Former Theater Kids Everywhere Had the Same Reaction to Will Smith Hitting Chris Rock

William Shakespeare's Macbeth is said to be cursed. Actors, therefore, do anything they can to say its name when they're in the theater—instead choosing to say "The Scottish Play" or "The Bard's Play."

So when Chris Rock came onstage at the Oscars last night and uttered the word "Macbeth," saying "Denzel—Macbeth—loved it," referring to Joel Coen's The Tragedy of Macbeth starring Denzel Washington as Macbeth, it all devolved from there. Will Smith stormed on stage and slapped Rock after Rock made a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith. Smith told the comic to "keep my wife's name out of your f*cking mouth."

The audience at the Dolby Theater was stunned, and so were audiences at home. One niche joke came up again and again though on social media: This confrontation was because Rock had said "Macbeth"—something that caused immediate bad luck.

As Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Lynn Nottage tweeted, "The minute Chris Rock said Macbeth on stage, my husband turned to me and said, 'this is not going to go well for him.'"

Where does the bad luck come from? As Royal Shakespeare Company explains, "According to folklore, Macbeth was cursed from the beginning. A coven of witches objected to Shakespeare using real incantations, so they put a curse on the play. Legend has it the play’s first performance (around 1606) was riddled with disaster. The actor playing Lady Macbeth died suddenly, so Shakespeare himself had to take on the part. Other rumoured mishaps include real daggers being used in place of stage props for the murder of King Duncan (resulting in the actor’s death)."

Since, there's been a spate of bad luck tied to Macbeth, including something called the Astor Place Riot in New York in 1849—sparked, in part by rivalry between American actor Edwin Forrest and English actor William Charles Macready, both playing Macbeth at the time.

Flash forward to the 2022 Oscars, when Chris Rock said the name of Macbeth in the Dolby Theater. Here were some of Twitter's best jokes about Rock and the Scottish Play:

In his acceptance speech for Best Actor, Smith said, "I wanna apologize to the Academy, I wanna apologize to all my fellow nominees."

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