- Joined
- Dec 16, 2015
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Here's the Tweet that got comic Nick Di Paolo fired from his show on Sirius XM last week:
"Dear future school shooters, please confine yourself to coll. campuses, specifically faculty lounges at Berkeley, Fresno State etc."
So this one got deleted fairly quickly, and Nick just up and disappeared from Sirius XM over last weekend. Nick is verging on openly racist and obsessed with pushing right wing politics. He's also a very talented comic whose voice is underrepresented on stage.
This was a tough one for me because that's a really fucked up thing to say, and it does border on being an actual call for violence. In the end though, it was a joke. A failed, shitty, inappropriate (even among the inappropriate) joke. I see the joke in there (faculty lounges), but you have to look pretty hard to find it. I understand how it might seem like a hateful call to violence to a lot of people.
Patrice O'Neal had a semi-famous old interview where he argued that comics should get the benefit of the doubt. Funny and unfunny come from the same place, he said. And it's the audience who lets you know if it succeeded. We should defend the attempt to be funny. Which, in Nick's case, would mean that we fuck him up for making a shit joke that was both unfunny and over the top offensive, which is the worst way to fail- but we don't ostracize him.
We don't need to waste any time on the "they can hire/fire who they want" stuff. We know that. We all know that. Should we defend Di Paolo's attempt at the joke, or should we punish him up for it, or do you disagree that it even qualifies as a joke?
"Dear future school shooters, please confine yourself to coll. campuses, specifically faculty lounges at Berkeley, Fresno State etc."
So this one got deleted fairly quickly, and Nick just up and disappeared from Sirius XM over last weekend. Nick is verging on openly racist and obsessed with pushing right wing politics. He's also a very talented comic whose voice is underrepresented on stage.
This was a tough one for me because that's a really fucked up thing to say, and it does border on being an actual call for violence. In the end though, it was a joke. A failed, shitty, inappropriate (even among the inappropriate) joke. I see the joke in there (faculty lounges), but you have to look pretty hard to find it. I understand how it might seem like a hateful call to violence to a lot of people.
Patrice O'Neal had a semi-famous old interview where he argued that comics should get the benefit of the doubt. Funny and unfunny come from the same place, he said. And it's the audience who lets you know if it succeeded. We should defend the attempt to be funny. Which, in Nick's case, would mean that we fuck him up for making a shit joke that was both unfunny and over the top offensive, which is the worst way to fail- but we don't ostracize him.
We don't need to waste any time on the "they can hire/fire who they want" stuff. We know that. We all know that. Should we defend Di Paolo's attempt at the joke, or should we punish him up for it, or do you disagree that it even qualifies as a joke?