J.B. Smoove, Arsenio Hall & Ronny Chieng on Chris Rock’s ‘Selective Outrage’

Chris Rock hit back at Will Smith Saturday night during the Netflix livestream of his comedy show “Chris Rock: Selective Outrage.”

It was nearly a year ago that Smith slapped Rock on the Oscars stage after the comedian made a joke about his wife Jada Pinkett Smith. Chris blamed Jada for the bad blood that led to the altercation and insisted it wasn’t a fair fight.

Beforehand, "Extra" spoke with comics J.B. Smoove, Arsenio, Ronny Chieng, who were part of the special.

J.B. joked that he was ready to do anything, like clean bathrooms, serve popcorn, “Whatever they need me to do, I am going to do for my man.”

Speaking on the significance of the event, he said, “This is big… Here’s what stand-up does: you can go on Netflix and watch someone’s special, but how about if there was a way to pull you into the moment as opposed to just sitting around watching when you want to watch it? There’s something really cool about designating a time, a specific time, for you to hear me perform. It’s very different because you are in the moment with the comedian, you are in the moment with the audience, you’re in the moment with everybody else. Technology has allowed us to do that now — we are in a different place now.”

He added,  “This right here is perfect. There’s something about knowing that you’re watching it at the same time as everybody else that makes it so special. We’re all in the moment and can comment on it in the moment.”

As for having the special right before the Oscars, J.B. said, “Comedians take these events and these milestones in their careers or things that happen to them, and they take it from a personal experience that they have in something and they bring it out onto the stage. But it takes the comedian time to develop the material… Every little detail you can think of goes into writing a bit, but when you really experience something like as in at the Oscars, you take a little step back and say, ‘How can I address this in the right way?’ But time flies. It feels like it just happened… The only time we have to compare it to is last year’s Oscars, and now we have this year’s Oscars — that’s the only barometer that we have.”

“It takes time to develop that material… It has to fit with the other material that you have… Otherwise the show will just be Oscar, Oscars, Oscars, Oscars… You don’t want that. It’s got to be a cohesive flow… You got to almost be caring but uncaring. You got to have a balance of both. You can’t let something happen like that and defeat you, find a way to… make it work in a cool way.”

Arsenio Hall was also front and center for the special.

He confessed ahead of the show, “I don’t even know… I’ll try to be appropriate and I’ll try not to piss off Netflix and talk about their accounting or anything serious, but the bottom line is: I don’t know what I’m going to say. That’s the good thing about doing something like this. I’m just going to flow with it. This is like jazz for me. I’m gonna be the Miles Davis of comedy tonight. Who know?”

Commenting on the live event, “Netflix has put together a Super Bowl of comedy, this has never been done before. It’s never been live… The Super Bowl, you wake up at noon and it’s on, then they play at 3, then after the game it’s on, and that’s what they are doing. It’s on.”

As for the meaning of the title of the special, “Selective Outrage,” Hall said, “It means that you could say something to me right now and I could kiss you, and somebody says the same thing to me later and I say, ‘Motherf**ker, I will kill you.’ That’s selective outrage.”

Hall told “Extra” of his relationship with Rock, “I’ve known him a long time, a long time.” He joked, “He had a Jheri curl as an embryo.”

Arsenio has been in the game a long time, too, so could we see him back on late night?

He insisted, “No! Late night has changed. Now you can do late night at your house with Instagram. There is still late night, don’t get me wrong, but they’re all white and they’re all named Jimmy or James.”

Walking away, he smiled, saying, “Was that the wrong thing to say? Where is the Netflix lady?”

Ronny also spoke with “Extra,” saying, “It’s the first time Netflix is doing it, it’s Chris Rock, so you have two huge entities combining to create a night of entertainment that hasn’t been done yet, for Netflix anyway.”

As for why Chris Rock is the best person to do this first on Netflix, Ronny said, “He’s mom-famous. There’s only three or four people in the world who are mom-famous, where even your mom will know who they are. There’s only so many cultural phenomena we have in the world alive today, he’s one of them so who else would be better?”

Saying he thinks the idea that the event is tied to the Oscars is overblown, Ronny told us, “Chris Rock is more than just about what happened at the Oscars… He’s more than just one event. He’s a cultural phenomenon. Everybody knows who he is. If you ask me and I’m sure if you ask him, I don’t think he planned it this way. I think that’s just something that happened in his life. That’s pretty crazy, but this guy leads a pretty crazy life. I don’t think that one incident is the defining moment of his life.”