The Onion apologizes for offensive Quvenzhané Wallis tweet (AP via MSN)
Seth MacFarlane’s Sexist Oscar Night: Why everyone is outraged (Yahoo! Shine)
Why Seth MacFarlane’s Misogyny Matters (Vulture)

Since a lot of the “entertainment” being produced in the 1980s wasn’t pleasing to my palate as I was growing up, I wound up spending a lot of time watching classic films and television shows. Watching reruns of the original Star Trek with my mother in the early 80s on our local independent station — back before there was even a Fox network — led to a lot of bonding, and set me up as a lifelong Star Trek fan. I have my father to thank for turning me on to Blazing Saddles at an age when most kids probably shouldn’t watch it, but it helped me to see the stupidity of racism (and power of satire) at an early age. I can remember when Nick at Nite first went on the air and I got hooked on Dragnet and Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. I still see, in my own attempts at humour, influences of some of the great game shows of the seventies like Match Game and The Gong Show.

I don’t recall The Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts that clearly, but I do recall how it felt like I was watching something special when they were on, something even naughtier than Blazing Saddles or anything else my parents would let me watch. Even though I didn’t get the jokes, and I didn’t recognize very many of the faces, replays of those shows still stuck with me. The whole idea of comedy roasts didn’t really register on my radar for a long time after that, save for the Ted Danson/Whoopi Goldberg blackface controversy at a Friar’s Club roast ages ago. I knew of the Friar’s Club, but I really didn’t think that much about them until a little over a decade ago, when Comedy Central televised some of the Friar’s Club roasts before launching their own brand of regular televised roasts, promoting them with massive commercial campaigns on their own network.

At first I wasn’t sure what to think of roasts coming “out into the open” like this. As someone who generally tries to adhere to principles of political correctness and proactive respect, I was kind of bothered by a new line of shows and specials where the bar for taste and tact was dropped so drastically, even by the standards of late 1990s/early 2000s television. On the other hand, I’ve certainly crossed that line before; I grew up seeing how political correctness could be taken too far, and I think there are times when you need to push that line in service of a greater point. In addition, to be honest, there are a lot of jokes I’ve heard over the years that I would unhesitatingly classify as tasteless and offencive that have made me laugh out loud, despite my revulsion.

I began to see roasts as, to borrow hippie-speak, the creation of a separate space. Although it’s not usually made explicit to watchers, a roast is supposed to be a place where we can let our guard down for a while, where we can laugh at jokes that would otherwise rub us the wrong way and maybe even prompt us to respond indignantly. I don’t see anything wrong with this, provided that the line between “roast space” and everyday life is clear and respected from everyone involved. You watch the roast, you laugh at the bawdy jokes, you get the release so many of us need from the rigours of political correctness and politeness, and then you go back to your regular life and normal standards of decorum.

Unfortunately, what seems to have happened is that the line doesn’t really seem to be there for a lot of people any longer. It didn’t help that, at the same time Comedy Central began putting roasts on television, Chappelle’s Show became a breakout success for both Dave Chappelle and the network, and a generation of children who hadn’t been taught the finer points of satire, and the differences between television and real life, saw Chappelle’s skits and got the impression that the way to be “funny,” or at least get people’s attention, was to repeat the n-word ad nauseum. Similarly, I think a lot of younger people saw these televised roasts and didn’t understand the special atmosphere that was being created there, and thought that no-holds-barred profanity, racist and sexist and homophobic jokes, and insults, were just a souped-up version of “normal comedy,” if not normal comedy itself.

This isn’t to say that this sort of thing hasn’t existed before my time, or will continue to exist long after I’m gone; I still remember the “dead baby jokes” some of the kids in my neighbourhood made when I was growing up (I never saw the point of those). Howard Stern has been one of the most influential forces in media for decades now. When the line between “normal comedy” and “roast comedy” is blurred, though, not only does it make roasts a lot less special, but it also has a tendency to normalize the racism, sexism, homophobia, and other deplorable behaviours that are at the root of so much roast humour, and to make people believe that such behaviours are acceptable in normal society.

