Heard the one about the racist tweet?
Relax, people. Michelle Wolf was just joking. Samantha Bee was just joking. Roseanne Barr was … well, Roseanne Barr was calling a black person an ape.
“Forgive me — my joke was in bad taste,” the comedian tweeted on Tuesday, May 29. But her mea culpa was too little, too late: Within hours, ABC announced that it was dumping Barr’s hit reboot of her TV sitcom, “Roseanne.”
For comics to claim they were “just joking,” they might have to consider telling an actual joke. Describing Valerie Jarrett, close friend and former senior adviser to President Barack Obama, by tweeting “Muslim brotherhood and planet of the apes had a baby“is several things, all of
them wrong. But it’s no joke.
“Anybody who has been on Twitter knows that Roseanne tweets in a toxic way,” says W. Kamau Bell, the East Bay comedian and host of CNN’s “United Shades of America.” “I believe ABC knew what they were getting into. They just thought they could manage her, but she’s clearly unmanageable.”
There have been times, Bell says, when he has begun drafting a provocative tweet, only to think better of it and press delete. That’s a small price to pay for a comedian who’s making a living off the corporate dime, he says.
Freedom of speech gives every American the right to say, or tweet, whatever they like. It also gives private businesses the right to choose to dissociate from an offender. (All eyes are now on Samantha Bee, who called Ivanka Trump “an inappropriate and inexcusable” expletive on her TBS show “Full Frontal” on Wednesday, May 30 — just a day after Barr’s apology. The word “c—” was bleeped, but the White House swiftly denounced the language as “vile and vicious,” and an online petition called for Bee’s show to face the same fate as Barr’s.)
By contrast, Wolf — a former writer for “Late Night With Seth Meyers” and “The Daily Show With Trevor Noah” who debuted in her own show, “The Break,” on Netflix this week — was working in her freelance capacity as a comedian for hire when she hosted the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April.
Supporters of President Trump and his administration cried foul when she joked about White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who is “very resourceful,” as the host cracked in the night’s most dissected bit: “She burns facts, and then she uses that ash to make a perfect smoky eye.”
Those who were outraged chose to believe the joke was about Sanders’ appearance, when actually — like pretty much all of Wolf’s set — it was about the current administration’s policies and positions. Which, as Wolf implied, not subtly, again and again, are fair game. And no laughing matter.
When comic Gilbert Gottfried fired off a few tweets after the Japanese tsunami of 2011 — “Is there a school in this area?” he imagined asking a Japanese real estate agent, who replies, “Not now, but just wait” — he was in fact crafting jokes. Setup, punch line. Bad taste? Sure. But they were jokes nonetheless. Still, they cost the comedian his job as the voice of the Aflac duck.
“The Aflac people said, ‘We do 75 percent of our business in Japan — no, thank you,’ ” says Bell.
Which brings us to Kathy Griffin, a comedian who built her career on insults, much as comedy star Don Rickles did in a previous generation. She was dropped as CNN’s New Year’s Eve co-host after she posted a photo of herself posing with a Trump mask doctored to look like his severed head. The image was unfortunate, but as the comedian tweeted in a long thread this week, it was meant as a darkly comic response to the president’s misogynistic comment about news personality Megyn Kelly (“blood coming out of her … wherever”). Combustible as ever, Griffin apologized, then rescinded the apology.
Griffin’s tweetstorm came in response to Sanders’ revisiting the incident after the Barr firing. Back out on tour (she comes to the Masonic in San Francisco June 14-15), the comedian says she’s fighting back against the president’s abuse of power.
The notion that comedians are growing more wary of what they say, as Trump attempts to seize every advantage in the culture wars and media companies cut ties with celebrities for their ill-advised social media posts, has been overblown, Bell believes.
“Every comedy club in the country has 22year-old dudes saying the most horrible things,” he says.
But those comics are powerless, and unaffiliated. By risking her comeback so flagrantly, Bell says, Barr “snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. She’d won. All she had to do was stop tweeting. And she couldn’t do it.”
This weekend, as dozens of comics — including Wolf’s “Daily Show” contemporaries Trevor Noah, Ronny Chieng and the show’s former host, Jon Stewart — gather at Comedy Central’s second annual Clusterfest in San Francisco, fans will see if any of them show restraint.
For Barr, the ultimate injustice may not have been the cancellation of her show. When she claimed that a dose of Ambien was to blame for her momentary loss of judgment, the drug’s parent company, Sanofi, replied aptly: “While all pharmaceutical treatments have side effects,” the company tweeted, “racism is not a known side effect of any Sanofi medication.”
Bell, who bills his stage show as “The W. Kamau Bell Curve: Ending Racism in About an Hour,” can have the last laugh for now.
“One of the side effects of Ambien, apparently, is shade.”