In a recent 20-minute conversation for something called The Intelligent Channel, Richard Belzer and Gilbert Gottfried had a vibrant, hilarious, and enlightening discussion – video below – about the ridiculousness of taking offense at comedy, and how even the seemingly most offensive comedy can soothe in turbulent times.
Along the way, they also provided great insight into a comedian’s mental process.
When I hear discussions like this, I’m often reminded of Bush-era press secretary Ari Fleischer’s misguided statement after 9/11 about how in times of crisis, Americans need to watch what they say – a statement made, ironically, in reaction to comments made by a comedian, Bill Maher – and the reaction of many including myself that protecting freedom of speech is never more important than in just such times, when the institutional reaction is often to pull the other way.
These days, of course, taking offense at what other people say has become something of a national pastime, furthered along by growing political correctness – the notion that language is so powerful that it can do harm, and must therefore be curtailed or regulated – and the way that the Internet and the proliferation of portable video recording devices has, as Belzer mentions in the video, turned every private statement into a potentially public one. (i.e. Would Michael Richards have been nearly as vilified for his “N” word tirade if he’d done it twenty years ago, when it would have been seen and heard by only several hundred people instead of many thousands?)
After a long and varied career that has seen him caught in the worst cast in SNL history, and later beloved as the voice of a talking bird, Gilbert Gottfried has developed a reputation over the past decade as a comic flame-thrower who’ll make solid, well-crafted jokes about the more serious and tragic events in our world, often at the obvious risk of offending millions. 9/11? Fair game. Japanese tsunami? Fair game. A joke about an incestuous family? Many told it – they did make an entire film about it, after all – but Gottfried took it further, using it at a more precarious time, and therefore making it funnier by virtue of both his own creativity and the joke’s cathartic context.
But before we get to that: the more recent comic “misdeed” by the bellowing comedian came on the heels of last year’s Japanese earthquake and tsunami, which took the lives of over 15,000 people.
Gottfried made a series of jokes on Twitter about the tragedies, including the following:
“I just split up with my girlfriend, but like the Japanese say, “They’ll be another one floating by any minute now.”
“I was talking to my Japanese real estate agent. I said, “is there a school in this area?” She said, “not now, but just wait.”
For these offenses, Gottfried was relieved of his lucrative gig as the voice of the AFLAC duck, a move driven by that company’s reportedly significant business interests in Japan.
Talking to Belzer, Gottfried makes a case for the senselessness of much of the public’s – and certainly of AFLAC’s – reaction.
What I loved about the whole thing is that the biggest, the most painful and hateful thing, is how I hurt the Japanese people. And I’m thinking, if enormous waves are crushing your village, and your family is being swept out to sea, are you really gonna be running to your computer going, ‘let’s see, how do you spell Gottfried?’ If the worst thing on your mind is my jokes, don’t you need to get your priorities in order? ‘My family’s dead, but look at joke #7! That one pisses me off.’
Belzer then makes the point that many people, especially in the media, reflexively laugh at jokes of this sort before intellectualizing them, and only take public offense later, after seeing the reaction of others.
(Aaron Sorkin had a great take on this sort of hypocrisy in a Season 2 episode of “The West Wing” called “The Drop-In.” White House press secretary C.J. Cregg, played by Allison Janney, has to get a comedian played by Rocky Carroll to turn down a job hosting an event the president will be attending, due to a joke he told about police shooting black men at another event attended by the president. The catch? They both know that at the time, the president laughed at the joke.)
For me – and, I imagine, many others my age – the absurdity of these “controversies” is magnified by our own childhood experiences. Growing up in pre-Giuliani New York City, one of the pleasures of the elementary/junior high school years was the telling of dead-baby jokes, a popular meme at the time in my blue collar Brooklyn neighborhood (and, I assume, many other places as well). Dead-baby jokes – and their related cousin, baby-in-a-blender jokes – were rites of passage, just a normal part of growing up, as were the often incredibly brutal jokes about whatever tragedy was in the news at the time. In fact, whenever something horrible happened on a nationwide scale, there would invariably be articles in the paper about the nature of using crude jokes and humor to get through these tragedies. But these articles, as I remember them, were not about why this humor was wrong, or how people were protesting in horror, but rather analyses of why crude humor was so often employed in times of mass grief, and how it served as a release for the sadness, anxiety, and other potentially unbearable emotions of the time, since grief could be made less overwhelming through humor. Now, it seems, when similar articles pop up in times of trouble, they’re generally ignited by those who take offense, rather than by those who possess a calm, rational curiosity about human reactions to tragedy. And not being a parent myself, I can only imagine what would happen if a kid today was caught telling a dead-baby joke in school. Mandatory counseling? A school-wide seminar on sensitivity?
