I’m of the opinion that there is no such thing as a topic so horrible that it cannot be made into a funny joke. It’s just that some topics are so horrible that it would take the skill of a *really* *good* comedian to make the joke work. The Holocaust, animal cruelty, genocide, sexual assault, racism, terminal illness, religious ritual murder… these would be hard to make successful jokes about. And any *smart* person attempting humor with these topics would think twice. You’d think.
Politics is of course a pretty easy and common subject of humor. And thus it’s perfectly understandable when *anybody* throws out a joke about Politician X. If the joke works, great. If the joke doesn’t work… meh, move on to the next one. Like “airline food” or “weather” jokes, if you make a “politics” joke that falls flat, it’s no big deal (caveat: unless you make a joke about the Left. They don’t like that.). But when the subject of the joke is a Dangerous Topic, the jokester had better put some thought into the joke. Not just in crafting it but in determining if the joke is any sort of good idea.
And so, the subject of this post:
Thus joining the like of Harmon and Gunn in thinking that pedo-jokes are funny. Now, again, I have no doubt that Richard Pryor or Eddie Murphy or George Carlin or Robin Williams or Dave Chapelle *could* have made funny pedo jokes, and may well have. I bet even they would have balked at the idea most of the time. But here’s the thing: you read or watch any of the “jokes” that Gunn, Harmon or Wilson – and no doubt a whole bunch more of our Hollywood Betters who are currently furiously scrubbing their Twitter accounts – produced, and there’s something that links them all together: they’re just not funny. They’re not witty. They don’t have anything resembling humor. They are just – at best – lame attempts to shock. “Look at me, see how transgressive and bold I am,” and it just comes across as “look at me, see what a perv I am.”
As always, I’m uneasy about people losing their careers over bad jokes on Twitter. But once again we’re faced with a guy who seemed to make a lot of the same kind of head-scratchingly-unwise jokes. This may be the fault of Twitter. When it becomes *that* easy to spew forth every least thought you have for all he world to see, then the self-editing process inherent in just about any deeper form of publishing seems to fall by the wayside.
