'Grey's' Isn't Going Anywhere
'Red Widow' Gets The Axe
Point/Counterpoint: Letterman's joke about the Palins was just that
by Danny Gallagher, posted Jun 16th 2009 2:01PM
A lot of dissecting and exploratory surgery has been done on the jokes that David Letterman made about the Palin family. Even after Dave apologized and Palin accepted, people still want to perform a comedy autopsy to figure out what Dave's intent was and why Palin was so vocal in her reaction to it.The problem is it's an unnecessary surgery and it fails to attack the root of the problem while the real cancer spreads like a California wildfire. E.B. White once said about such procedures that, "Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it." The only reason this frog hasn't died is because someone wants to keep it alive and no one has dared to touch the heart.
This is the side I will debate in the never-ending Letterman vs. Palin "Joke-gate" controversy while our very own John Scott Lewinski will offer a rebuttal later in the day that a public figure's children should always be off-limits.
First off, I find it rather interesting that this is the first time a joke about the Palins' kids has reached such a fever pitch. If Letterman is guilty of bad taste, that also means Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien and Bill Maher could be charged as accessories after the fact and should all share a cell in Comedy Jail. They have all made jokes about the Palin kids and how Bristol's big underage mistake in the sack has made her an "easy" target (pun intended) for every political and athletic horn-dog who is still roasting on a spit at the concession stand of public shame. That's why it's called "late night" television. It's like after dark cable TV but with less appealing boobs.
But bad taste isn't the only crime on Letterman's rap sheet. A bigger and more egregious charge lies just behind the sidebar - ignorance. I can't telepathically pull the fact that Letterman and his punch-pullers knew that Bristol wasn't the daughter at the game out of their heads, but the joke assumes Bristol was the one at the game because she's the daughter who has had the most face time because of her mother's vice presidential campaign and Bristol's abstinence promotion tour.
Jokes aren't about reporting the news in a timely and politically unbiased fashion. If all late night and stand-up comedians had to be fair to their targets and keep everyone's level of offensiveness in mind, we'd have nothing but Hee Haw on the tube every night. Just the thought of living in that world makes the grits rise in my gullet.
Bristol is an adult and on TV in a socially political context and that makes her fair game for satire. It might seem cruel and unfair to kick a pregnant unwed mother when she's facing the biggest mistake of her life, but it happens on TV on both sides of the political spectrum, from late night jokes to stump speeches of politicians looking for news sound-bytes. Poor Willow just happened to be in the cross-hairs either because the joke worked better without mentioning which Palin girl was at the game or newspapers have become as obsolete as a news source as the town crier or the wizard who predicts the future with leech races.
If Palin and company really wanted Dave to apologize instead of draw this out into another media tour filled with wild accusations and allusions to perversions and innuendo, they should take him up on his offer to appear on the show and let him writhe like the squiggly little worm they have portrayed him to be. He's done it several times, most notably with his invitation to the late comedian Bill Hicks' mother. He would do it again and somehow, it would be oh so uncomfortably funny. All the other late night shows will make fun of it and it will also be funny.
Maybe then we'll remember just why most people watch shows after 11:30 p.m. in the first place. I mean, other than you're drunk and Judge Joe Brown is a rerun.
16 Comments