Nick Cannon blames Jada Pinkett Smith’s Red Table Talk for Oscars slap
Smith’s Facebook Watch series was recently cancelled among a larger cost-cutting initiative
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Nick Cannon has wildly suggested that if it weren’t for Jada Pinkett Smith’s Red Table Talk series, the 2022 Oscars fiasco would never have happened.
Speaking on a Thursday (27 April) episode of his Amazon-hosted podcast, The Daily Cannon, the Masked Singer presenter celebrated the “good” news of Smith’s Facebook Watch show’s cancellation.
“If there was no Red Table Talk, then [Will Smith] wouldn’t have slapped the s*** out of Chris Rock,” Cannon said.
Smith’s husband, Men In Black star Will, stunned the world when he walked on stage during the 94th Academy Awards and smacked comedian Rock across the face in response to a joke about his wife’s shaved head.
Cannon said that he believed Will’s rageful reaction stemmed from the series’s infamous 2020 episode, in which the Oscar winner joined his wife to speak about her “entanglement” with singer August Alsina.
“I don’t want to know all this s*** about y’all,” the TV host said.
“I just want to mind my own Black business,” Cannon said. “I don’t want to be up in everybody else’s kitchen. Keep that s*** to y’all selves.”
Abby De La Rosa, the mother to three of Cannon’s children, disagreed, telling him to stop criticising the series.
“It was an honest table,” she countered. “It feels human, like, they’re human. It feels relatable. They’re trash too, like the rest of us.”
Canon and De La Rosa’s remarks follow the news that the Mark Zuckerberg-owned company was pulling the plug on its Facebook Watch originals, including Smith’s Red Table Talk series, one of the platform’s breakout hits.
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The move comes amid Meta’s cost-cutting initiative, which has affected several departments across the company.
Smith’s popular chat show, hosted with her mother, Adrienne Banfield-Norris, and daughter Willow, comes to an end after five seasons.
During its five-year run, making its debut in May 2018, the series garnered over 11 million followers, along with its corresponding discussion group of 600,000 members.
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