(A totally tangential but, I think, fascinating aside. Jokes of the sort I discuss above were brought full-bore mainstream in the early 80s by the publication of a series of books called “Truly Tasteless Jokes,” which dominated the New York Times bestseller lists and, filled as they were with jokes about dead babies and various races and such, were eventually met with some outrage. The author of the books was only known at the time by the pseudonym Blanche Knott, but it was eventually revealed that Knott was actually Ashton Applewhite, a young editor at the book’s publisher, St. Martin’s Press. Applewhite’s father, it turns out, was a man named Edgar Applewhite – a longtime collaborator of Buckminster Fuller’s, and also a veteran CIA operative who was reportedly involved in a massive CIA operation called Mockingbird, the purpose of which was to influence, manipulate, and, when necessary, silence the media. In a book called “The Very Best Men: The Early Years of the CIA,” Applewhite is quoted as follows about how he manipulated a left-wing magazine called “Ramparts”:
“I had all sorts of dirty tricks to hurt their circulation and financing. The people running ‘Ramparts’ were vulnerable to blackmail. We had awful things in mind, some of which we carried off.”
No word on how Applewhite felt about his daughter’s scandalous efforts.)
After discussing the tsunami fracas, Belzer and Gottfried go in-depth about Gottfried’s controversial 9/11 jokes at the Hugh Hefner roast that took place just weeks after the tragedy, and the ensuing conversation is revealing not just about Gottfried’s intent that night – he sought to shake up the still-reticent and traumatized crowd when he told a joke about how he couldn’t get a direct flight because his plane had to make a stop at the Empire State Building – but also about a comedian’s mental process in general.
After telling that joke, which was met by crickets and much shuffling in seats, Gottfried made the split-second decision to segue into his outrageously filthy, XXX-rated, incestuous “Aristocrats” material, which brought the crowd roaring with laughter back to his side – and in the process, he says, was also a brilliant illustration of the inconsistency and ludicrousness of allowing yourself to be offended by comedy. (And yes, lest we forget, being offended is, absolutely, a choice.)
The terrorist attack was tasteless, and inexcusable. But if you wanna do a joke about a family fucking and sucking each other, and blowing their dog, well that’s OK. Go with what you know.
Several years later, Frank Rich of the New York Times, who was at the roast, further illustrated the greatness of what Gottfried accomplished – and why it’s so often absurd for the initial reaction to a politically incorrect joke to be the taking of offense.
We knew we had seen something remarkable, not because the joke was so funny but because it had served as shock therapy, harmless shock therapy for an adult audience, that at least temporarily relieved us of our burdens and jolted us back into the land of the living again.
While all of this is true, what’s also important is what the telling of, and the reaction to, jokes like these says about us as a nation. Aside from the initial effect of killing lots of people, the goal of terrorists like Osama bin Laden, when committing terrorist acts like 9/11, is to destroy any illusion of security in everyday life, and to thrust the intended victims into a perpetual bubble of fear – a goal that, given the ease with which we have allowed certain overbearing security and surveillance operations into our lives, I often cannot help thinking that bin Ladin accomplished.
The best way to defy terrorists – aside from killing them, of course – is to refuse to allow their actions to restrict our freedoms. And that, someone should have told Mr. Fleischer, means ALL freedoms, including the freedom to speak freely, the freedom to tell whatever jokes we like, and the freedom to live and laugh just as we had before the tragedy.
As Gottfried concludes about what that evening accomplished:
It was like that moment of, hey, it’s OK. You can come out, climb out from under your beds. Everything’s fine. I always thought that moment of me, on stage, telling the first 9/11 joke, should be sent to Al Qaeda, and say, ‘hey, you killed 3,000 of us, and you know what we’re doing now? We’re laughing about it.’
