On Comedy: Stop Thief!-- Joke Stealing Is No Laughing Matter!

Hardly a week goes by without Twitter exploding in righteous indignation about one offence or another. Be it a dead lion, or an insensitive quip, livelihoods and lives can be ruined by a wave of righteous torch-bearing mob-indignation. Normally I steer clear of such outrage, but this time I just had to comment.

It all started when someone on my timeline retweeted this:

Before this post, I had never heard of Josh Ostrovsky who tweets and instagrams under the nom-de-douche "The Fat Jew," but I felt compelled to investigate.

Why?

Because while jokes are inherently silly, joke theft is not. 

My research, thin as it was, revealed that Ostrovsky fancies himself a "performance artist" and the "curator or aggregator of the internet." Those titles require a little translation. "Performance Artist" really means unimaginative hack who seeks to get paid for acting like a pretentious hipster dickhead, and "Curator or Aggregator" is pretentious hipster douchebag-speak for "guy who steals other people's jokes and passes them off as his own." Not only has he been stealing jokes from hundreds, maybe thousands of people, he's been, according to professional Canuck shit-disturber Gavin McInnes, doing it for years.

Now if he just stuck to just tweeting stolen jokes, he'd be nothing more than a nuisance. However, Ostrovsky landed TV and radio gigs with E!, Comedy Central, Apple's Beats Radio, and representation with CAA, one of Hollywood's most elite agencies on the basis of his douchebag image, and his alleged wit on social media. 

Now he's making serious money off of the work and sweat of others, which makes his thievery more of a crime against comedy than a nuisance. He's literally taking money out of the pockets of real joke-makers.

Sadly, crimes against comedy aren't punishable under the law, but we can name, shame, not only the thief, but the media companies and agencies who are literally rewarding him for being a thief.

Joke theft is not a new phenomenon borne from the internet. It goes back to the stone age when Ag stole Ug's one about the hunter and the gatherer's daughter.

Ug responded by clocking Ag on the head with a rock.

And thus the concept of intellectual property was born.

A more civilized response was one done by Bob Hope against fellow vaudeville star Milton Berle back in the 1920s. Showbiz insiders considered Berle most famous for two things; he had the biggest schlong on the circuit, and he was terrible for stealing jokes.

Hope and a young writer, who both just made successful leap to Broadway, wanted to teach Berle a lesson. So Hope and the young writer made a careful and exact plan of attack, and waited for the right moment to strike.

That moment came on a fateful Monday night.

On Monday's the musicals traditionally go "dark" or don't perform, because they're doing an extra matinee on Sunday and the cast needs a break. Back in the 1920s they used to use the theatres on Mondays for charity variety shows called Benefits.

Benefit Night, as it was known then, was a big deal. All the top show-biz people and New York power players were in the audience, and it was the perfect spot for an aspiring vaudeville comic like Berle to get off the circuit and into a major Broadway show.

Now every theatre would be having a benefit show, and it was common practice for comics to perform in one theatre, run up the street, perform there, and so on, literally until the wee hours of the morning.

Hope and his partner arranged to perform right before Berle, which was literally the time Berle was closing his act in the last theatre and he was literally running to the next one. Berle would arrive just as Hope was leaving the stage and heading for the next theatre.

Berle would then go on stage, start his act and....cue the cricket sound.

You see, Hope would go out and do Berle's mostly stolen act, verbatim, which meant that it looked like Berle was just repeating Hope's act.

Berle learned his lesson and didn't steal another joke...for a while.

Now there isn't one kind of joke theft, and some is not really theft at all, and I'll attempt to explain most of this probably incomplete list.

