In the run-up to Chris Rock’s latest Netflix special Selective Outrage (which premiered live on Sunday morning), the streaming platform dropped a teaser that hinted at the supposed fireworks to come: “the seven-second delay button is taking a night off”. It was obvious to fans what this alluded to: it’s only been a year since How Can He Slap? Vol. 2 and everyone wanted to see Rock address it live on stage.

Streaming the special live was a big play for Netflix, given live events are the new big battleground for streaming platforms. They probably hoped that the premiere—with bonus controversy—would generate some of the same excitement as live sports, which has become perhaps the last globally applicable example of ‘appointment TV’, things we all tune in to watch at the exact same time. Selective Outrage, however, actually resembles a different, declining genre of appointment TV: the awards ceremony. You can see it in the way these 70-odd minutes have been staged. The lighting (blindingly white, flat) and direction (restless, attention-seeking) just scream Golden Globes-lite. Even director Joel Gallen has a bunch of awards shows on his resume.

Sadly for Rock, the material he dishes out (including but not limited to his much-anticipated ‘revenge material’ regarding Will Smith) is just as outdated and tired as the awards show format. Things get off to a rocky start with a predictably whiny routine about ‘cancel culture,’ the favourite bug-bear of rich, middle-aged comedians who suddenly believe that consequences are a leftist conspiracy. Another bit about age gaps in dating is provocative for a hot second, before collapsing into sad cliché. And unlike on 2018 Netflix special Tamborine, which also had its fair share of ho-hum material, he doesn’t have Bo Burnham’s intense, theatrical direction to save the day.

Instead, Rock spends much of Selective Outrage lurching from joke to joke like a wind-up toy. A full 15 minutes of the show’s midsection is devoted to an unimaginative routine about the Kardashian-Jenner family. Robert Kardashian—father to Kim, Kourtney and co.—was the lawyer who freed OJ Simpson, Rock helpfully reminds the three audience members who were possibly unaware.

He says, “OJ Simpson killed two white people and got away with it, that’s a different kinda Black excellence. A long time before Wakanda!” He ends the routine shortly after, with a joke about God cursing Robert Kardashian. “Robert Kardashian—for the sin of helping to free OJ Simpson, a Black football player and murderer, from this day forth for the rest of eternity till the end of time, your daughters will fuck nothing but n****s! And not just any n****s, the craziest n****s in town!”

Not quite a fall from grace, but an insalubrious sight nevertheless.

Ironically, the inadequacy of these jokes is all the more obvious because of how good a performer Rock continues to be. In fact, one of the barnstorming, epoch-marking specials in Rock’s catalogue is 1996’s Bring the Pain, where the centrepiece was a longish OJ Simpson routine worth more than the entirety of Selective Outrage. Rock was in his early 30s then, and his observations on racial and class divisions in 90s America rang true. Today, he’s 58 and insists that he’s “rich but identifies as poor” and that his “pronoun is ‘broke’”. He says he “didn’t get rich and stay in shape” to talk “about Anita Bryant, I’m trying to f**k Doja Cat here!”

It’s like the real-life version of that Steve Buscemi meme from 30 Rock, where he’s dressed up like a high-school skateboarder and he’s saying, “How do you do, fellow kids?” Not quite a fall from grace, but an insalubrious sight nevertheless.

Rock keeps the Will Smith material in his pockets until the last 8 minutes, which is just as well because it’s… disappointingly ordinary. He flat-out flubs the punchline of his biggest joke, referring to Emancipation (a Will Smith movie) when he meant to refer to Concussion (another Will Smith movie) instead. It should be noted that even correctly rendered, the joke (“He didn’t get an Oscar for Concussion, so he gave me a concussion instead!”) is juvenile weak-sauce. The other stuff comes across as a diatribe against Jada Smith, frankly, and it isn’t very funny either.   

The only bits in the show that worked for me were jokes about parenting. There’s some good stuff in there about how those without children naively idealise the parents among us. At one point, Rock launches into a well-thought-out joke involving his daughter getting kicked out of an American private school, and going on to attend a culinary school in Paris. Just a couple of generations ago, Rock’s mother would be legally forbidden to go to a white dentist—she went to a veterinarian instead. “And now this woman, who had to suffer the indignity of getting her teeth checked out by the horse doctor, flies to Paris to have coffee with her granddaughter. Touché , n****!”

These moments of redemption are the exception rather than the norm for Selective Outrage. Chris Rock joins the likes of Dave Chappelle, Louis CK and Ricky Gervais—over-the-hill titans who’d rather fan the flames of the culture war than take their comedy to interesting new directions.