Culture Shock 03.17.11: Some jokes just aren't funny

There is a saying in showbiz: "Dying is easy, comedy is hard." But when people really are dying and suffering, comedy is even harder.

Stand-up comedian Gilbert Gottfried learned that this week after he tweeted several jokes about Japan's disastrous 9.0 earthquake and subsequent tsunami, which killed thousands of people, with thousands more still missing and nearly half a million homeless.

Gottfried had been the voice of the Aflac duck. That ended Monday, when the insurance company fired him because of his weekend remarks on Twitter. Aflac does 75 percent of its business in Japan, but I suspect the company would have fired him regardless. He not only crossed the line of good taste, he left it receding in his rear-view mirror.

One of Gottfried's least offensive tweets was, "Japan is really advanced. They don't go to the beach. The beach comes to them," so you can imagine how bad the rest were.

Gottfried has since apologized and removed the offending "jokes" from his Twitter feed.

"I sincerely apologize to anyone who was offended by my attempt at humor regarding the tragedy in Japan," he tweeted Tuesday. "I meant no disrespect, and my thoughts are with the victims and their families."

A few hours later, Gottfried was back in form, tweeting from the Friars Club roast of Donald Trump.

"Thank God Marlee Matlin can't hear any of this," he tweeted.

Now that's funny. The joke depends on Matlin's being deaf, which isn't funny, but the joke's target isn't her, rather it's the comedians at the roast. That makes all the difference between an "offensive" joke that's still funny and an offensive joke — without the scare quotes — that isn't.

Audiences expect comedians to walk that fine line. We expect them to say what some of us only think. And what we think sometimes isn't pretty.

Gottfried is one of stand-up comedy's brightest stars, and I've been a fan since he hosted "USA Up All Night" from 1986 to 1998, where, during commercial breaks, he got laughs at the expense of movies like "Hell Comes to Frogtown" and "Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama." Also, for what it's worth, he ranks 59th on Comedy Central's list of the 100 greatest stand-ups, placing him one spot ahead of Jeff Foxworthy.

Most people, however, probably know him as the voice of Iago in Disney's "Aladdin."

But his stage act almost always flirts with bad taste. His latest comedy CD and DVD, "Dirty Jokes," delivers exactly what the title promises.

And last weekend's incident isn't the first time Gottfried has gone too far.

Just weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Gottfried opened his routine at the Friars Club roast of Hugh Hefner with a 9/11 joke. That was too much even for jaded roast attendees, eliciting boos and a shout of "too soon."

Gottfried recalled that incident last month in an interview with the Las Vegas Sun: "When I figured I had completely lost them, there was nowhere to go but further down, I started telling ‘The Aristocrats,' and that just exploded. The whole place was cheering."

The Aristocrats is the filthiest joke in the world. It doesn't really have a punchline. It's all set-up — an escalating orgy of disgusting bodily functions and descriptions of sexual acts that would get you arrested in every state of the Union. The joke has a long history among stand-ups, and it seems like just about every comic has his own version. Bob Saget — yes, the dad from "Full House" — tells one of the more infamous ones. It is, as far as I know, the only joke to inspire a documentary film.

Gottfried's "Dirty Jokes" includes his 10-minute rendition of The Aristocrats.

The Aristocrats is obscene, but it doesn't really hurt anyone.

Gottfried's Japan jokes did.

If I were in charge at Aflac, I'd probably have fired Gottfried, too.

Yet this is, generally speaking, what we ask of comedians. We demand that they play with fire. And, usually, we're better off when they can say what no one else can — until they say what no one should.

Then we punish them for going too, too far.

Culture Shock 06.18.09: The 'revolution' was Twittered, and I was there

"The revolution will not be televised. It will, apparently, be Twitterized."

With that tweet this past weekend, I achieved my 15 minutes of Twitter fame. I'll be available for autographs.

As protesters demonstrated in the streets of Tehran during the hours following Iran's still-contested national election, the best source of information from the Iranian capital was Twitter. The Iranian government quickly blocked the country's access to some Web sites and social networks like Facebook, but it couldn't completely block Twitter, which allows users to send brief messages to the Internet via the Web and mobile phones.

Lesson learned: If people have access to the right technology, then no government, no matter how authoritarian, can completely cut them off from the rest of the world. If you want to run a totalitarian state, you have to keep your people in the Stone Age, like North Korea does.

Twitter users use hash tags, a # followed by a keyword, to designate tweets on specific topics so that anyone can follow the online conversation. The "#iranelection" tag rose quickly Saturday to be the top "trending topic" on Twitter. As of Tuesday night, it was still No. 1, despite challenges from "Real Housewives," "Taylor Swift" and "WeirdAl" (short for parody musician "Weird Al" Yankovic, who stormed the Web with a Doors-themed music video about Craigslist).

For the first time, the world experienced a social uprising taking place in real time, 140 characters per tweet. That's a definite step up from Twitter's previous claim to fame — Ashton "Mr. Demi Moore" Kutcher's successful bid to become the first person on Twitter with 1 million followers.

In addition to people tweeting from Iran, people from around the world chimed in on Twitter to express their support for the protesters. Twitter users in the United States also tweeted their dismay about the lack of news coverage on the American cable news channels. The general sentiment was, how could CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC stick to their canned weekend programming when there was a "revolution" going on in Iran?

That was when I made my slightly tongue-in-cheek tweet about the revolution being "Twitterized" instead of televised.

As someone in the news business, I recognize as well as anyone the difficulties involved in switching gears to cover a breaking story, especially one on the other side of the globe, in a country that isn't exactly friendly to foreign reporters. But anything is better than the prerecorded fluff that the 24-hour news channels use to fill their weekend schedules. At least give me some think-tank nerds discussing what they think might be going on in Iran. Even if I think they're clueless hacks, I can at least shout at the TV, which is what I do most of the time I watch CNN and FNC, anyway.

Before I knew it, my tweet had been re-tweeted, including by an actual ABC News reporter working in the Middle East. Mine was the tweet re-tweeted around the world. Yay, me!

Inadvertently, I had been swept up in the #iranelection furor, but I have mixed feelings about that. It's not as if the pro-reform side in Iran doesn't have an agenda, too, and who really knows who is on the other side of a tweet? Some early Twitter reports were wrong, and some, probably, were propaganda.

Also, some Twitterers in America are now demanding that the U.S. support the pro-reform backers of Mir Hossein Mousavi against Iran's reactionary President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. I suspect, however, that explicit American support would undermine the pro-reformers with the broader Iranian population. Memories of the United States' support of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi run deep.

That's one problem with Twitter. Getting caught up in the moment can get the better of your judgment.