Jimmy Kimmel’s 2023 Oscars Monologue Joked About Will Smith’s SlapGate

At the 2023 Oscars, Jimmy Kimmel addressed the elephant in the room without saying Will Smith’s name. The three-time host made several jokes during his opening monologue about Smith slapping Chris Rock at the 2022 Academy Awards, including a warning that if anyone incites violence during this year’s ceremony they “will be awarded the Oscar for Best Actor and permitted to give a 19-minute speech.”

To open the show, Kimmel entered the stage by flying in on a parachute, pretending to have jumped from fighter jets above the Dolby Theatre à la Top Gun: Maverick. Midway through his monologue, Kimmel made his first nod to SlapGate while joking about The Banshees of Inisherin cast’s nominations. “Five Irish actors are nominated tonight, which means the odds of another fight on stage just went way up,” he said. Then he established the rules for the ceremony in case anyone “wants to jump on stage and get jiggy with it,” another sly dig at Smith and his song “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It” from 1997.

“Seriously, the Academy has a crisis team in place,” he said. “If anything unpredictable or violent happens during the ceremony, just do what you did last year — nothing. Maybe even give the assailant a hug.”

Kimmel then listed a slew of superheroes and tough people that any potential assailant would have to go through in order to attack him, including Spider-Man (Andrew Garfield), Fabelman (The Fabelmans director Steven Spielberg), and Guillermo — both his talk show sidekick Guillermo Rodriguez and Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro.

Kimmel made another joke about Smith while introducing Questlove, who won Best Documentary Feature right after the slap and was now presenting the same award with Riz Ahmed. “Documentary Feature is where we had that skirmish last year. Let’s hope Documentary Feature goes off without a hitch, or at least without Hitch,” he said, referring to Smith’s 2005 film Hitch.

This is far from Kimmel’s first time giving a biting Oscars monologue, having previously hosted the ceremony in 2017 and 2018. It’s also not his first time navigating an awkward Oscars situation after he had to conclude the 2017 show after the infamous La La Land Best Picture debacle.