When Bad Jokes Make History
Eddie Murphy has a famously complicated relationship with Saturday Night Live, the comic institution that he helped save during its bleakest hours (the Jean Douminian era, specifically) and that, in turn, helped make Murphy one of the biggest movie stars in the world for decades.
I’m not sure where I read it, but apparently Murphy was so hurt by a “Weekend Update” joke from the mid 1990s that it made him want to have nothing to do with the show, including appearing in reunions or returning to guest host.
The joke in question was delivered by low-to-medium talent David Spade, who quipped of an image of Murphy in Vampire in Brooklyn, “Look kids, a falling star!”
It was quintessential Spade: lazy, cheap and glib. It was the cheapest of cheap shots from a man whose legacy pales in comparison to Murphy but who nevertheless felt entitled to make a mean, empty joke at Murphy’s expense because that’s Spade’s whole shtick: making the easiest, broadest jokes from a place of smug, unearned superiority.
If I were Lorne Michaels I would have done a cost-benefit analysis and weighed the risk of alienating one of the show’s biggest stars, a black man who absolutely triumphed on a show that inexplicably kept doing blackface into the new millennium, including Jimmy Fallon putting on the burnt cork to play Chris Rock, arguably the second most successful African-American performer to come out of Saturday Night Live, against the mild chuckle Spade’s wisecrack might score.
Spade’s meager little half-joke about how, due to a series of failed films, Eddie Murphy was not as popular in the mid 1990s as he was during the mid 1980s, when he was literally the biggest movie star in the world, ended up having a very big effect on the show and one of its true icons.
I mention this because another meager half joke unexpectedly made show-business history. I’m referring, of course, to Chris Rock’s lame quip that Jada Pinkett-Smith, the wife of Oscar winner and three time nominee Will Smith, looked like she was going to star in GI Jane 2 because of her shaved head while hosting the Oscars.
Truth be told, it wasn’t even the meanest joke Rock has told about Pinkett-Smith at the Academy Awards. In 2016 Rock stood onstage at the Academy Awards and said of Pinkett-Smith boycotting the Oscars, “Jada says she’s not coming. Protesting. Jada boycotting the Oscars is like me boycotting Rihanna’s panties. I wasn’t invited!”
Considering that Will Smith recently published an autobiography where he wrote about being so ashamed of having casual sex that he would vomit after ejaculating and that the whole Smith family has become synonymous with unwise self-disclosures, joking that Pinkett-Smith’s shaved head makes her look like she’s in the military is, if anything, an almost perversely soft joke, as well as bad, lazy, and bizarrely dated.
A GI Jane joke? In 2022? Did Rock run out of material involving Viagra, John Wayne Bobbitt or The Apprentice?
Yet this lame joke nevertheless inspired one of the most talked about moments in Oscar history.
I’m sure that Rock would do things differently if he had a do-over for Oscar night. It’s embarrassing that Will Smith, a man who has lived most of his life in the blinding glare of the spotlight, was so offended by a bad, dumb joke that he physically assaulted a peer in front of the whole world.
But it’s even more embarrassing for Rock that he will forever be associated with one of his weakest jokes, a quip so tame and lame it is unworthy of a man widely and rightly considered one of our greatest comic minds and social commentators.
It was like the Oscar moment when a streaker famously ran across the stage naked only instead of revealing their physical shortcomings, Will Smith and Chris Rock flagrantly revealed their shortcomings as performers and human beings.
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