It was the slap seen ’round the world – and while the incident between Will Smith and Chris Rock at the Oscars was polarizing and shocking, it does have a silver lining. Ticket sales for Chris Rock’s comedy shows have reportedly spiked since Sunday night.
Live event ticketing site, TickPick, sold more tickets to see Chris Rock overnight than it had in the past month combined, according to a tweet from the company Monday.
Rock is set to perform standup at Boston’s Wilbur Theater on Wednesday. On March 18, the cheapest tickets were sold for $46, but had increased to $411 by Monday, according to TickPick’s public relations representative Kyle Zorn.
And tickets for his Friday show at the same theater now start at $503. That show is sold out on TicketMaster.
CBS News has reached out to TickPick, Ticketmaster and other ticketing websites for more information and is awaiting response.
Rock will perform several New York-area shows with comedian Kevin Hart this summer, then finish with his own “Ego Death World Tour” that will take him to Australia and New Zealand.
Rock has yet to make any public statements about the incident with Smith. The comedian was presenting at the Oscars when he made a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith’s shaved head that apparently upset the couple and prompted Smith to not only hop up on stage and slap Rock, but shout “keep my wife’s name out of your f***ing mouth.” Pinkett Smith has a shaved head because she has alopecia, which she has been open about.
Rock has decided not to press charges, according to the LAPD.
Smith won the award for Best Actor shortly after the slap and used his speech to apologize to the Academy and his fellow nominees – not Rock. He did, however, release a statement on Instagram Monday saying his “behavior at last night’s Academy Awards was unacceptable and inexcusable” and that he would like to publicly apologize to Rock.
“I was out of line and I was wrong,” Smith wrote.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said Monday that it “condemns” Smith’s actions at the Oscars and is launching a formal review into his conduct.
