Thursday, June 1, 2017

Kathy Griffin's Big Mistake


If you have not seen the above picture yet (how long were you in the cave?), it is comedian Kathy Griffin's attempt at humor. Nothing says "funny" like the severed head of a sitting president!

All humor aside, assuming there is any left after Kathy vacuumed the room of it, Kathy took a huge risk with this. There is a rule in comedy that states "Timing is everything".

Some things you have to wait before you can make jokes. For example, you couldn't make 9/11 jokes on 9/12, and maybe not even now.

You also have to consider your audience: 9/11 jokes in New York would be in bad taste, but might play well in Saudi Arabia.

"Killing the president" jokes take a long time to tell, and the president should have been dead for a long time already. The classic, "So Mrs. Lincoln, aside from that, how was the play?" would not have played well in 1866, but is a hoot today.

A joke about a living president runs into an almost eternal political correctness boundary that is appropriate, as Kathy Griffin learned the hard way. From TMZ:
[President Trump's 11 year old son] Barron Trump was watching television Tuesday at home with Melania when Kathy Griffin's photo appeared on the screen, and his initial reaction was that something terrible happened to his father.

Trump family sources tell us Barron was in front of the TV watching a show when the news came on and he saw the bloody, beheaded image. We're told he panicked and screamed, "Mommy, Mommy!"

As it was put to us, "He's 11. He doesn't know who Kathy Griffin is and the head she was holding resembled his dad."
Most humans consider showing an 11 year old boy the severed head of his father to be inhuman, which is the opposite of funny. How could she do it?

Columnist John Podhoretz nails the answer:
Imagine living in a bubble so impermeable it didn’t occur to you that retailing a photograph of a decapitated president’s head would be a horrendous career move — a bubble in which you don’t know anyone who doesn’t think the world would be a better place once Donald Trump had had his head cut off. 
That is the world Kathy Griffin lives in.
Kathy has paid the price for her misjudgment: She lost her CNN gig.

In her defense, she did pull the image and apologized immediately:

Should we forgive her? Absolutely. To be honest, I would even support reinstating her CNN job. We need to quit using political correctness as a bludgeon to ruin people's lives, especially after contrition is displayed.

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