Cedric the Entertainer was not originally booked as the entertainment for the (faux) Bowl & Spoon Awards in Jerry Seinfeld’s (faux) Pop-Tart origin story “Unfrosted.”
Seinfeld originally wanted one of his best — and oldest — buddies from standup to shoot the gig, complete with a sendup of an unforgettable moment from the 2022 Oscars.
“Chris Rock was going to be the emcee of the Bowl & Spoon Awards,” Seinfeld told Dana Carvey and David Spade on their “Fly on the Wall” podcast episode. “We shot that right after the Will Smith slap, and I was gonna have somebody come up on the stage and have Chris punch ‘em out as they got there.”
“And then Chris wasn’t— he wasn’t up to perform, he was still a little shook from the event,” he continued. “But that was what that scene was going to be, but Cedric saved the day.”
Seinfeld then asked Carvey and Spade if they think the Rock idea “would have been funny.” After all, they know Rock well from their shared “Saturday Night Live” days.
“Without the Will Smith thing, I think it’s funny,” Carvey said. “It’s just sort of— there’s still kind of residual darkness around that moment.”
“Yeah, isn’t that what we’re attracted to more than anything? Residual darkness?” Seinfeld responded. “I don’t know if it would have worked.”
They agreed it would have been a lively debate in the writers room. Spike Feresten co-wrote the movie with Seinfeld.
The joke of the Bowl & Spoon Awards is basically that they were sponsored by Kellogg’s, where Seinfeld’s, Jim Gaffigan’s, and Melissa McCarthy’s characters all worked, and Kellogg’s won every award (over its 1960s rivals Post, run by Amy Schumer, and the sad-sack Quaker Oats).
We’ll never know if the Rock bit would have worked, but Cedric was fine as a pinch hitter. The whole movie worked for Netflix, but not so much for film critics.
In just its first three days of availability, “Unfrosted” was Netflix’s number 1 movie with 7.1 million views (on 11.3 million hours viewed). That’s a historically small number of views for the top slot, but number 1 is number 1. “Unfrosted” unseated Zack Snyder’s “Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver” and staved off Sydney Sweeney’s and Glen Powell’s Sony rom-com “Anyone but You.” Perhaps the movie business really is over.
“Unfrosted” marked Seinfeld’s directorial debut, though his truest value to the film may not have been in directing, acting, or even writing. “Unfrosted” has arguably the finest collection of comedians and comic actors since “Anchorman,” and most of them came just for Jerry. Of course, they ended up being upstaged by the movie’s standout surprise reunion, a cameo Seinfeld also closed. (Spoiler alert for that link.)
Seinfeld’s proposed revenge bit for Rock didn’t make it to Netflix via “Unfrosted,” but Rock’s response to the Academy Awards incident certainly did. The Rock stand-up special, “Selective Outrage,” was the streaming service’s first-ever live event. It went off without a hitch, except for when the comedian flubbed a punchline referencing one of the “Hitch” actor’s movies. (It wasn’t “Hitch,” and the mistake was edited out in post for the replay.)
The podcast appearance was one stop on Seinfeld’s very busy press tour. You can listen to the entire “Fly on the Wall” episode here:
