As everyone knows by now, Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars last week. Rock, who was announcing an award, made a joke about Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, who shaved her head due to having alopecia. In putative defense of his wife’s honor, Smith rose from his seat, mounted the stage, and open-hand slapped Rock in front of God and everyone. “Keep my wife’s name out of your f***ing mouth,” he then yelled after retaking his seat.
“Love will make you do crazy things,” Smith said later during his speech accepting the Oscar for best actor. In a more formal apology posted to Instagram, the once-Fresh Prince wrote, “A joke about my Jada’s medical condition was too much for me to bear and I reacted emotionally.”
Naturally, the internet had quite a few opinions on the matter. It is a bit unusual, in the year of the Lord 2022, to see one grown man slap another over a comedic insult, much less when it involves two of the most famous men in Hollywood and a televised awards show. Yet, once upon a time, such a move would not have been out of place in the least. Indeed, the open-handed slap would not have been the end of the confrontation but the beginning.
The idiom “throw down the gauntlet” comes to us not from metaphor but from physical action. As Elizabeth Harrison helpfully explains, the word gauntlet, “comes from the French word ‘gantelet,’ and referred to the heavy, armored gloves worn by medieval knights. In an age when chivalry and personal honor were paramount, throwing a gauntlet at the feet of an enemy or opponent was considered a grave insult that could only be answered with personal combat, and the offended party was expected to ‘take up the gauntlet’ to acknowledge and accept the challenge. Over time, as heavy steel armor became less common, gauntlets referred to any heavy glove with an extended cuff to protect the wrists, and the practice of using gloves to initiate duels continued until dueling was outlawed in Europe and the United States in the late 18th century.”
Duels may be outlawed, but the masculine impulse to “take this outside” is eternal. This is especially true when the honor of a lady is involved, as anyone who has been to a bar in the South can confirm.
The most well-known duel on American shores may belong to Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, but our most prolific duelist was none other than Andrew Jackson. And his most famous duel, against Charles Dickinson in May 1806, occurred over the fact Dickinson had insulted Jackson’s beloved wife, Rachel. (Dickinson also accused Old Hickory of cheating on a horse race bet, but it was the smear on Rachel that did it for Jackson.)
Dickinson was a renowned marksman, and at the command, he swiftly aimed and fired, hitting Jackson in the chest. As I recounted in these pages some years ago, “The bullet missed his heart ‘by little more than an inch.’ Yet Jackson stood his ground. ‘His face grim as death,’ wrote historian H.W. Brands, Jackson ‘raised his own pistol, looked implacably into Dickinson’s stricken eyes, and pulled the trigger.’ Jackson’s bullet took his foe just below the ribs; Dickinson died several hours later.”
Jackson deliberately let Dickinson shoot first, so as to allow himself time to aim. “I should have hit him if he had shot me through the brain,” Jackson said later, in something of a better line than Smith’s.
