I still get that, like, people are like
I'm not sitting in the front row at your show.
And I'm like, no, no, no, don't worry
I only roast volunteers.
You're not gonna be a sitting duck at my shows.
Is that true?
When I do my shows, I'll do my proper act
whatever I'm working on for 30 or 40 minutes.
And then I'll say, all right, I need volunteers
who wants to come up here and get roasted?
House lights go on, people stand up, you know,
and I'll say like anybody pregnant
or disabled, raise your hand.
And if people try to point to other people,
I don't take that.
Right. Right.
That's bullying.
I go, it's gotta be volunteers.
And that way I don't get slapped at the Oscars.
(all laughing)
You know.
Which, by the way, is considered an honor now.
Yeah. Can you believe we lost Gilbert, Saget,
and Will Smith in the same year?
(all laughing)
I mean, gone but not forgotten.
Okay. So here's, I wanna get your take on this
because I was in New York the week Mulaney was hosting SNL
and he asked me to come by the Comedy Cellar
and check out his, what he was gonna do for his monologue.
So I went by and Chris Rock was there.
I talked to him for a bit.
And then Chris went up, this might have been
a week and a half before the famous slap.
Right.
But I saw him deal with a heckler in the audience
and I thought, wow, that was interesting.
I was there, you know,
I think it was kind of a very PC person in the crowd
who went, oh, I don't know about that.
And Chris was like, excuse me,
you don't get to weigh in on what I'm doing.
And it was really fun to see, but then to see a week later
you'd think, well, that might happen at
a comedy club in Manhattan, but now he's doing the Oscars.
He's safe. And the idea that a week later
he was on stage getting slapped
by one of the biggest A-listers was absolutely stunning
and something I still can't believe happened.
I was in Atlanta. I had just come off stage,
watching it on TV.
And I'm gonna be sincere here.
I welled up, my eyes welled up.
It was my hero, one of my heroes, Chris Rock
arguably my favorite comedian
getting slapped over a roast joke.
So I saw my whole world and I
And a throwaway joke, nothing that in the --
Well, the joke's on Jada
because I have alopecia and I'm starring in G.I. Jane 2
(all laughing)
But it was something
It was something that I --
Do I slap you? No, I don't.
Well, it really showed me, and I've always been preaching
like take a joke, have thick skin.
That's been my mantra for years
since I've been doing the roasts
and roasts can be very healing.
And I get a lot of people with disabilities.
I get a lot of just, it's normali--
roasting is normalizing things
that aren't necessarily normal.
Maybe not the celebrity roasts
but like the roasting I do in nightclubs
and in theaters and stuff.
And I got alopecia like six or seven years ago
and I did everything I could to cover it up.
You know, my hair fell out in a course of a few weeks
and I thought I was dying.
I was seeing specialists, I didn't know what it was.
Took a long time to figure out.
And you know, my eyebrows look fucked up sometimes
and this and that, and I was embarrassed
'cause I had this big Jewfro and I had jokes about it.
And I said, I'll pretend it's a summer look
and I'm going on tour and I'll--
And when I saw that woman not take that joke
when she could have easily normalized it,
for hundreds of thousands of kids all over the world
watching this beautiful movie star on TV, be a bad sport
about something she could easily have laughed about.
Even if it hurt inside, she could have.
And to me, it forced me to talk about it.
I talked about it on stage.
I talked about it on the internet the next day,
because it really,
I knew that it was hurting other people who might have that.
It's mostly kids like imagine being a --
My doctor, Brett King at Yale, he's a research doctor.
And he told me about that he had read about a girl,
12 years old who had to wear a wig to school
and the kids bullied her and they pulled her wig off
and she fricking killed herself.
So, to me, anything you can do to normalize it
and own it, I guess, and learn to live with it
and channel your inner rock star, which for me is Pitbull
(all laughing)
If he got attacked by a pit bull,
is what we Jews call a mitzvah.
And not that I'm trying to be,
listen, I'm sure no doubt for a woman
it's very traumatizing, but she,
Jada had talked about it so much publicly that for,
it made me think that it wasn't the alopecia
that was bothering her, that maybe she had some history
with Chris Rock.
Yeah. To me, not knowing anything,
it felt like there's something else happening here.
And also it's a weird pool shot
because it's not her storming the stage,
it's her signaling to her husband who then goes into
but looked to me like a character.
Like he reset and became this person
who I'm now gonna go kick ass.
And you think, I don't know,
I've met Will Smith a bunch of times.
That's not who he is.
That he went into character.
It all felt very strange.
Somebody told me that is who he is.
And we've been watching a character for 20 years.
So I don't know, man.
I don't know. I hope he's okay.
I love Will Smith. I always enjoyed his movies.
The one time I met him, he did scare the shit out of me.
I was writing the MTV Awards with Chris Rock and we
were standing at the stage. This is when he was doing Ali.
And he goes, you know, "Hey, Jeff Ross!"
He just sort of recognized me as, you know,
and he starts coming at me like Ali,
boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Throwing punches.
And I was like, scared shitless.
I was like, this guy has like really got the character down.
So, he is an icon and
it's sad to see someone's career plummet like that.
I mean, his, you know, who am I to talk?
His worst day is probably my best day in show business
but it really hurt me to see,
I said to my girlfriend that night
and I, like, basically through my emotions, I said,
if he gets away with this, I'm done in show business.
Right, right.
Who's gonna stick up for me at a comedy club
if this guy's getting away
with slapping Chris Rock on the Oscars?
And think about it, like, he slapped Chris,
he won, he made a speech, he got a standing ovation.
He went to the after party, went dancing,
and then they kicked him outta the Academy.
I know.
That's like going to your favorite restaurant
for your birthday, they pick up the check,
the waitress fucks all your friends and families.
You have three desserts, then the maitre d's like,
sir we're gonna have to ask you to leave.
(all laughing)
Yeah. It's 5:00 AM. My Dick is wet. I'm leaving.
(all laughing)
I did it. I had the best time ever.
That's the greatest Denny's I've ever heard of.