The viral moment reverberated off the walls of Twitter, clogging timelines for days with every Joe Shmo's hot take. But it echoed especially loudly in the ears of comics right here in Miami, who say audiences here are uniquely rowdy and aggressive.
On March 27, the night of the Slap™, comedians Brittany Brave, Luis Diaz, and Carmen Zita Alayeto were at the restaurant next door to the Miami Improv in Doral. Diaz had just opened for visiting headliner Bryan Callan, with Brave and Alayeto in attendance.
"We were drinking at Copper Blues, and one of the servers runs up to us like, 'Hey, people get smacked for telling jokes!'" says Diaz, 28. "We're like, 'That's not real.' And then they showed us their phone."
Brave's immediate reaction was disbelief. Then, shock.
"I think a lot of us were kind of tossing around, like, what kind of precedent is this going to set?" says Brave, who's 31. "Especially coming from somebody as powerful and famous and, for the most part, as loved as Will Smith doing and getting away with assaulting a comedian over a joke. What does that mean for everybody else in the state of this industry?"
"[Smith] should have left, or if he didn't leave, everybody else should have left," adds Ricky Cruz, another local comedian who was elsewhere that night. "It was almost like the Mafia boss: does whatever he wants, smacks somebody, goes and sits back down, and he finishes having his dinner."
Alayeto, 36, says that she thinks comedians, including Rock, rarely have malicious intentions with their punch lines."We're kind of losing what the point of comedy is to begin with."
tweet this
"Intent is important," she explains. "We're kind of losing what the point of comedy is to begin with if now we're saying like, 'Oh, you can't talk about someone's physical appearance at a comedy show.' Like, wait, yeah, you can if the intent is just to keep it light and not take yourself seriously, not to be mean or make someone cry."
Diaz thinks it's pretty odd when people get angry at the words of comedians, especially in an entertainment setting.
"It's so weird when people get mad at comics because, hey, we're joking," Diaz adds. "Like, if people go to a comedy show and don't realize we're kidding, to me, that's on them."
Brave says people forgot that assault is a crime.
"Even if you don't like Chris Rock's joke or you think his joke was tasteless, Will Smith assaulted him. Like, that's like physical violence," Brave adds. "That's not an okay reaction in any context."
Alayeto says she's frustrated with those who sum up the situation simply to say that both Smith and Rock were wrong. She vehemently disagrees.
"Absolutely not. One thing was a crime, and one thing was a bad joke. And also, I don't see a lot of ramifications for Will Smith aside from like movie deals he's losing. Even the fact that they let him accept his award, I thought, was so disappointing."
Cruz, 48, thinks Rock's joke could've been much worse than it was. And in a video on his Instagram two days after the slap, he read a copy of Rock's transcript that he obtained through "sources" that contained several jokes written but not used to roast Will Smith. They included making fun of his son Jaden's feminine clothing choices and his wife Jada's infidelities.
Brittany Brave has never dealt with physical violence from a crowd but has had people shout at her from the audience.
Photo by JT Anderson
"My take was just that Will Smith's got to own it," he says. "He's got to go around slapping everybody. That's gotta be his thing. He's got to be hanging out with Suge Knight."
Jokes aside, how normal is it for comedians to experience aggression or outright violence? If a comedian can get slapped at the Oscars, what does that mean for those who perform at dive bars and cocktail lounges without ample security or a camera crew to catch when a glass gets thrown at their head?
"Comedians get attacked often," Diaz says. "I didn't think it was a conversation that we needed to have, and now it is."
"The part of our job that makes it so beautiful and important is also the part of our job that makes it so scary and risky," Brave adds. "The fact that we're willing to be the people that are putting ourselves out there and falling on that sword and saying the things that the other non-comedian and normal folks aren't ready to say."
Brave has never dealt with physical violence from a crowd but has had people shout at her from the audience, send her hateful messages online, and even try to grab the mike from her.
Without a herd of loyal fans and personal security like celebrity performers, Alayeto says leaving a show can be scary for local comedians.
"Of course, there's security there when there's any show going on to make sure there's nothing rowdy that happens or anyone that gets on stage," she explains. "But anything after that, you're on your own. In the parking lot, you don't know what's going to happen."
