Man, This Week Has Been a Joke

Quvenzhané Wallis went from being on the red carpet to being the target of a blue joke. (AFP/Getty Images)

This has been a busy week for outrage.

The Seth MacFarlane-hosted Oscars got some people’s knickers in a twist, a crass Onion comment on Twitter actually resulted in an apology, which is something those offended by a Joan Rivers Holocaust comment are never going to get.

Throw in Swedish meatballs made of horsemeat and, as the week ends, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker being compared to Jeffrey Dahmer, and you've got something to outrage everybody.

Whew, I’m exhausted just typing it. But to me, it’s sort of the confluence of a lot of things in our culture right now – that line of humor that always seems to move a bit, a reactionary culture and people’s sense that they have to express everything they think the moment they think it.

Welcome to 2013.

Let’s start with the Oscars. I wasn’t a big fan of the MacFarlane hosting job, but then again I can’t remember one I’ve actually liked. Few can, so that’s why the outrage about MacFarlane seemed rather odd. It was coupled with some notion that the broadcast was terribly sexist, yet how many people at home were deciding which actresses looked hot and which ones didn’t?

One who looked cute, because she’s too young to be anything else, was 9-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis, a Best Actress nominee. With a puppy purse in hand, she was the epitome of sweetness in the midst of the often-tacky red carpet sideshow. So of course that was the perfect setup for the satirical website/newspaper The Onion to jokingly call her a word that is generally never uttered at a woman unless you want to get slapped or shot.

That was the joke, of course, that she is the opposite of that. But the use of that word aimed at a 9-year-old was something that many (including myself) thought crossed a line. Even so, I was more stunned by the Onion apology than I was the joke. Everything seems fair game these days, even children.

In Rivers’ case, there were those who felt she should apologize because, as a Jew, she should know better than to joke about such matters. Rivers has no plans to back down, and good for her even if I don’t quite agree that jokes about the Holocaust are a way of continuing a conversation about it. But I also don’t agree that there is one group of people who get to designate how others should feel about something that is part of their own history, too. 

Part of the reason much of this is exhausting to me is the humor involved is so lame. We seem to be caught up in a cycle of creating a punch line that involves shock and little else. There’s little nuance, there’s often little thought except the arrogance of “Well, you just are offended too easily.” Rude and funny are not the same thing to everyone. If so, every high school freshman boy in the world would have his own cable special.

I’m no saint. I work in a newsroom, and newsrooms are veritable petri dishes for the formation of the darkest of humor. I’ve often wondered what the outside world would think if they heard the things we say. Let’s just say the Onion isn’t that far removed from the things we wish we could put in the paper sometime. But it all generally involves some thought, commentary or wordplay and doesn't just rely on an obscene word or notion.

I’m old enough to have watched “Saturday Night Live” in its first seasons, when it really broke some ground on the comedy front. But in a world where just about any crude, rude phrase passes as humor, I wonder how many of those sketches would even make it on the air today?

Not everything was brilliant on “SNL” back then, it would take a very selective memory to make that statement. Yet an infamous sketch in which Chevy Chase and Richard Pryor throw every racial epithet at each other works as a commentary on society and not just because of the shock of hearing those words on TV. (The setup was that it was a job interview, and in our clueless world there probably used to be job interviews like this and probably still are.)

People are so dug in now, would they even get the joke? It’s amazing to me that the Onion – which I love – continues to thrive since satire seems all but dead. Two movies that say more about our culture than any I can remember in recent years “Citizen Ruth” and “American Dreamz” utterly tanked at the box office and few people I know have even heard of them. But poking fun at both sides of the abortion debate or lampooning our obsession with talent-reality shows is not a way to earn a lot of love from the people.

To me, all this is just exacerbated by social media, text messaging and call-in radio shows. There is such an abundance of ways to immediately express your thoughts that so many people feel compelled to do this every waking moment. I’m just as guilty of this as anyone; I get twitchy and want to click ‘like’ on someone’s Twitter comment even though that isn’t even possible. But everyone’s inner “edit” button seems to get worn down as the years pass and the results aren’t pretty.

In some ways, it’s a nice problem to have. Complaining about too much freedom is like complaining about too much sunshine. Either way, however, you have to be careful not to get burned.

The words Chevy Chase and Richard Pryor threw at each  other in a comedy sketch shocked, but also offered food for thought. (NBC)