Jerrod Carmichael Jokes That He Was Forced To Talk About The Will Smith Slap During His ‘SNL’ Opening Monologue

The latest SNL kicked off by only briefly mentioning the number one story of last week: that slap. Perhaps you’ve heard about it But it didn’t take long for the episode do go all-in on Will Smith smacking Chris Rock jokes. But when host Jerrod Carmichael broached the subject, he did so reluctantly. He even joked — or not — that he was all but forced to discuss it.

“I’m not gonna talk about it,” the comic said at the start of his opening monologue. “I’ve talked about it enough. Kept talking about it. Kept thinking about it. I don’t wanna talk about it. You can’t make me talk about it.”

Carmichael — there to promote his new HBO special, in which he comes out as gay — admitted that he was obsessed with the incident early on. But by week’s end, he made a “vow” to himself: “I promised myself I would never, ever talk about it again.”

Then, he said, SNL honcho Lorne Michaels came into his dressing room, telling him he had to. “He said, ‘The nation needs to heal,’” Carmichael recalled. “The nation don’t even know me. The nation has no clue who I am.” He then claimed that he had to be “the least famous host in SNL history. The least.”

That’s absolutely not true. For one, he’s far more famous than Ron Nessen, the White Hosue press secretary under Gerald Ford, who improbably hosted the show in 1976. (Then again, who can’t name all four of Trump’s press secretaries during his single term) But eventually Carmichael used his monologue to pass the job to someone else: Barack Obama.

You can watch Carmichael’s monologue in the video above.