Last night on Real Time with Bill Maher, the inevitable topic of Will Smith‘s Oscars slap came up and boy did the HBO host have plenty to say. After all, it’s the only thing Hollywood has been talking about for nearly a week now.
“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 got your back.”
Maher paused for a second. “April Fools. You’re a dick.”
He then threw a few jabs at the actor who sucker slapped Chris Rock at this year’s Oscars ceremony for a “G.I. Jane” joke about his wife Jada’s shaved head due to an alopecia condition. “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 heard ’round the world,” acknowledged Maher. “That whole ‘Keep my wife’s name out of your mouth’ didn’t really work out.”
Although the on-stage physical confrontation happened so fast, Maher noted “there was more action in three seconds than in three hours of The Power of the Dog.”
He added, “Who would have thought the movie coming out of the Oscars with all the buzz was G.I. Jane.”
Maher then scoffed at backlash about Rock’s joke, saying that comparing a woman to Demi Moore at her hottest was not a huge insult. “Alopecia is not leukemia,” he said. “I blame toxic femininity.”
Of course, there were more important things going on in the world this week. “But we don’t care about that,” Maher joked.
The host later brought up the topic during his panel with Laura Coates, CNN Senior Legal Analyst, and Andrew Yang, where it was concluded that liberal hypocrisy seemed to take center stage at the Oscars.
Coates was in disbelief that Smith received a standing ovation for winning the Best Actor award moments after his slap. “I thought, ‘Why is he even there to get the award?” She added that a civilian wouldn’t be able to hang around after an incident like that with a hypothetical excuse such as “Oh, no. I got the rest of my kid’s soccer game.”
Yang added that “part of it was he’s Will Smith. Anyone else would have been ushered out.”
Lastly Maher mentioned that he had talked to an African American friend at the Vanity Fair party and another guest posed a scenario in which 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 check out Maher’s opening monologue above and catch new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher on Fridays at 10:00 p.m. EST on HBO.
Michael is a music and television junkie keen on most things that are not a complete and total bore. You can follow him on Twitter — @Tweetskoor