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Kat Timpf says she cried a lot after being diagnosed with alopecia at 27, weighs in on bald joke

March 30, 2022 | | Print Article

Kat Timpf, a comedian and Fox News contributor, may be the perfect person to opine on the Will Smith debacle that shook the world Sunday night.

The actor slapped Chris Rock in the head Sunday night during a live presentation of the Academy Awards show after the comedian made a GI Jane 2 joke about the actor’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, who suffers from an auto-immune disease that causes hair loss.

“Keep my wife’s name out of your f*cking mouth!” Smith screamed after returning to his seat, only to receive a standing ovation minutes later after winning an Oscar for best actor.

Turns out, Timpf has suffered from the same disease, alopecia, that Pinkett Smith has, which she took note of during an appearance Monday on Fox News’ “America Reports” while making a valiant stand for the art of comedy.

“I was diagnosed with alopecia at 27 after severe hair loss. I’m lucky that topicals/supplements & PRP (ouch) have been working for me & that it’s much better, even without these pounds of clip-ins. I’ve cried a lot over my alopecia, but we can’t defend hitting comics over jokes,” Timpf tweeted, in sharing the clip.

“It was an unacceptable reaction to the joke, to the point where I actually can’t even believe that there’s a debate over it,” she said on air.

“This is what happens when people are always saying ‘words are violence, words are violence.’ They are not violence and now you see why me and so many other people have been pushing back against the narrative because it’s a really scary time to be a comedian because before, if you make an errant joke you can have the career destroyed and canceled, apparently now you get hit and people are actually defending the person who hit you,” Timpf said. “I don’t care what the joke was about. It does not matter. His job is to make jokes, they are not all going to hit. You cannot slap somebody.”

“I don’t want to see a world where that’s something a comedian can expect,” Timpf added. “Oh, I’m going to try this joke out, if it doesn’t work someone is going to hit me, and people think it’s acceptable.

“I get alopecia, I was diagnosed with alopecia when I was 27, and I lost almost all my hair,” she explained. “It’s back now — this is mostly fake hair, but my natural hair is better now thanks to different topicals and  medications and PRP [Platelet-rich plasma], which is a treatment that worked for me but is painful. I get it, I never went completely bald, I don’t know how that would feel, I get it’s a painful thing. I did cry a lot.”

Timpf shifted back to the response to Will Smith’s violent act, and the impact it may have on comedy.

“It does not matter in terms of someone slapping a comedian for telling a joke. I don’t — it’s scary to me that that happened, it’s even scarier to me that people are defending it. It shows how far we have gone in terms of respecting the art of comedy and you know, people being able to speak without expecting violence or the potential of violence,” she said.

A poll on the incident conducted by the Democratic outfit Blue Rose Research showed that more people faulted Rock than they did Smith.

“Last night, there was an incident at the Academy Awards show you may have heard about. The host, comedian Chris Rock, made a comment about Jada Pinkett Smith’s hair loss, joking that she should be cast in a movie as G.I Jane,” the poll said.  “In response, her husband, actor Will Smith, stormed on the stage and slapped Rock across the face. Who do you think was more in the wrong?”

Of those surveyed, 52.3 percent said Rock was in the wrong while 47.7 percent faulted Smith.

Tom Tillison
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