Culture

All The Best Reactions To Will Smith Slapping Chris Rock At The Oscars Today

The internet is melting down over the most dramatic Oscars moment yet.

by Charles Rushforth  28 March 2022
will smith chris rock

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It’s a wild thing to witness something becoming a meme in real time.

That’s what is going down on Twitter right now, as media personalities, shit-posters and shock jocks all scramble to incubate a hot take around Will Smith’s assault on comedian Chris Rock during today’s Oscars ceremony.

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Watch Will Smith's "Apology" When He Won The Oscar After Slapping Chris Rock

The punch-slap-hit went down today as Chris Rock was announcing the winner of Best Documentary. During the preamble for the award, Rock made a wayward joke about Smith’s wife Jada Pinkett Smith, joking that her shaved head  — the result of alopecia — made her look like “GI Jane”. Smith first appeared to laugh at the joke, but after noticing Jada’s discomfort, stormed the stage and clocked Rock with an open-handed slap.

Media outlets in Australia went to DEFCON 1 after Smith actually won an award for King Richard later in the evening, giving him the chance to package his acceptance speech with an apology of sorts. During the speech, Smith neglected to apologise directly to Rock, but broadly spoke of wanting to be a ‘vessel for love’.

As I type, pundits are seizing the memes of production — creating accelerated understandings of the slap that will then bid for supremacy in the digital arena known as Twitter. Without futher ado, let’s take a look at some of the frontrunners as we speculate which meme will reign supreme in the coming hours.

Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air Jokes

Understanding the formula is simple here, Will Smith’s role as the Fresh Prince projects an innocence that stands in direct juxtaposition to what went down at the Oscars. Plenty of these have already popped up, my favourite belongs to comedian Jordan Raskopoulos.

Captions Of This Exact Moment

It’s difficult (and humbling) to watch a template for a joke, based on cruel weird real-world events that are almost “too soon”, being projected across the internet at speeds approximately 5000x your initial moral reluctance. I’m describing of course how people have memified the initial moment of Smith striking Rock.

Like it or not, this image will probably define a large part of 2022, as one user put it: this is “generation z’s moon landing”, and is the leading meme format so far.

The “Slap Incident Layered With An Existing Meme” Meme

Much like the horrifying cuisine ‘chiducken’, which distorts the reality of both a chicken and a duck in their fusion, today’s events are being packaged and understood through existing memes. Essentially a chaotic wildcard category, the perfect combination of a historical meme and Chris Rock could be born through this process, birthing the greatest internet joke of our time.

For example, here are the events of today understood via the TV show Arthur.

And then, of course, there are just these: