Just another day in the land of the thin skinned mewling pussies as Gilbert Gottfried is fired from being the duck voice on the Aflac commercials because he posted jokes about the Japan earthquake/tsunami/meltdown/holyfuckingshitmess to his twitter account. (source) This is the same Gilbert Gottfried who spawned the “raped and murdered a girl in 1990” humor genre. This is the same Gilbert Gottfried who made jokes about planes crashing into the Empire State Building 3 weeks after 9/11. This is the same Gilbert Gottfried who delivers The Aristocrats joke like none other.
And now Aflac is shocked that the guy might not have the same lilly-white-ass sense of humor that Americans require now that we’re the land of “everyone has a right to never be offended?” Who in the hell did they think they were hiring?
People are losing their minds that Gottfried joked about the worst thing to hit Japan since karaoke. I got hate mail about my “Tsunami in San Diego” post. To all of them, I say this: “get fucked.” If you don’t like a joke, here’s what you can do — don’t laugh. However, don’t whine about it if you think the joke is “tasteless.”
Maybe it is.
Jokes about Michael Jackson, famine, 9/11, rectal cancer, the holocaust, Karen Carpenter, The Kennedys, racism, sexism, children being molested, and illegal immigrants are all tasteless. And if you claim you’ve never laughed at one, then you’re either a liar or you have a stick so far up your ass that you may as well remove it by pulling it all the way out through your throat. Tasteless just means “holy shit, that’s inappropriate and likely to make someone feel badly.”
Yeah? So what?
One of my best friends, Anthony, taught me that Pain + Time = Humor. That’s why people sometimes react to a tasteless joke with “too soon?” (which makes the joke all the funnier). That’s also why I make jokes about Anthony’s miserable divorce from the screeching nut-case harpy from hell that is his ex wife. Is it tasteless? Yeah, they made him uncomfortable at first, but laughter is part of the healing process.
When we make “inappropriate” jokes, often we make them because we see a wound. Laughter is a great salve. It makes us feel better about shitty things — especially when those things are gaping chasms of pain. We have a miserable legacy of racism in America. Meanwhile, Lisa Lampanelli makes me about piss myself laughing — and I am not alone. I saw her in San Diego recently where she picked on each and every person she could approach, Blacks, Jews, Asians, Midgets, the Handicapped… nobody was sacred, and everyone laughed. Why? Because after 400 years of fucking up, some of us are ready to laugh at the past. Law professors writing articles about critical gender theory, most residents of San Francisco, and the full membership of the International Association of Crybabies won’t be laughing with us, but fuck them. The rest of us don’t need them.
Do you think Gilbert Gottfried really doesn’t care about the people in Japan? Do you think that any human could look at the videos and photos and not feel some of the joy drain out of their veins? We all feel it. Gilbert Gottfried too. We all feel for the kids who got ass-fucked by priests. We all feel for people who die of starvation. We all felt it on 9/11. My best friends standing around me felt it when they loaded me into a helicopter to rush me to the hospital after a skydiving accident, yet they could not resist making jokes about it even as it was uncertain whether I’d walk again.
Some of us deal with painful events by doing humor algebra. If Pain + Time = Humor. Then Pain + Humor = The Perception of Time.
No matter how painful something is, the day comes when we can laugh again while thinking about it. If some of us like to feel better sooner by ingesting the pill of humor, in order to give us the emotions the mewling crybabies may have in a few years, then fuck you, crybabies if we’re better adjusted than you. Or hell, maybe we-of-the-inappropriate-joke are more poorly adjusted, and we need this crutch to get through the otherwise-insanity-inducing horror. In any event, I will not condemn anyone for making a “tasteless” joke about a tragic event, but I will give the big middle finger to anyone who has a problem with it.
I thank Gilbert Gottfried. I thank him for making it possible to laugh when thinking about Japan right now. There’s not a fucking other thing I can do about the disaster there. Being able to laugh at an inappropriate Gottfried joke makes me feel better and it harms nobody. So fuck you, if you have a problem with it.
So in honor of Anthony’s divorce, the Japan Tsunami, and 9/11, please post your most “inappropriate” and “off color” jokes in the comments.
The only topic I won’t let you joke about is rape (which is never a laughing matter, unless you are raping a clown).
