Chris Rock Is Finally Ready to Talk About Will Smith’s Oscar Slap

Chris Rock is poised to hit back on his own terms and his own turf: a stand-up comedy special that will stream live on Netflix a week before the Academy Awards.

Since Will Smith clobbered him at last year’s Oscars in front of their Hollywood peers and about 15 million onlookers on U.S. television, Mr. Rock has avoided the forums where celebrities typically go to unburden themselves. No prime-time interview with Oprah. No magazine cover stories. No confiding on Instagram. In short, no milking of the moment.

The only platform Mr. Rock went to is the stage he controls. The comic has spent the past year on a nearly nonstop tour of arenas and theaters, where he gradually rolled out a slew of jokes about being assaulted by Mr. Smith. Mr. Rock is expected to finally go wide with his take on the slap in the Netflix special scheduled for March 4. Upping the stakes, it’s the first live show—starting at 10 p.m. Eastern time—that the streamer has ever offered to its 231 million global subscribers. That makes Mr. Rock a test pilot for new technology on the service and a push into event programming by the company that trained us to binge content on our own schedule.

“Watching live on Netflix is a real change in the construct that we have with our members,” said Robbie Praw, Netflix’s vice president of stand-up and comedy formats. The streamer tapped a performer “on the Mount Rushmore of comedy” to create a mass moment that will prompt reactions from viewers in real time, he said.

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