• COINCIDENTAL: Now this doesn't really count as joke theft, but is often mistaken for it. The world is big, there are literally billions of people and if it's something topical, then more than one person is going to make the same joke. I know, it happens to me all the time, probably because my sense of humour is so obvious and banal, and I'm probably even a victim of it as well. When that guy threw a shoe at President Bush I sold a joke to a comedian for $50 about how the Shoe Thrower was hired as MSNBC's new pundit. The comedian used it in a web video, and two days later it was in Jay Leno's opening monologue. I'm sure that was purely coincidental, he said while rearranging the pins in his Jay Leno voodoo doll.
• SUBCONSCIOUS: Now this does count as joke theft, but it lacks one key ingredient that separates it from what I consider criminal joke theft: INTENT. It happens when you hear a joke, forget where you heard it, and then blurt it out fully convinced that you just came up with it out of the blue. Robin Williams used to be bad for this, but I don't recall anyone resenting him for it, because it was mostly because his memory and rapid fire style was better at remembering the joke itself rather than the source. 
• AMBITIOUS, YET INSECURE: Now we're delving into the realm of deliberate joke theft. Theft, and intent are arm in arm in this one, but motive can be a contributing factor. You see intent means that you mean to deliberately commit a crime, but MOTIVE is your reasoning behind your intent. Many comedians, Berle being a classic example, can often let their ambition outrun not their talent, but their faith in their own talent. They want to reach the top, but aren't sure if all their material is "A Grade" so they poach material that they're sure works because they've seen it work with someone else. Often these kinds of joke thieves present a cocky and brash exterior to hide the mouldering bucket of anxiety worms that makes up their psyche.
• MALICIOUS: These kinds of joke thieves are the lowest and worst kind. They know they are deliberately stealing material from people who burnt the calories needed to create original material, they just don't care. They also aren't acting out of insecurity, but entitlement. They assume that they are entitled to fame and success but don't want to actually work for it beyond making sales pitches to surprisingly gullible media insiders who all yearn to be one of the "cool kids." If getting that fame and success requires stealing, then that's just fine, because this joke thief's victims aren't viewed as cool enough to be worthy of consideration. When caught, they usually try to brush it off with lame excuses/double-talk, and/or jump straight into attacking their accusers.

That Josh "The Fat Jew" Ostrovsky committed joke theft is pretty much beyond doubt. What's being discussed here is what kind of joke theft did he commit, and that, ladies and gentlemen of the jury of public opinion, I leave to you to decide.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1244: Random Drips From The Brain Pan.

THE STEWART CONUNDRUM

"I'm just a comedian, except when I'm not."

Jon Stewart, the outgoing host of The Daily Show, has been getting criticized, mostly in conservative media for meeting with President Obama in the run-up to and during the 2012 election. Stewart's been trying to deflect the criticism with his usual defence of "I'm just a comedian" that he brings out in between telling people that he's the most trusted source of news for the millennial generation for which he's paid $30 million a year, more than Leno & Letterman despite averaging 1/3 of their ratings.

All I really have to say is to offer a little thought experiment: How would Jon Stewart react if a rival satirist had secret meetings with a Republican president and his material was seen as having a pro-Republican slant?

He would shit kittens and go after that rival with both hands as a craven political toady.

You know he would.

FEAR THE WALKING SPIN-OFF

AMC is doing a spin-off from their mega-hit The Walking Dead, called Fear The Walking Dead, and are hoping to have some sort of crossover with the flagship in some future season.

Here's what I would like the spin-off show to do.

At the end of the first season, they find a solution to the zombie problem, and clean it up to the point where life quickly goes back to normal. However, they run out of money to clean up the zombies in a narrow corridor between Atlanta and Alexandria. For the rest of the show's run it's just a family-based kitchen-sink drama with only occasional scenes of characters wondering if any living people are still in the zombie zone and then going, "Nyah, we run the evacuation instructions during every PBS pledge break, they're bound to have seen it."

That also opens the door for The Walking Dead finale to feature the last surviving character finally stumbling out of the quarantined zombie zone and going "Aw shit."

PEZ ME OFF

"AAAAAGGGHH!! MY THROAT!"

Some producers are planning to make a Pez Movie. Yep a movie about those little candy dispenser that look like candy's being ripped out of a cartoon character's throat.

Time to put a big "CLOSED: OUT OF IDEAS" sign out on Hollywood.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1224: It's Just A Joke.

