The Living Room Times

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: