gave Will Smith a standing ovation later that night for winning the Best Actor award.
The Slap reminded me of fights that started taking place in my all-boys’ school in Allahabad from standard four onwards. Desks and chairs would tumble, fists would fly. The provocation: “Maa ki gaali”, the word “gaali” for some reason was pronounced “gaari” in East UP lingo, as in “gaari bakat hai”. One boy would call another the MC word and all hell would break loose. Will would have done well in Allahabad.
Another thing that struck me about the slap was that this was one Black man hitting another Black man. A White man would have punched another White man but unlikely that he would have punched a Black man on stage, given the fraught racial context. It was also one entertainer slapping another entertainer. This brings us to the guild factor in public slapping culture.
This holds true in India as well. In Ektaa Kapoor serials, adult actors slap each other a fair bit. In Crime Patrol, the cop actor always slaps the actor playing the criminal, as soon as he throws him into the lock-up. A cricketer can slap another cricketer — as happened between Harbhajan Singh and Sreesanth. Bollywood personalities are allowed to slap each other — as happened when Shah Rukh Khan slapped Shirish Kunder. Shah Rukh then made up for it by presenting the latter with a car. It’s not clear if it was a BMW or a Ferrari. Perhaps, Will should take Chris out for an ice-cream.
While I was not at the Oscars to witness the incident, I did witness a slapping event in Dehradun, just a day after Slapgate. While out on an evening walk, I saw a middle-aged lady slapping a youth who kept taking the slaps, all the while nonchalantly chomping on an apple. The lady kept saying that the lad was doing “badtameezi”. The culture of Indian street- slapping is slightly different from the culture of Oscar stage- slapping. We don’t stop at just the one. We land a few. People gather around and take videos on their phones. Then, after the tenth slap or so, a bystander will intervene saying, “Chalo, bahot ho gaya, time to move on.” There is an invisible outer limit to the slapping. The slapper stops and the slapper and slappee go their separate ways as if nothing happened.
The Slap has also reignited the debate about freedom of speech in comedy and what is and is not offensive. The Americans should watch our television news debates. Spokespersons of all political hues only have one argument vis-à-vis this: “But Nidhi, freedom of speech doesn’t mean that you can say whatever you want and anything you want. Freedom should be there, but in limits.” No one knows what these limits are in a babbling country of a billion-plus people.
The fact of the matter is that there are no limits or rules to humour. Enough people who have expressed woke outrage over Will’s slap have also laughed heartily at Stevie Wonder and Stephen Hawking jokes. Chris Rock’s joke pales in comparison. We Indians have a nervous tic about making comments about people’s appearances, the all-time favourite being, “You’ve lost (or put on) so much weight. In the 1990s, at the height of MTV’s popularity, I was called “Informer”, because apparently, I bore a resemblance to the rapper Snow (I think it was the glasses I wore), whose single was top of the pops at the time. When I became a published writer, people would say, “You look like Rushdie”. One friend got obsessed with the idea that I looked like Arun Jaitley. He’d send me screenshots of Jaitley throughout the working day. This went on for a few months. And even if I did look like the late minister, saying it once should have been enough. Looking back, I should have done a Will Smith on this friend.
The writer is the author of The Butterfly Generation and the editor of House Spirit: Drinking in India. Views expressed are personal.
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