Ricky Gervais reveals his Jada Pinkett Smith Oscars joke
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If he had presented, Ricky Gervais wouldn’t have poked fun at Jada Pinkett Smith’s hair loss, like Chris Rock did at Sunday night’s Academy Awards.
Instead, the British comic had far funnier — and more personal jabs — he would have unleashed.
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“I trended when that happened and I was not even there. People were going ‘What would have happened if Ricky Gervais had been doing it (hosting the Oscars)?’ Well, nothing as I would not have made a joke about his wife’s hair. I would have made a joke about her boyfriend,” Gervais said at a stand-up appearance this week, per the Mirror.
The comedian was taking a swipe at 50-year-old Pinkett Smith’s “entanglement” with R&B singer August Alsina, 29, who claimed the two had a whirlwind romance after meeting in 2015 when she and her husband Will were on a break.
“I totally gave myself to that relationship for years of my life,” Alsina told radio host Angela Yee in 2020.
“Yes, it was a relationship, absolutely. I was in a lot of pain, and I was very broken,” Pinkett Smith revealed on Red Table Talk in July 2020.
“I was done with you,” Smith said, referring to their split. “Marriages have that, though. We decided that we were going to separate for a period of time, and you go figure out how to make yourself happy and I’ll try to figure out how to make myself happy. I really felt like we could be over.”
In an interview with GQ last September, Smith admitted the couple, who married in 1997 and share two children, had a different kind of bond.
“Jada never believed in conventional marriage … Jada had family members that had an unconventional relationship,” Smith told GQ.
Elsewhere, Smith revealed that their notions of marriage changed as they got older.
“Marriage for us can’t be a prison … But the experiences that the freedoms that we’ve given one another and the unconditional support, to me, is the highest definition of love,” Smith said.
Gervais told the crowd at his stand-up show that he didn’t have “any Will Smith material,” but he did weigh in on the head-smacking incident when he reposted a clip of his David Brent character from TheOffice making fun of a colleague’s wife’s alopecia — an autoimmune disease that Pinkett Smith suffers from that causes baldness.
Smith slapped Rock after the comedian made a G.I. Jane joke about his wife’s shaved head.
On social media, many followers wondered why Smith so easily struck Rock for a harmless remark and not Alsina.
“Will Smith’s marriage is open to EVERYTHING except jokes,” conservative commentator C.J. Pearson jabbed.
Meanwhile, at the BAFTAs last month, host Rebel Wilson sniped that Smith’s “best performance in the past year was being OK with all his wife’s boyfriends.”
Gervais’ joke about Alsina wasn’t the first time he gave fans a hint of what would have happened if he hosted the Academy Awards. Responding to a fan on Twitter this week, the comedian posted a snippet of his opening monologue.
“I’d start with ‘Hello. I hope this show helps cheer up the ordinary people watching at home,'” Gervais began. “‘If you’re unemployed for example, take some comfort in the fact that even if you had a job, your salary probably wouldn’t be as much as the goody bag all the actors have just been given.'”
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