Every fall, the long-running satirical show Saturday Night Live introduces new cast members. It is considered a huge boost to the career of young comedians to get a slot on this show because many have gone onto highly successful careers later. But this year, the introduction of three new members ran into trouble when it was discovered that one of them, Shane Gillis, had made racist, homophobic, and misogynist jokes.
But in a statement on Monday, a spokesperson for SNL’s producer, Lorne Michaels, said: “After talking with Shane Gillis, we have decided that he will not be joining SNL.
“We want SNL to have a variety of voices and points of view within the show, and we hired Shane on the strength of his talent as a comedian and his impressive audition … We were not aware of his prior remarks.
“The language he used is offensive, hurtful and unacceptable. We are sorry that we did not see these clips earlier, and that our vetting process was not up to standard.”
I am not sure that I buy the idea that SNL were totally unaware of his past. So many comedians have stirred controversy for saying offensive things that I cannot imagine that a huge operation like SNL did not thoroughly vet him before they hired him. Maybe they thought it was not so bad and were taken aback by the uproar and this was a face-saving reason. After all, other comedy outlets had dropped Gillis because of his brand of humor and this news would have been on the comedy grapevine.
We, like many, were very quickly disgusted by Shane Gillis' overt racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia – expressed both on and off stage – upon working with him years ago. We've deliberately chosen not to work with him in the years since.
— Good Good Comedy Theatre (@goodgoodcomedy) September 13, 2019
Gillis defended the comments on Twitter saying he is a comedian “who pushes boundaries”. He continued: “My intention is never to hurt anyone but I am trying to be the best comedian I can be and sometimes that requires risks.”
Gillis really thinks that racist, homophobic, transphobic, and misogynist humor will make him the best comedian he can be? Where exactly is the risk in targeting marginalized groups? How can you possibly think that you will not be hurting people? It is the old story. People who are in dominant groups can laugh at humor aimed at their group because they are still the dominant group and suffer no repercussions. They think that all groups should feel the same way, not appreciating that context and history very much determines whether something is hurtful or not.
The rule that one should punch up and not punch down applies to comedians as much as anyone. Comedy does not give you a pass to say things that others would not. Doing so is cheap humor, taking the low road, trying to be the worst you can be.
All humor, without exception, must come at someone’s expense.
If we wish for something more than knock-knock jokes--the least offensive, but still offensive to the brunt of the joke, of all humor, then determining where the line between acceptable and unacceptable lies will always be a moving target.
I do not envy professional comedians.
Go to Youtube and check out Contrapoints video The Darkness; she deals with pretty much this exact type of issue.
From the headline, I’d thought this post involved a recent Corey Lewandowski interview:
Apparently SNL wanted him as a conservative voice on the show.
So he was literally a diversity hire.
hyphenman @ 1 “All humor, without exception, must come at someone’s expense.”
Nonsense, I can think of at least a dozen jokes that come at no-ones expense.
It is the sudden shift in mental perspective that elicits mirth.
Simple example:
Two goldfish are in a tank.
One says “You drive, I’ll man the gun.”
I grow tired of comedians claiming they are being silenced by political correctness, when it’s really just that they’re not particularly funny.
Flip that around and basically they’re saying “the reason you didn’t laugh at my fart joke is political correctness.” No, it’s because it’s hard to come up with a new, funny, fart joke. There are plenty of comedians that drop really edgy stuff and are extremely funny while they’re doing it. The secret there is novelty and shock value -- not “I’m shocked that you’re still telling stupid homophobic jokes and it’s 2019 already.”
I guess I should say “I’m looking at you Dave Chappelle.” Now there is one dude who used to be screamingly funny, innovative, and delightfully weird. Now he’s making tired homophobic jokes and joking about school shootings. I’m not trying to censor him or be politically correct, I just wish he’d be, you know, funny.
Tabby Lavalamp@#4:
Apparently SNL wanted him as a conservative voice on the show.
So he was literally a diversity hire.
See, now, a good comedian could do a really impressive riff on “conservative humor.” I hear David Attenborough spent weeks out in the jungle trying to find some conservative humor only to discover it was a typo -- he thought they meant “conservation humor.”
Marcus @#6,
I agree about Chapelle, I have not seen a lot of his stuff but back in 2015 I did a post about a funny sketch that he did where he played a blind man who did not know he was black and ended up as a white supremacist and KKK leader. It was definitely edgy and very funny because of what you say, that it played on upended expectations.
There were already examples of victimless humor in this thread, but if a joke must have a victim, the best is when it is the joke-teller themself. Second best is when it is as generic as possible.
@machintelligence No. 5
Yes, the joke is funny, but it is funny because the teller is hoping to make a tiny bit of a fool out of the listener for not immediately getting the joke coming from the double meaning of “tank.”
If the response to the joke is: well yeah, so…?
In that case, the teller is defeated in the attempt to make a tiny bit of a fool out of the listener and, in fact, is made to look a tiny bit silly for telling such a lame joke.
