I was going to tweet this thought, but it ended up being 620 characters long, so I guess I’ll just blog it:
I think it’s silly to call David Letterman is a hypocrite because he made jokes about people’s sex lives while having sexual peccadilloes of his own. Are we demanding complete purity and righteousness from… our COMEDIANS now? Really?! Of course he made those jokes. It’s his *job* to make those jokes. Look, if Letterman were now getting prickly and defensive about others making jokes about his situation, THEN he’d be a hypocrite. But he’s not. In fact, he’s making the jokes himself. It’s now open season on Dave, just as it was open season on Bill Clinton and Mark Sanford and the rest, and that’s as it should be.
P.S. Here’s his monologue last night. He’s not exactly skirting the issue. He even references all those years of jokes about others’ infidelity, first by saying there’s a possibility he’ll be “the first talk show host impeached,” and then later with his “let’s look at the news” bit re: Clinton, Sanford and Spitzer.
Look: David Letterman has never held himself up as somehow superior to the rest of us. Indeed, his tendency toward self-deprecation has always been one of his strengths. And his jokes about unfaithful, womanizing politicians were not moral judgments from on high. They were jokes — more often than not, funny jokes. Just like the jokes about Dave are funny. They don’t become unfunny in retrospect because of revelations about the person telling them. And those revelations don’t make the joke-teller a hypocrite, unless there’s some reason to believe that the jokes carried with them an implied moral judgment, rather than simply fulfilling the usual purpose of late-night comedy: to make fun of whatever funny s**t is happening in the news.
Comedians routinely make fun of politicians and other public figures for being inarticulate and saying dumb things. (Think Sarah Palin, George W. Bush or Dan Quayle.) Do they not have the right to do this, if they themselves are sometimes inarticulate or occasionally say dumb things?
Comedians routinely make fun of celebrities who behave boorishly or foolishly while out partying, clubbing or whatnot. (Think Britney, Paris, Lindsay, etc.) Do they not have the right to do this, if they themselves have ever done anything boorish or foolish in public?
Comedians have been having a field day with Kanye West’s interruption of Taylor Swift at the VMAs, making a ton of jokes premised on the notion that he’s a big fat jerk. Do they not have the right to do this, if they themselves have ever acted like jerks in their public or private lives?
At the end of the day, comedy shows are just that: shows. They are acts. Their very purpose, their raison d’etre, is to poke fun at funny stuff that happens in our society and culture, which often means laughing at other people’s misfortunes and/or poor decisions and/or stupid actions. If we applied the “glass houses” rule to comedians, declaring that they shouldn’t make jokes about any subject area in which they aren’t completely pure, we’d have very few comedians left, and even fewer good ones.
So condemn Dave as an immoral womanizer, or a sexual harasser, or a creepy old man, if you like. But this argument that he’s a hypocrite misunderstands the comedian’s role in society, and the purpose and nature of the supposedly hypocritical jokes.
P.P.S. Here is Dave’s apology last night:
Letterman has always been self-deprecating. So far his own jokes about himself have been funnier than any other comedian or site I’ve read/heard.
Let’s not forget that what Letterman did in the first place took balls. He took time on his own show to lay out his problem and his right to defend himself. What he did or who he slept with is his own business. Can we make fun of it? Sure. Should we condemn him for it? No. He brought up a good point last night – he still has to atone to his wife for what he did and he might not even be able to but he’s certainly going to try.
Marty, do you truly believe he owned up to this out of a sense of responsibility for wrong doing? I don’t. I think he owned up to it because it was going to be made public anyway because of his grand jury testimony. In other words if he hadn’t been caught, he wouldn’t have said a word, probably not even to his wife.
This isn’t a guy who had AN affair and regretted it. He’s a guy who has had MULTIPLE affairs. Frankly I don’t know how you make up one affair let alone multiple.
Furthering the problem is the fact that these were not women he simply knew, but women who worked for him, that adds a whole knew level of shame to the situation.
As for him being a hypocrite? Well he’s not a flaming hypocrite perhaps, but his behavior IS hypocritical. Just because the jokes he told were funny, doesn’t mean he wasn’t still wrong to take advantage of others situation while doing the same thing himself. You’d think it might have been a wake-up call, but then I don’t think he was really sorry about what he was doing anyway. Although the hypocrisy part seems rather unimportant in the face of the two issues I mention above.
What really galls me is the sympathy he is getting and seemingly instant forgiveness. It carries with it shades of Roman Polanski. Somehow its ok to do wrong as long as you are famous? We should feel bad for poor victimized David Letterman? Hardly. I feel sorry for his wife and what he has now put her through, both the pain of the affairs (which he has even joked about during his “apology” monologue) and now putting this out for all the public to see.
