SNL: Michael Che roasts Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith after Oscars slap

‘I mean you can’t expect him to sit around while another man jumps all over his wife... without signing an NDA’

Michael Che roasted Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith on Saturday Night Live after the Oscars “slap heard around the world”.

The 38-year-old stand-up comedian said he was tired of “people putting their own insecurities on our joke intentions” in the first SNL skit (2 April) since the incident.

“Can we stop pretending everyone knew that Jada had alopecia?” quipped Che, referring to the incident last Sunday (27 March), involving Will Smith storming on the Oscars stage and slapping Chris Rock after he joked about Pinkett Smith’s appearance.

“Jada, I love you. GI Jane 2, can’t wait to see you,” he quipped in a reference to the actor’s shaved head.

Smith then walked onstage and struck the comedian, yelling “keep my wife’s name out your f***ing mouth”.

Soon after that moment, Smith won the Best Actor award for his role in King Richard and broke down in tears during his acceptance speech where he addressed the on-stage incident by saying: “Love will make you do crazy things”.

“You know what else will make you do crazy things? Crazy,” Che joked.

“But I understand where Will is coming from. I mean you can’t expect him to sit around while another man jumps all over his wife,” he added. “Without signing an NDA.”

Co-host Colin Jost then spoke about Smith resigning from the Academy while talking about what would have happened if he was expelled.

“If Will Smith had been expelled, he would’ve joined a small group of people kicked out of the Academy including Bill Cosby, Roman Polanski and Harvey Weinstein,” he said. “Or as they’re also known ‘Bad Boys for Life’.”

Will Smith slapped Chris Rock on stage at the Oscars ceremony last Sunday (AP)

Che took over and said: “Also, can we stop pretending everybody knew Jada had alopecia?”

“I mean as much as we heard about Jada and Will’s personal lives, you can’t expect us to retain everything,” he joked. “Just selfishly as a comedian, I’m tired of people putting their own insecurities on our joke intentions.”

Jost went on to talk about how the Academy let Smith stay at the venue after what he did.

“I also really love that the reason that they let Will Smith stay in the audience was that they asked Chris Rock and he said it was okay,” he said. “So now we just ask the victim right after they get hit in the head?”

“Hey, you cool if the guy who just attacked you hangs around for a while? You don’t want to make him mad again!”

“I can’t believe that the Academy has a worst concussion protocol than the NFL,” Jost joked. “Honestly, I can’t even blame the Academy for not knowing what to do. Nobody knew what to do.”

Che wrapped up the segment by joking about how Rock “has been very public about his non-verbal learning disorder, which means it’s hard for him to understand non-verbal signals”.

“So when he saw an angry Will Smith charging towards him, instead of moving out of the way, he put both his hands behind his back, smiled and said ‘oh-oh’.”

SNL host Jerrod Carmichael brought up the Oscars slap in the show’s opening segment.

He started his monologue by saying: “I’m not going to talk about it. Aren’t you sick of talking about it? It seems like we’ve been talking about it for a long time. It was six days. Didn’t it feel like it happened years ago, like when we were all in high school? It happened on Sunday! It’s Saturday, bro. On Monday, it was exciting. If this were Monday, you wouldn’t get me to shut up about it.”

Carmichael, along with Chris Redd, also re-enacted a sketch that imagined how people surrounding Will Smith may have reacted to him slapping Rock out of nowhere.