My point is that as a society we understand why jokes work. We’re just having a moment trying to decide where a very movable line is.
@anat, No. 9
There were no examples of victimless humor that I saw, only humor where the victim was acceptable in that role.
And I agree with your ranking, though self-deprecating humor has its problems as well because making fools of ourselves can be dangerous as in the classic case of sad clowns.
hyphenman:
All you’ve done here is repeat your assertion, not contradicted machintelligence.
But sure, for you, any joke with a punchline perforce relies on making a fool out of the listener, and this is therefore at their expense.
(It’s a zero-sum game, for you — couldn’t possibly be the whimsy of it, right?)
“Two bananas are lying on a river bank when a turd comes floating by. The turd looks over and says, “Hey! Come on in! The water’s fine!” One banana turns to the other banana and says, “Do you believe that shit?””
@John Morales nos. 12 &13.
On an offensiveness scale of 1-100, I would give the goldfish joke a 2, perfectly safe as a Dad Joke.
On the same scale I would give your joke a 40, only because there are people who find the word “shit” offensive in some company.
For an example of a 100, I would offer The Aristocrats joke.
I accept that there are jokes too offensive to be told by everybody—I would, however, argue that some jokes told at the expense of specific groups may not be found offensive when told by a member of that specific group—for a variety of reasons.
Here are two examples: listening to the jokes in any Richard Pryor record (yes, I’m old enough to have Pryor on vinyl) or the redneck humor of Jeff Foxworthy. (I can tell, and laugh with Foxworthy’s jokes because I’m a member of the group. Let someone outside the group make a crack about hillbillies, though, and I’m ready for a fight. On Pryor’s humor, he has me rolling on the floor, but I don’t repeat his jokes because I don’t think I have the right to do so.
As the tag line to the 1988 movie Punchline reminds us: “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.”
Cheers
“All humor, without exception, must come at someone’s expense.”
That was the claim. So, at whose expense is the abstract joke at #13?
@John Morales, No. 15
As I said before in No. 10, the answer to your question is it is the listener who is made a tiny bit of a fool of for not seeing the punchline coming. Nearly all would laugh at the joke and move on, but somewhere there is a person, or a group of people, who would feel less for having heard the joke.
Most people would say, “well that’s there problem,” but when we set aside protected groups we must acknowledge that what we are doing is subjective.
I’m not suggesting that we should not set aside protected groups—particularly when the joke teller is punching down, as is often the case—we should do that. But we ought not to pretend that there is some objective standard that tells us which jokes are offensive and which ones aren’t. This is a societal decision that has always been and will always be in flux.
Again, please understand that this is a feature of comedy, not a bug. This is the way jokes work.
Have you watched the 2005 movie The Aristocrats? where dozens of comedians tell and retell their version of the most offensive joke ever conceived as a way of illustrating this point.
We just need to acknowledge the truth their telling us and not pretend that there is any hard line between acceptable/non-offensive and unacceptable/offensive humor. The line is a band on the spectrum constantly in motion as societies change.
Cheers…
You just said that person or group is the listener, so do you feel the joke was made at your expense?
(I seriously doubt that)
Your evasiveness is futile; your original claim was (and I again quote you):
“All humor, without exception, must come at someone’s expense.”
So, have you now refined your contention as ““All humor, without exception, must come at
someone’s expensethe expense of the listener.” ?—
BTW, my wife and I have this little joke going, where the chased is frantically running and the chaser ambles behind yet somehow keeps up. We call it “Pepe Le Pewing”.
(At whose expense is that little joke?)
[I’m not being mean, I just react when people express things as ∀x rather than as ∃x]
@John Morales
Nope. A clarification in this specific case would seem a more appropriate reading. The someone is this particular joke just happens to be the listener.
There are at least three possible targets of any joke: the teller (usually self deprecating), the listener (being made look, to some degree, a fool. Even knock-knock jokes fall into this category.) or a third party (typically typically a group being denigrated as a whole by stereotyping or other means).
So I stand by my ordinal assertion.
The question is: When is the expense too great so that the joke becomes offensive?
And as for “Pepe le Pewing” (which is a clever turn of phrase) the joke may come at the expense of the person you’re comparing to a cartoon skunk or (and this would be far more troubling) to the person being Pepe le Pewed. In the latter case, the teller is possibly granting a pass to a sexual predator by comparing them to a cute carton skunk.
So, depending upon the target. in the words of Douglas Adams, the joke is “mostly harmless,” or, horribly offensive.
(sigh)
We’re never gonna agree.
“Q: Why was six scared of seven?
A: Because seven “ate” nine.”
You think it’s at the expense of the listener, I think it’s the drollness of the word play.
(And I imagine most kiddies do, too_
John,
The goal, at least my goal, is not to agree but to read and contemplate points of views other than my own with the aim of broadening and, occasionally, shifting my own perspective.
I am fond of thanking new visitors to my blog by writing—before I respond to their comment:
Thank you for the conversation.
Cheers.
Jeff Hess