I think you’re right, sorta, but I also think Ace is right.
Let’s not forget that Letterman’s newfound sense of penitence came after someone was trying to extort him. Obviously I’m not condoning the would-be extortionist, but it’s not as if he’s confessing this of his own free will.
Also, most people in this situation take a leave of absence. A poor but easy analogy is Kanye West canceling his tour. I don’t know what action CBS took or will take, if any, but leaving Letterman on to milk his lecherousness for ratings seems in poor taste.
You’re right, Brendan. Dave may be an immoral womanizer, a sexual harasser, and a creepy old man, but he is not a hypocrite. He even avoided getting married so he wouldn’t commit adultery! (At least, in the technical sense.)
What creeps me out is him giving a mea culpa with the audience cheering. I feel the same way as the Kansas City Star’s TV critic.
http://www.kansascity.com/entertainment/columnists/aaron_barnhart/story/1485800.html
I could care less about Letterman or whether he’s technically a hypocrite or not, but these are pretty damn funny.
Comedians routinely make fun of politicians and other public figures for being inarticulate and saying dumb things. (Think Sarah Palin, George W. Bush or Dan Quayle.)
You left out the word Republican.
I knew someone would make this point. But is there a Democratic politician in the last two decades who belongs in the same breath as Palin, Dubya and Quayle, if we’re talking about politicians who have been routinely skewered by comics — not just Letterman, but all comics across the board — for “being inarticulate and saying dumb things”? I tried to think of one, for the sake of balance, but I couldn’t.
This doesn’t mean comics never make fun of Democrats. If we’re talking about politicians who are skewered for womanizing, Bill Clinton and Eliot Spitzer immediately come to mind. If we’re talking about politicians who are skewered for being stiff as a board, there’s only one person we could be thinking of: Al Gore. If we’re talking about politicians who are skewered for being pompous or flip-flopping, John Kerry is the obvious choice. There’s no conspiracy here; there are plenty of jokes made at Democratic politicians’ expense, all the time. But the particular “inarticulate/dumb” label has really fallen harder on Quayle, Bush and Palin than on anyone else. Blame bias for that, if you wish. Personally, I think they were just unusually easy targets.
*Perhaps you’ll say Joe Biden is in this category, or should be. But Biden’s brand of idiocy is a bit different. Fairly or unfairly, Quayle/Dubya/Palin were portrayed as simply being dummies. Biden doesn’t come across as a dummy — he comes across as the “gunner” in your law school class who doesn’t know when to shut up, and thinks he’s smarter than he is. A lot of the jokes told about Quayle, Dubya and Palin are interchangeable — you could switch the names and they’d make just as much sense. Not so with Biden. It’s a different type of joke.
Well, Slate is doing a sequel to Bushisms called Bidenisms.
http://www.slate.com/id/2229640/
So there’s that.
Biden is different then Bush, though. Both have funny gaffes. But you can’t imagine Biden messing up like Bush did, and vice versa.
Much as it pains me to admit it, I think Brendan’s wrong here. I’ve been a fan of Letterman since the 80s, when my bro and I used to tape his NBC show and watch it the next day. But Letterman’s hypocrisy is relevant to this discussion.
Dictionary.com defines hypocrisy as “a pretense of having a virtuous character…that one does not really possess”. We could perhaps argue about whether making fun of Mark Sanford involves condescending schadenfreude at his expense, for the rest of this post I’m simply going to assume that we all agree that righteous condescension is a big part of why we enjoy those jokes.
What does Letterman get for ginning up our condescension with his jokes at the expense of the immoral? Ratings. What do you get if you have a successful, hip show? A procession of nubile interns that will give “anything” to break into the extremely competitive world of television. Who were these targets of Letterman’s sexual peccadillos?
If Letterman were walking out into Times Square and bagging babes, I think you would have a better defense against hypocrisy. But these weren’t random chicks. These are casting couch encounters. And the casting couch’s attractiveness to young females is increased due to the merits of public condescension to the sexual misdeeds of ill-mannered public figures.
Maybe not hypocritical…but certainly gross.
Gross abuse of power, no doubt. But Letterman is and always has been a jackass. So I have trouble with calling it straight up hypocrisy. I haven’t watched Letterman for years, nor ever found him to be particularly funny or a particularly good interviewer. So I, unlike Joe Mama, I couldn’t care less about this.
So I, unlike Joe Mama, I couldn’t care less about this.
LOL…I meant to say “couldn’t” 🙂