First South African comedian Trevor Noah was tapped to be the replacement for Jon Stewart at Comedy Central's The Daily Show.

Second came increased interest in this guy who most Americans have never seen, since he had only three Daily Show appearances before being crowned heir apparent. More people were tweeting about Noah than actually watch The Daily Show.

Then came the inevitable event for any comedian, close scrutiny of Noah's Twitter feed uncovered jokes, but not just any jokes, jokes that offended some people, by going outside the list of pre-approved subjects and targets.

Naturally this led to outrageous outrage that a comedian would dare to joke about something that might hurt the feelings of someone somewhere. Then comedian Patton Oswalt stepped in with an epic Twitter rant mocking those outraged at mockery.

Leading to Oswalt to be declared "Problematic" yet again by the authors of many an online think-piece.

This controversy taught me three important things.

1. It explains why Jon Stewart avoided doing ANYTHING where every single word he said wasn't pre-written and pre-scrutinized by a staff of 20 professional writers, producers, and probably a few lawyers. He learned to avoid talking or joking off the cuff, because it was nothing but trouble. Better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak, and remove all doubt, even better to have professionals do all the heavy lifting for you.

2. The post of Daily Show anchor is extremely important to the people who staff the Twitter outrage machine. This is because whether they actually watch the show or not, they use the Daily Show, and the hundreds of almost daily on-line think-pieces it inspires, to determine who or what they're supposed to be outraged at while not feeling like a censorious prig because they're the right kind of hip for following The Daily Show. For a host-apparent to violate their shibboleths must feel like a horrible betrayal.

3. If Noah gets the same ratings as Jon Stewart, but doesn't get paid the exact same money that Jon Stewart got for the exact same job, then Comedy Central is irredeemably racist.

______________

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Hollywood Babble On & On #1214: All-Girl Ghostbusters - the Perils & Pitfalls

Well, it's pretty much all but official.

The long simmering all-women reboot of the Ghostbusters franchise has entered final negotiations with the cast Paul Feig wants to don the proton packs. 

Melissa McCarthy is signed on, and final talks are going on with Bridesmaids co-star Kristin Wiig, and Saturday Night Live cast-members Leslie Jones, and Kate McKinnon.

This event is being touted as the biggest victory for feminism since women got the vote.

But is it?

Think about it for a minute.

We're not talking about Hollywood developing an original, female-driven franchise.

What we are talking about is Hollywood tossing women a franchise that's been considered more or less dead since 1989, and even then it was only because the original cast was unavailable due to busyness, contrariness, or mortality.

To me that's not a victory, but more like getting the scraps of something unwanted by the people that Hollywood views as more important.

That's considered a victory?

I think it's a trap.

If the new all-women Ghostbusters under performs by any metric of comparison with the original, then Hollywood will  declare it a failure and use it as an excuse to not develop women-led franchise films.

I think a victory would be the creation of a new female-driven film with franchise potential and to let it fly or flop on its own merits without the baggage of a long dead franchise whose only sequel was considered a flop by everyone involved because it only made globally what the first film made domestically.

It's not hard to come up with a female-centric high-concept movie. Back during the more sexist Golden Age of Movies they used to put out "women's pictures" with great regularity and in a wide variety of genres and styles. They made the expected romantic comedies and weepy melodramas, but they also made female-driven thrillers, mysteries, broader slapstick farces, adventure films, and even horror films.

They didn't do that because people demanded it in the name of fairness, the studios did it because it was a practical business decision. Those films made money.

I demonstrated how easy it is when I whipped up a "women's picture" premise literally on the fly during a previous discussion of this issue.

Anyone can do it, and let's come up with another one and do it for this cast:

THE POOL: This is an action comedy set in the 1960s. They play a group of women who want to be spies, but, despite their training and talent, are trapped doing secretarial work for the National Intelligence Agency because the swaggering men running the place won't admit they're able. When they uncover a plot involving traitors selling the agency out to a super villain, they go out in the field, have all kinds of Connery-era James Bond style hijinks and settle the bad guys' hash and save the world.

Easy peasy.