Witness the controversy over the tweet The Onion made during last night’s Oscars about nine-year-old actress Quvenzhané Wallis. Joking about a nine-year-old allegedly acting like a prima donna can conceivably be funny, and even work on a satirical level to point to the absurdities of Hollywood. However, calling a nine-year-old the c-word — like the n-word, it’s a word I’m never comfortable using, even when quoting someone else, unless it’s absolutely necessary — is so obviously beyond the bounds of good taste that, despite The Onion taking the tweet down an hour after it was posted, it continues to generate a much-deserved torrent of bad publicity for a comedic team that had otherwise been known for playing the good taste/bad taste line like a fiddle and coming up with a lot of genuinely funny stuff. With the choice of that one word, whoever wrote that tweet took what was a funny concept and turned it into something supremely unfunny and offencive. If the same word had been directed towards an adult actress, though, do you think it would have generated anything like the firestorm The Onion is going through now? Maybe it would have fifteen years ago, but I’m not so sure it would attract much attention these days.

If it weren’t for The Onion’s idiotic tweet, the growing tide of criticism Seth MacFarlane is receiving for his hosting performance at the Oscars would be getting a lot more mainstream attention. I didn’t watch the Oscars — I never do —  but a lot of people on my Facebook and Twitter feeds were, and the only ones who weren’t outraged by MacFarlane’s performance were my housemate (a huge MacFarlane fan) and people who had worked with MacFarlane before. MacFarlane has made me laugh before — the club where I’ve been doing performance art plays Adult Swim on the televisions, so I’ve been catching a fair amount of Family Guy and American Dad lately — but his style of comedy isn’t really my thing, and as a writer I don’t like how his body of work has done so much to destroy the art of subtlety in writing.

The articles I linked to above provide pretty comprehensive explanations of why so many of MacFarlane’s jokes last night crossed the line and just weren’t funny, so I’m not going to rehash the arguments they make. All I will add is that MacFarlane, like Stern and so many of his media doppelgangers, have an annoying habit of trying to justify their “comedy” by saying that it’s okay for them to do it because they can take as good as they can give. They have thick skins, ergo, we all need to develop thick skins too and put up with their “jokes.” I’ve been accused of being too thin-skinned before, and certainly there was a time in my life when that was very true. (I think it could still well be true today.) For MacFarlane and Stern and their ilk to insist that we all develop skins as thick as theirs, though, and to normalize the awful, wretched behaviours at the root of their “comedy,” is so ludicrous as to often be the funniest things about their schticks.

When respect is thrown out the window, when a minimal semblance of good manners and good taste becomes an object of ridicule, only bad things can happen. As I often tell my students, the world might be a much more interesting place if people just randomly punched each other in the face as they walked down the streets, but it would certainly be a much more painful place, and at some point, no matter how hard you tried, it’d be your face getting punched over and over again. Since I can take being punched in the face, does that make it okay for me to go see Seth MacFarlane and knock all his teeth out for repeatedly offending me and so many of my friends? Of course not. There are laws against that, as well there should be, and I’m the last person in the world who would dare suggest that we enact laws banning bad taste or obscenity. That doesn’t mean that informally, as a society, we can’t maintain those standards ourselves, and call attention to those who insist on habitually breaking them for no other purpose than to shock for the sake of shocking, offend for the sake of offending, and making some quick cash from a populace increasingly inured to the dark roots and harmful effects of this kind of “comedy.” I’m all for shocking and offending in service of a greater point — I do it myself, sometimes gleefully — but to do it for no other purposes than to get a rise out of people and make money is pathetic.

We all know MacFarlane is just going to keep on doing what he’s been doing since Family Guy first became such a big hit, though, and that is why, ultimately, his Oscars performance is so much worse than The Onion’s tweet. None of MacFarlane’s awful “jokes” at the Oscars were even close to being as horrible as that tweet that came from The Onion’s Twitter account, to be sure. The Onion removed that tweet shortly after it was posted, though, and they issued a forceful apology — not a middling “we’re sorry if anyone was offended” apology, but a “this was absolutely wrong and we apologize to everyone” apology — and immediately took steps to discipline the responsible individuals and make sure that nothing like this ever happens again on any of their properties. If MacFarlane ever says anything in response to the mounting criticism over his Oscars hosting performance, as well as the offencive things on his shows and movies, I have no doubt he’ll say the same thing that he, and others of his kind, have said in response to similar criticism over the years: Words to the effect of “Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.”

If you’re offended by my unnecessary use of the f-word in that last sentence … well, you’re one of a dying breed. If the lines between “normal comedy” and “roast comedy” keep disappearing, how much longer will it be until we hear Big Bird drop a big old f-bomb on Sesame Street?