The Oscars Forbid Amy Schumer From Telling This Alec Baldwin Joke

Everyone remembers Will Smith smacking Chris Rock at the 2022 Oscars, but twenty bucks says you can’t name the hosts of that year’s ceremony. That’s right, hosts plural — Wanda Sykes, Regina Hall and Amy Schumer tag-teamed the MC duties that year with performances overshadowed by The Slap. (The hosts were also criticized for not commenting on the fight during the show.) But if Smith hadn’t taken offense to Rock’s joke about Jada Pinkett-Smith, it could have been another punchline that made headlines that night.

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While performing a comedy set at the Mirage in Las Vegas, Schumer revealed that Academy honchos banned pointed jokes that she wanted to tell on Oscar night. In particular, she wanted to take aim, as it were, at Alec Baldwin. “I want to preface these Oscar jokes by saying that my lawyer said not to say these," she confided to her Vegas audience. “Don’t tell anybody and don’t get mad at me.”

The offending joke, not surprisingly, was about Baldwin’s involvement in a fatal shooting on the set of the independent film Rust. If Schumer had her way, part of her monologue would have included this joke: “Don’t Look Up is the name of a movie? More like don’t look down the barrel of Alec Baldwin’s shotgun.” 

“I wasn’t allowed to say any of that,” Schumer told the comedy crowd, “but you can just come up and (slap) someone.”

While Schumer wasn’t allowed to tell Baldwin jokes at the Oscars, she got plenty of opportunities in her 2023 Netflix special, Emergency Contact. She poked at his “von Trapp-amount of children,” then devoted an extended bit to the dubious ethnicity of Baldwin’s wife Hilaria (she’s from Boston). “My point is… that all evidence points to this woman, since she met her husband, has straight-up pretended to be from Spain,” Schumer says in her special. “And her husband shot someone. Now stay with me!”

While Schumer was eager to joke about the tragedy in Baldwin’s life, she found the violence that occured during her own Oscar experience more troubling. After the ceremony, The Los Angeles Times reported that she took her trauma to Instagram in an apparently deleted post: “Still triggered and traumatized. I love my friend @chrisrock and believe he handled it like a pro. Stayed up there and gave an Oscar to his friend @questlove and the whole thing was so disturbing. So much pain in @willsmith anyway I’m still in shock and stunned and sad. Im proud of myself and my cohosts. But yeah. Waiting for this sickening feeling to go away from what we all witnessed.”

Imagine how disturbed she would have been if she accidentally killed someone with a prop gun.