Why won't Hollywood do it?

Because they think it's a "risk" because it involves both originality and women, two things Hollywood fears the most.

That's what I think.

What do you think?

On Comedy: What Is Satire?

A tip of my jaunty beret to Nate Winchester who mentioned in an e-mail that an online critic called Paul Verhoeven a "master of satire" due to Robocop and Starship Troopers, and how it got me thinking about what constitutes satire and what constitutes what I consider real satire.

Let's look at what the dictionary says:

SATIRE (noun): The use of humour, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people’s stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.

So I guess Verhoeven's films might count as satire, if you go with a broad interpretation of that definition. His films do use irony, tons of exaggeration, and heaps tons of ridicule on their targets.

However, are they good satires, and is Verhoeven a master of the art form?

No, not really.

In fact, I think it's easier to find hen's teeth than decent satire, especially over the last few decades, and even more so from Hollywood.

So let's take a look at what ingredients make good satire, and why so many attempts at satire fail:

1. CHOICE OF SUBJECT MATTER: Usually the subject matter is in the mind of the wannabe satirist before they consciously decide to satirize. It's usually something that annoys or angers the satirist.

That's something shared by both the good and the failed satirist.

2. KNOWLEDGE OF SUBJECT MATTER: The good satirist makes a point to know as much as they can about the subject they intend to satirize. It's like being an impressionist, you must learn the tiny details and nuances to get your schtick right.

The good satirist must fully understand their target. Where bad satirists, like Verhoeven, fail is that they just gloss over a few surface concepts and base their satire on a total misunderstanding of the subject matter.

Take Starship Troopers for example. Verhoeven saw that the future society of Heinlein's original novel was a democracy where only those who do a minimum of two years of "Federal Service" are allowed to vote. The term "Federal Service" covers work in the military, natch, or work in civil or charitable services.

Now Heinlein intended the concept as a satire of people who vote to get things from the government, while being unwilling to do anything for the greater good of society as being inherently destructive. So Heinlein posited that in order to qualify for suffrage you had to prove that you're willing to sacrifice and suffer for the greater good. Everyone is given a chance to attempt to earn suffrage, but then must endure physical and mental trials, as well as an intense education, if not indoctrination, that teaches them that their role in society was to serve, and not be served. They're taught that unless they're  100% dedicated to making the world a better place, then they shouldn't be in a position to decide the fates of others.

Verhoeven saw the surface, assumed it was an endorsement of fascism, Aryanized the book's multi-ethnic cast, dressed everyone up from the Hugo Boss Wermacht collection, and called it "satire."

Nope, it wasn't even a good science fiction film.

3. PRESENTATION OF SATIRE: Whether broad or subtle presentation is key to good satire. This is where a lot of TV political humour fails for me is that their idea of "taking down" or "destroying" a target is to just mug at the camera and go "Ooooh, aren't they a bunch of stupid evil stupid Hitler assholes!"

It's worse in movies where targets are presented as horrid grotesque gargoyles incapable of reason or morality at best, downright insane and evil at worst.

There's no reason for this.

Satire, like any comedy or drama, works better if even the people being mocked can be understood as being humans with lives and agendas of their own, not grimacing puppets. 

Now we take a look at two ingredients missing from most modern satire:

4. ELEMENT OF DANGER: Let's face it, most modern "satirists" in Hollywood are masters of playing it safe while pretending to be "risky" or "edgy." 

This is because Hollywood is an extremely predictable place when it comes to likes and dislikes. Those likes and dislikes are, especially when it comes to politics, and they are usually the inverse of the likes and dislikes of the general American audience. So while insulting and attacking the sensibilities of the general audience while granting immunity to the sensibilities of those in power in Hollywood.

Now Hollywood will say that there's an element of danger in attacking the audience, and there is, it's called "low ratings" or "poor box office." However, insulting the audience may result in failure, but that failure does not preclude getting work in the future where their salaries are usually not commensurate with their audience. 

5. INTELLECTUAL HONESTY: "A plague on both your houses" is not a line one would associate with comedy, since it comes from Shakespeare's most famous romantic tragedy, but it holds true.

