Chris Rock Finally Gets the Last Laugh

The experience of trying to watch Selective Outrage was bizarre in and of itself. Netflix treated Rock's special as if it was a pseudo-comedy Super Bowl, bookending the event with a preshow and an aftershow. The Ronny Chieng-hosted preamble had a New Year's Rockin' Eve-esque timer counting down the minutes until Rock stepped on stage. The afterparty featured, inexplicably, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar breaking down the special, saying that if he was on last year's Oscars stage instead of Chris Rock, Will Smith wouldn't have dared slap him. As for Selective Outrage itself? In the end, it's Chris Rock—one of the greatest comedians of all time, as a Netflix-compiled series of celebrity video tributes (including Matthew McConaughey?!) reminded us—so the special was a delight.

View in Browser  SHOP EXCLUSIVE SUBSCRIBE Well, Chris Rock Had the Last Laugh After All The experience of trying to watch Selective Outrage was bizarre in and of itself. Netflix treated Rock's special as if it was a pseudo-comedy Super Bowl, bookending the event with a preshow and an aftershow. The Ronny Chieng-hosted preamble had a New Year's Rockin' Eve-esque timer counting down the minutes until Rock stepped on stage. The afterparty featured, inexplicably, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar breaking down the special, saying that if he was on last year's Oscars stage instead of Chris Rock, Will Smith wouldn't have dared slap him. As for Selective Outrage itself? In the end, it's Chris Rock—one of the greatest comedians of all time, as a Netflix-compiled series of celebrity video tributes (including Matthew McConaughey?!) reminded us—so the special was a delight. Read More The 10 Best Bongs For Smoking Better Weed Be the weed renaissance man you wish to see in the world. Read More The Heart of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar After a busy month—and the breaking of a certain scoring record—the Lakers legend is just trying to do it all the right way. Isn't that what we're all striving for? Read More Fix Our Immigration System? First We Have to Get a Grip. The president has been playing defense on immigration for his first two years in office. Family separation formally ended in the summer of 2018 and, with Trump residing at Mar-a-Lago rather than the White House, talk of a "big, beautiful" border wall has faded. But the fearmongering about migrants that Trump unleashed lives on. Some U.S. politicians now speak about people who want to come to this country almost exclusively as hordes of invaders bent on destroying America. The governors of Texas and Florida have taken to busing and flying new migrants to northeast cities to stick it to the libs. Right-wing pundits, meanwhile, have relentlessly accused the Biden administration of enabling a full-blown border crisis. Read More 'The Last of Us' Episode 8 Changes Ellie For Good This week, our hero meets some deeply messed-up people—which is saying something in this fungus world. Read More 7 Things Esquire Editors Bought This Week Self care purchases, sustainable mugs, and more. Read More 15 Books Chris Pine Thinks Everyone Should Read Before he was a dungeon-pilfering rogue, a Starfleet captain, or a handsome prince, Chris Pine was an English major. And while he's ended up—like many an English major before him—making a living in a different field, dude still loves to read. And he reads everything— when we met at his house in Los Angeles a few months ago, the volumes in his on-deck circle ranged from Lucy Ellman's Ducks, Newburyport—a stream-of-consciousness novel told in a single run-on sentence that stretches over 1,000 pages—to Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner's page-turner Heat 2. Ahead of our meeting, he'd agreed to give us a top-five list of recent favorites; by the morning of the interview, he'd managed to narrow it down to around twenty. Here, he walks us through that stack. Read More Follow Us Unsubscribe | Privacy Notice/Notice at Collection esquire.com ©2023 Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Hearst Magazines, 300 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019