The Chris Moeller Archives

What's so funny?

Friday was a peculiar day. I woke to watch the terrible news on television about the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear threat in Japan. It was a terrifying ordeal to fathom on behalf of the people of Japan thousands of miles away. As the day carried itself along, and as I went about my work, I confess that the horrendous circumstances occurring on the other side of the world would slip from my mind. I was having a great day personally. The pace of work was atypically relaxing, even fulfilling. It was a Friday of course, the weather was spring-like in Des Moines for one of the first times this year, and I had plans to drive to Cedar Rapids to see friends that evening and to spend the weekend out of town.

As thoughts of Japan drifted in and out again from my head, I had a difficult time reconciling what I felt was a genuine concern for these other people with my own distracting positive fortunes, as it were. I wasn't being directly affected by this tragedy in the slightest, having never really known any Japanese people or persons on the scene there now, and I realized I wasn't absorbing their pain in any way other than in the abstract, like another in the series of tragedies that have hit other locales like Haiti and Chile in recent months. What I was feeling was far from apathy, but on with my life I was going too, disquietingly unperturbed except for my guilt. Most everyone around me was going on with their lives, it seemed, just the same.

What's my point? I'm not sure except that these thoughts ran through my head again when I read yesterday about comedian Gilbert Gottfried. The long-time comic was fired by the Aflac insurance company as the voice of their mascot duck after he tweeted some jokes about the disaster.

Gottfried has not made his career speaking appropriately. While his voice work might be quite recognizable, his name and face are certainly best known in recent years from his participation in the series of Comedy Central celebrity roasts. These roasts are the very height of inappropriateness and tastelessness. It was Gottfried who quite famously, at one of these roasts, took the proverbial wrapper off the 9/11 tragedy for other comedians to then indulge themselves. In the days following the devastation at the Twin Towers, he joked that he couldn't get a plane into New York City because all of the flights were scheduled to connect at the Empire State Building. If you followed the link above, you probably recognize that the tweets about Japan are in this same vein.

One might actually argue that it's Gottfried's job, as a comic, to make these jokes. Jokes about anything and everything. As a company spokesman now, maybe not so much, but then Gottfried's relative value as a comedian-- that is, whether he's funny or not-- isn't defined for me by his corporate affiliations. I suspect they're only the financially lucrative part of his career that allow him to otherwise aim his stand-up act more narrowly. I think he's brilliant, and my attitude on that hasn't changed this week.

Now maybe because I haven't been directly affected by the unfolding tragedy, I'm not the best person to pass judgment, good or bad, on Gottfried's jokes (ones he's apologized for, incidentally), but it would also make me rather a hypocrite if I criticized him, as other relatively-unaffected people have. I also know that I personally prefer a little humor and deflation mixed in with my own tragedies. Perhaps I just have a rather unusually-large respect for the role of the comedian in society. His or her stated goal is to make us laugh. If Gottfried took to Twitter to remind us instead of the Red Cross phone number for donations (as plenty of others are already doing in his absence), that wouldn't be very funny either.

The problem with having a comedic line that's not allowed to be crossed is deciding who gets to decide where the line is. A new Comedy Central roast of Donald Trump is airing tonight, coincidentally, and comic Whitney Cummings told a reporter on the red carpet that one of her jokes got axed by the network and The Donald before broadcast. The joke, if I may appropriate it from the link, was that Trump wanted to tear down (comedian) Lisa Lampanelli's vagina and build a high-rise, but he didn't want to have to evict a thousand black men.

You might think that this was more sensitively a joke at Lampanelli's expense, but the insult-spewing "Queen of Mean" could probably easily absorb it. According to Cummings, it was Trump who wanted it gone because of an element of truth contained in it. Apparently, the mogul does have a history of evicting black people from their homes in his quest to trade on and develop real estate. The most cutting comedy is usually the comedy that contains the most truth, and Trump has a business reputation to be upheld that's been branded by television, and he's got a pretend presidential candidacy to promote as well.

Comedy is about risk. Wherever it's being set, Gottfried may have fallen over the line of appropriateness, and his jokes about Japan may have lacked even a terrific truth about the tragedy as well, but his job as a professional comedian-- as an authentic comic's comic, which he is by reputation-- is to toe that line. If he doesn't sometimes stumble over it, then perhaps he isn't working close enough to it to begin with.

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Firing Gilbert Gottfried was the easy part for Aflac, Inc. They evidently do 75% of their business in Japan, and in canning the comic, their head marketing officer stated, "there is no time for anything but compassion and concern for these difficult times." That's excellent, and let's see that they stick to that too when it comes time to pay out their claims.

posted by CM @ 8:30 PM