The audience is smart, it knows that both sides of any issue have their own quirks, and fumbles because they're human beings.

A classic example is Monty Python's heretical classic Life of Brian. In that film the religious authorities were portrayed as obsessed with rules over morality, the imperialist Romans were thuggish and oppressive, while the "freedom fighters" of the People's Front of Judea are portrayed as addle brained wannabe revolutionaries more comfortable debating over ideological minutiae rather than doing anything constructive or even destructive.

All engaged in nonsensical behaviour, all missed the point of what they were supposed to be doing, and that film became a classic that can be watched again, decades after it was made, and it still holds up.

You see, what Monty Python engaged in was a bit of intellectual honesty. Unlike a lot of modern Hollywood "satirists" they accepted that all sides call for ridicule, and delivered.

Too many satirists these days feel they must present one side as saintly, and the other side as satanic because too many of them consider themselves more political/social activist than comedian. That leaves audiences feeling unsatisfied and their material weak and very quickly dated.

Anyway, that's what I think.

R.I.P. Harold Ramis

Writer, director, and actor Harold Ramis passed away yesterday at the age of 69.

Ramis was never a movie "star" preferring to work either behind the camera, or as a supporting player, like his most famous role of Dr. Egon Spengler in the 1984 classic Ghostbusters.

If you spent any time of your life in the 1980s Ramis had revolutionized comedy. He crafted stories of underdogs trying to make their way in the world, battling forces seeking to keep them down, usually with hilarious results. 

My earliest memories of Ramis is not from his movies, but from seeing him on episodes of SCTV out of Toronto, and I think it would be a nice tribute to show some of his more famous bits from the show to remember him by.

Enjoy.

This one might be thought of as tacky, but I think he would like it:

This one was my personal favourite:

Hollywood Babble On & On #1096: Methinks He Doth Shill Too Much...

Congratulations to Will Ferrell.

He has done what you might think of as the impossible, he has officially made me totally sick and tired of a movie before it was even released.

That movie is Anchorman 2, the sequel to Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, and he is shilling it on a level unseen in living memory. He's going on local news programs "guest anchoring" in the character of Ron Burgundy, doing interviews in the character of Ron Burgundy, and essentially making himself an almost constant presence in the media sphere.

Now some are saying that it's because Will Ferrell is dedicated to his work and wants everyone to know how wonderful this movie is going to be.

I disagree.

I think it's desperation on the part of Ferrell and the studio.

Need proof?

Look at Ferrell's box office record, it's a mixed bag with some huge flops, like Land of the Lost, and some hits that range from big like Talladega Nights: The Legend of Ricky Bobby ($178 million), to modest like The Campaign ($86,000).

But there's a catch.

And it's a big catch.

That catch is money.

Remember this little formula when it comes to determining if a film is a money-maker or not.

The theatres keep 50% of the box office receipts. What's left is called the "Rental" and goes to the distributor/studio who paid for the movie.

For a film to make a profit it has to beat not only its production budget, but also its marketing budget, which can be in the tens of millions of dollars.

The average Will Ferrell comedy has an average budget of between $70 million to $100 million, and an average marketing budget of anywhere between $30 million to $70 million.

This means that a film has to pull in at least twice its production budget to break even, and three times its production budget to be considered a hit.

That means that at best Will Ferrell's biggest hits have broken even at best, and lost money most of the time. In fact, I suspect the last Will Ferrell film to pull a real profit was…

It was a small film by studio standards with a budget of only $26 million and a comparatively modest marketing budget since the studio treated it as an afterthought, and it pulled in just under $90 million making it a sleeper moneymaker, and its second life on home video and cable reruns only added to its mystique.

Ferrell has a lot to lose if the studios realize that he doesn't put butts in seats the way he claims, and that his biggest moneymakers, Elf and Anchorman 1, may have been more more flukes than anything else.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1024: Who's Laughing?

