"Has Anyone Paid You Money to Tell Jokes? No?"

"Then take that as a clue."

By now, and particularly based on recent posts, ya'll should know I think that the right wing, idiotic, crazy shit, immature understanding of free speech is nothing but bullshit. With out checking if Ann Althouse is whining about this guy's basically being fired for a really nasty-bad joke, I will report on it, here and now.

Asshole fired for truly ugly joke about Lara Logan.


Just for the record, and in case you haven't heard yet, CBS Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan was brutally assaulted during the "celebrating" following the victory of the protesters in Egypt, there in Tahrir Square. And it was reported as being a sexual assault. And ass hole man basically lost his part time gig at NYU on account of the ugly joke about her, he twitted. (Ok, the proper usage might be twittered, but here, twitted seems a better fit.)

I, as a general matter, believe in accountability. I believe that one should own one's own shit. And if one posts some really ugly shitty joke on their twitter page, and offends people, they have to own that. If they lose respect, friends, and even gigs, based on the stupid shit they say, that is a perfect example of the world working as it should. Remember. Folk are free to say any ugly, stupid assed shit they wanna. And the rest of us are free to take offense and otherwise judge the asshole in question, and harshly, if that's our feeling at the moment.

I repeat: that is the world working as it should.

But regarding deliberate jokes, and not even dealing with the right wing, libertarian, childish view of "free speech," I am definitely a hard ass. That's based on my past life career in show biz. Now I never did stand up, but I did do some emcee work back in college. So I get to say I did get paid to tell jokes (among a lot of duties I had for that one gig.) And what I said there in the title and the first line of this post is the set up and punchline of a real life joke-remark I told to a friend of mine, back when we were in law school. He had a rare, if not odd sense of humor, and his jokes kept blowing up in his face. Instead of telling him flat out, stop that shit, I couched that message in vocational terms.

But if I am not being sensitive to people's feelings I tell them flat out. Go ahead. Ignore my advice. But firstly, you ain't that funny. But no matter what you think, no one else has to like you attempts at humor. Expect them to reject you. It's their right. Leave the joke telling to the professionals. And you are no where near that level.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not literally saying that the only people who can tell jokes are professionals. There are many gifted joke tellers out there. My ex, from years ago? She had a way with delivering some ordinary joke that made it even funnier. But she never wrote her own material. And that is were people tend to fuck it up. It really is not the telling the joke part that causes people to lose respect, and friends, and gigs. It's the really lame if not ugly jokes their warped little brains make up, that usually are the cause of the fuck up. And that leads to people judging them harshly, not so much for the delivery, but for the warped joke and the warped mind that thought that ugly shit was so funny.