Saturday Night Live: Chris Redd plays Will Smith in Oscars spoof

SNL

We knew entering Saturday Night Live that the show was going to address Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars. We just didn’t know what the angle was going to be.

While the show did choose to mention the incident in the cold open and host Jerrod Carmichael’s monologue, they did circle back to the main event a little later in the show. In this sketch, Jerrod played a seat-filler at the Oscars who was eager to spend time with Will (Chris Redd), right before they moment with Rock happened on stage. The moment that the slap happened, everyone in the audience changed their demeanor. Yet, “Will” acted like he didn’t know what happened or why anyone was so upset.

The whole idea of the sketch was to show how tone-deaf Smith supposedly was the night of the Oscars and not attune to the mood around him. There is some accuracy here in how he didn’t apologize to Chris during his acceptance speech, but he did apologize to the Academy. Redd’s impersonation of Smith was pretty solid, especially when it comes to his laugh.

Yet, did anyone else out there feel like this ended too soon? It was a great premise that ran out of steam and in some ways, it felt like this was the show doing something knowing that they had to do something. If they had Chris in studio, maybe they would have done something more — but he is out on a comedy tour. We know there was more going on after the slap and before Smith’s speech than the sketch showed, but the goal here was not necessarily to be accurate. Instead, this was just about allowing us all to have a good time.

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What did you think about how Saturday Night Live handled Will Smith and Chris Rock?

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