The folks at The Wrap are pondering the state of Hollywood movie comedy and they don't seem to confident. A lot of expected big budget blockbusters are under-performing despite tons of hype and more tonnage of money spent, and the comedies that do perform well at the box-office aren't doing the big business that their predecessors did not that long ago.

So what's up?

There are three possible reasons:

1. NATURAL CYCLES

Everything follows patterns and cycles. Sometimes those patterns and cycles are so complicated that our puny mortal minds are unable to grasp them. When we reach the end of a cycle and not know we can end up scratching our heads and furrowing our brows in a feeble attempt to understand why what we expected to happen didn't happen. 

The popularity of certain kinds of movies come and go. We can't say when they come and when they go, it involves a lot of blind luck and having the right film at the right place and time.

2. UNREAL EXPECTATIONS

If a film like the first Hangover comes out of nowhere and does big business the studio mindset is to immediately go bigger. Sometimes it works, but you can easily run into the law of diminishing returns. Costs go up, profit margins thin, and the unending demand to go bigger and louder strains the imagination of the creative team. You end up with a studio thinking that bigger movies will result in bigger returns ending up usually getting the opposite.

Then there's the overestimation of the star power of certain players. Tina Fey is a classic example. If you go solely by the media hype she gets you would probably think that she is the be-all-end-all of popular American comedy. Fey is talented, but she's not anywhere near as popular as Hollywood thinks she is. She's been in some modestly successful films, but her live action movies don't crack that precious $100 million mark that even relatively small studio films need to hit for the leads to be properly considered "movie stars." Her television show 30 Rock fared even worse with audiences somehow managing to stay on NBC for 7 seasons despite it being at or near the bottom of the ratings for its entire run. However, Hollywood tends to believe its own hype, and are then shocked to see her starring vehicle just disappear and be forgotten when they were fully expecting it to be a big hit and maybe snag a few award nominations.

3. NARROW IMAGINATIONS

Back in the old days when a team that worked as well as the Hangover trio was discovered they didn't necessarily jump into a sequel if they thought it would involve the flogging of a deceased equine in the concept department. 

They would look for other vehicles that the team could participate in. This meant that the creative-starring partnership wasn't wrapped up entirely in one franchise, and if that franchise started to under perform, it would invite unfavourable comparisons to other projects they might work together on.

But instead, they would aim for sequels, sequels, sequels. That's the sort of franchise they can wrap their little brains around.

Then there's the novelty factor. A joke always gets the biggest laugh the first time it's heard. Which is a long winded way of saying that key ingredient of successful comedy is a steady stream of new ideas and new talent. However, comedy in Hollywood seems to be dominated by several small cliques of elite "A-List" stars and their immediate social circle. There doesn't seem to be much independent comedy getting much play in theatres either, which means that there's the risk of a comedy talent drought when the current crop burns themselves out.

There's a lively comedy scene on the internet, but while some make work in the slightly more open and responsive field of television, the big screen has more or less ignored it so far.

And then there's the fourth reason...

4. TOO MUCH CRAP

For every big monster comedy hit, there were at least ten films as bad or almost as bad as...

So you can understand why the audience might be a little leery of trusting Hollywood's taste in comedy.

Hollywood Babble On & On #961: Life As A Sitcom

Sitcoms are really big on TV right now, and the networks are looking for "real life" for inspiration. Too bad they're looking within Hollywood for that inspiration.

One project at ABC is based on the teen years of super-model and TV host Tyra Banks, while NBC is developing a sitcom based upon celebrity dresser Rachel Zoe.

I think this calls for a look at the PROS AND CONS!!

PROS:

1. Tyra Banks is famous and her reality show America's Top Model has run for a long time on the CW network.

2. Rachel Zoe is sort of famous for dressing famous women who are infamously skinny. Plus she had a reality that ran on the Bravo channel for 4 seasons, which means that gay men know who she is too.

CONS:

1. Sitcoms "based" on or inspired by the lives of real people tend to only work if that real person is a comedian. That's because a comedian is someone who is willing to look both normal and ridiculous.

