Once
upon a time, I was having a good set at a small nightclub in Georgia. I was in
my angry phase and that was really working for me. Someone in the audience
asked, “Do you hate everyone?”
I said,
“No, I don’t hate everyone. Just people like you.”
I know
it doesn’t sound funny at all, but people were laughing. Then I said, “I’m
kidding. That was just a joke. Have you noticed that when people say something
was just a joke, it usually wasn’t?”
More
laughter. Once in a while when you do standup, you can say anything and people
will laugh. I even blew a few punchlines that night and people still laughed. On
the other hand, when you tell lots of jokes, some of them are going to go
wrong.
Sometimes when you say something off-the-cuff, you realize immediately that you shouldn’t have said it. Then you say, “I’m sorry. That was just a joke.” Sometimes an incident like that really is just a joke. At other times, the joke teller in question is saying it was just a joke only because someone got ticked off.
A big part
of Bill Maher’s schtick has been making snarky remarks in response to one of
his guests. He used the N word recently. In the moment, that seemed funny to
him. Although Maher has a history of being edgy, he doesn’t have a history of
using the N word often. The next day he posted an apology. Nevertheless, there
are people who view him as a habitual envelope pusher and they want him to
suffer serious consequences.
Kathy
Griffin’s severed head incident was more than an offhand remark. Sometimes when
a photographer is wrapping up a shoot, he or she says, “As long as we’re all
set up, let’s try something zany.” From what Griffin said about the shoot, that
may have been how the severed head photo came about. Still, the Trump head
photo required a prop and that takes at least a little premeditation.
After
the incident, Griffin posted a video apology which seemed sincere. On Friday,
June 2, she held a press conference at her lawyer’s office. She was briefly remorseful. After that she was combative, she claimed the President and his
family were out to destroy her, and she sobbed a few times. She said, “It was
just a bad joke.”
At the
outset of the press conference, she mentioned that she was nervous and that she
probably would resort to jokes as a result of that. Still, going into standup
mode in response to serious questions seemed strange. That’s her persona and
it’s what she does, but it still seemed odd. It doesn’t seem like the press
conference helped her to begin salvaging her career.
Griffin
has been ridiculing Donald Trump since before he was elected. Contrary to what
some people say, ridicule isn’t harmless. More often than not, it is
intentionally destructive. Jokes can be very effective for pointing out how ridiculous
and stupid someone is. People use ridicule to make fun of other people in an
effort to break their spirit, one verbal swipe at a time.
People
who enjoy insulting others say, “It was just a joke,” with some frequency. The
more a person says it, the less likely it is to be true.
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