All of the local comics who spoke with New Times agree that Miami is home to particularly aggressive crowds. The reasons for that, they say, are vanity, identity as a party city, and a general newness to the comedy scene as a whole.
"I would definitely say that Miami people are a lot quicker to shout back at you," Alayeto offers. "They're a lot quicker to not understand that, like, you're supposed to be sitting and listening and laughing.""[Miami is] a mecca for electronic music and art and fashion and partying and other things, but I think we're still warming up to the fine art of comedy."
tweet this
"I've toured and done comedy in a lot of cities in the U.S., and I have never seen a city want to hear about itself as much as Miami does," says Brave, a Kendall native. "They don't want to hear what's uncomfortable to them. They don't want to hear what's not popular in Miami."
"Everything is me, me, me," says Diaz, who grew up in West Kendall. "We're not a violent crowd because we just did our hair. But people are aggressive in the way that they make it about themselves."
Whereas cities like New York and Chicago have a more established comedy and arts scene in general, Brave says, Miami is still finding itself.
"It's a mecca for electronic music and art and fashion and partying and other things, but I think we're still warming up to the fine art of comedy. So as a result, a lot of Miami crowds bring a party energy and a savage energy to comedy shows," Brave explains.
For Diaz, the back talk and heckling, unfortunately, just come with the territory.
"Everyone's dealt with a little bit of aggression. And if you haven't, you haven't been doing it long enough, or you're not good enough yet, in my opinion," he says.
Diaz recalls one particular show in June 2021 — ironically, a charity event — at Miami Improv that nearly ended in a brawl for both him and Cruz. The comedians say the fundraiser was for Florida Widows Sons, a motorcycle group whose website describes itself as "committed to Brotherly Love, Relief, and Truth."
Diaz says he began telling a joke about his wife's holiday office party when someone from the crowd shouted that the story was fake. Diaz hit back with aggressive comments until the man reached the lip of the stage and was eventually pulled away by other audience members.
During Cruz's set, another attendee approached the stage when the comic made a joke about COVID-19. Cruz says he didn't realize the benefit had been scheduled to honor someone who'd died of COVID.
"For me, I'm most happy when I'm taking risks when I'm pushing the envelope. I don't want to toe the crowd line," Cruz explains. "We say what are they thinking and what they are afraid to say in their daily lives. So with that comes the potential of, you know, offending people."
Diaz says a part of him still suspects the Chris Rock slap was staged.
"Will Smith just came out with a book. Chris Rock just started his new tour, or if not, his sales just went up," he says. "Like, they both have money to make, and this was a nice quick way for them to popularize themselves."
Cruz, who has opened on several occasions for Chris Rock's brother Tony, who's also a comedian, doesn't think so.
"There's no way Chris Rock was trying to pull the wool over the eyes of so many comics that he respects, because there were so many comics that came out of the woodwork in support," Cruz points. "I was like, There's no way he's gonna do some kind of gag or some kind of prank and fool all of his buddies."
Publicity stunt or not, some of the comedians New Times interviewed feel the slapping fiasco initiated a shift in the comedy community.
"It doesn't stop me from saying anything, but I'm definitely on alert," Diaz says. "I'm gonna be aware because, unfortunately, people are gonna see this as an opportunity or as permission to do what he did — and that's not right."
Others, like Alayeto, are self-monitoring a little more as a result.
"I will say that after it happened, I became more self-conscious about what I was saying, more so than I already am as a comedian and in the culture that we're in," Alayeto says. "I've never been worried about someone actually physically coming at me, and I still don't think I am today. But I am more worried now that someone after a show might come at me with an attitude and, you know, like, just come at me. I don't want any of that energy. Standup is hard enough as it is."
Brave hopes that, if anything, the viral event sheds light on how we should be treating comedians in general.
"I think it helped the comedians band together," Brave says. "If it's going to make comedians recalibrate about if their joke writing is appropriate or not, then it should also make society meet them halfway and maybe reassess how they behave at comedy shows and how they respond to comedy."
Chris Rock. 8 p.m. Thursday, April 14, and Friday, April 15, at Hard Rock Live, 1 Seminole Way, Hollywood; 305-797-5531; seminolehardrockhollywood.com. Tickets cost $78.25 to $208.25 via ticketmaster.com.