 

Normal in the way that their lives as presented as being decidedly non-glamorous, and ridiculous in the way that their "character" is frequently and regularly put square in the middle of embarrassing, outrageous, and silly situations that are usually fueled by some sort of character flaw.

I don't really seeing them go that way with these shows. The subjects must be made to look good and glamorous and right all the time, which does not make a good sitcom. Sitcoms are based on bad decisions.

2. For the most part the audience doesn't give a flying fiddler's fudge about shows set in, around, or about Hollywood or celebrities. Shows like that tend to do better on cable where smaller audiences are more acceptable. 

One rare instance where such a "Hollywood" show works with both critics and audiences is Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm. That's because Hollywood's role in the series isn't as some sort of model lifestyle, but a place full of rich yet extremely neurotic and touchy people. The fact that everyone takes everything so seriously, especially when the topic of all the ire is trivial and nonsensical. 

I don't see the shows going in that direction, because unlike Larry David, the people setting themselves up as the foundation for the shows are not comedians. Larry David's character, despite his success, is still basically an outsider, unable to fit in with the "beautiful people" around him.

The two shows being set up by ABC and NBC are about those "beautiful people," and I don't think you can milk much comedy from that.

My money is that these shows will either fizzle out in development, or have extremely short runs.

Hollywood Babble On & On #934: Too Soon?

There are two reasons a comedian makes the news these days. 

Either they've signed a deal for a sitcom, or they've offended somebody and people are demanding that they make some sort of public apology, possibly involving a form of self flagellation or face being boycotted or censored into oblivion.

You had Gilbert Gottfried getting fired from his Aflac duck gig for tweeting jokes about the Japanese tsunami disaster, Adam Carolla being deemed worse than Hitler for saying that he sees more men in comedy than women, and most recently Dane Cook had to apologize for making jokes about the recent shootings in Aurora.

And it's not just an American thing. A Canadian comedian was fined thousands of dollars and literally banned by a government agency from performing in the province of British Columbia for the crime of hurting the feelings of a heckler who was being rowdy at an open mic night.

Why are people putting so much weight on the often off the cuff rantings of comedians, who are not role models in any sense of the word?

Two reasons: 

1. It's easy. 

2. Too many people NEED to be offended these days.

Need more explanation? Okay...

1. It's easy because comedians are prone to run off at the mouth. This is especially true when they're developing new material, and are prone to do and say anything in front of any kind of audience to see if it will work.

Sprinkle a dozen camera phones recording every second of a live performance, or people taking screen grabs of their social media postings, and suddenly something that would have just got a few boos from the audience goes viral, and it's all over the world.

Which brings us to...

2. There are people who just need to be offended because they profit from it in some way. First there's a 24/7/365 media industry that needs stories and there's nothing they like better than someone doing something outrageous and offensive because it requires little to no investigation or analysis.

Second are the professionally outraged. Lawyers, activists, sensitivity trainers, and others all need causes to get attention for themselves and their causes, and to keep their paychecks coming. So they can, and will, jump on anything they think they can use, and like I said earlier, comedians are easy targets.

Now this is where I get to say that the Middle Ages had done something right.

You see back in olden days, between plague outbreaks, peasant revolts, and sieges the royal court would be entertained by the Court Jester or the Fool. 

Now there was a rule that the Jester could not be punished for anything he said, no matter how offensive or outrageous.

Why?

Because laughter, even inappropriate laughter is essential to our mental survival, and occasionally a nugget of deeper truth would plop out of the all the foolishness.

See, even before the invention of the dinner fork, they knew that censoring comedy was wrong.

Now you're probably sitting at your computer thinking "This isn't the Middle Ages, this is the Internet Age where outrage is cheap and plentiful. What do I do if a comedian says something that offends me?"

The answer is NOTHING!

Don't laugh.

Don't boo.

Don't go running around screaming about your hurt feelings.

Just sit there in silence.

You see boos and screams of outrage are a form of attention, and some comics would prefer attention over laughs. However silence stings the comic, it can induce potentially fatal cases of flop sweat, and it forces them to move onto something else that might work better.