Should There Be a Line for Comedians?

The concept of "too soon" is a tricky one. So, don't make jokes about the Manchester bombing the next day, but the day after is ok? When exactly is "too soon" too soon?

And yes, comedy is certainly is subjective. I remember the day of 9/11, the very day of, there was a thread here about Jumper Collector Cards. People photoshopped the people jumping from the buildings into collectible cards and wrote bios for them. Clearly, that was a very distasteful thing to do and most were outraged, but there were some that truly found it hilarious.

Oh? Enlighten me? (Honest question)

It's all about respect I feel,

I mean morbid stuff can be funny, there is nothing wrong with morbid or black humor.

But comon, we are all human beings, the least you can have is some respect for eachother.

It's so easy to hide behind a computer screen and go up in anonimity... Try actually telling the joke to someone who just lost someone at a terrorist attack the other day... I swear none of those 'jokers' would dare it.

I do love morbid humor. I mean, my friend and I were telling Haiti jokes the day of the earthquake, but of course, we'd never tell them to someone who was actually from Haiti or had friends/relatives in Haiti.

Yeah that's a good example.

It's one thing if it's just between you and your friend.

But it's another thing to put it on the internet and for the world to see. I mean the last is just way more disrespectful.

I don't like people censoring humor, because it's way too subjectie. But on the other hand I don't like people that don't have respect for other people either :P

Perfect example was Gilbert Gottfried and those tweets he was making not a day after the Japan earthquakes (I believe). Sure, he as a comedian has every right, but he also deserved to get fired from Aflac.

Yeah it may be a good idea in your head... But maybe tell those jokes to a friend you know who can appreciate that kind of humor... Not share it with the whole world you know :P

They should at least try to be funny.

I had no idea who this red head was until now and I had no idea she was a comedian base on the footage she put out that went viral.

Yeah the thing about free speech in the UK is that it's much more context-dependent than in the US.

If you want to make a taboo joke during a stand-up comedy show or give a controversial speech as part of some kind of professional speaking engagement at a private venue, you'll probably be fine. But shout something dodgy on the street or make a bad remark on facebook or twitter and authorities might come after you.

It's rather sinister. They seem to try and control speech more if you're further from public view. There's this youtuber in Scotland who's been charged by the police for making a silly video where he was pretending to indoctrinate his dog into Nazism (as a joke). If that had been on a regular comedy show, no-one would've cared.

Yes, but now you've changed your first example back to being a proper use of the market. If all they're saying is "buy our stuff, not theirs" it's a market. If they're saying "stop them selling stuff", it's not.

The waiter example doesn't translate well onto the internet. To better see the distinction: What if it was still only that 1 customer complaining but they happened to work for a media company and have 100,000 twitter followers? So they told the manager that because of that 1 bad waiter, they're going to write an article to their hundred thousand followers telling them how bad the experience was. It's still only 1 person complaining technically. But they suddenly pose a much larger threat to the company. I'm saying that particular case isn't really the free market. Those 100,000 followers aren't actually negatively reacting to the product themselves, and if it really was just 1 bad waiter on 1 occasion, chances are that 100,000 people would not have the same negative experience. But they're going to be swayed all the same.

That's essentially what happened with the pewdiepie incident. All I'm saying is that while that's certainly legal, it's not the marketplace of ideas operating. It's the marketplace being rigged by minorities with big megaphones. Sometimes those various megaphones end up cancelling each other out. But in many cases they don't. The media has a lot of influence in framing the general direction of proceedings.

The thing is, any transaction is going to involve both parties getting what they want out of the deal. The same way the I might buy Sega because it does what Nintendon't, people are also getting something intangible out of supporting people with the right values. That is, they're paying to feel good about themselves. So, hypothetically speaking, let's say there's a retailer out there selling some really tasteless racist-ass shit. This retailer generally has worked out well for me, but now I notice myself feeling BAD about using my money to support a company that has no qualms about selling such racist-ass shit. The implicit notion behind me telling them in an angry email that I'm not going to give them any more money until they stop selling that product is that I'm still going to buy my stuff SOMEWHERE. Just not from these jackasses. If buying from Company A makes me feel a little bit bad inside, and buying from Company B doesn't make me feel a little bit bad inside, then I'm clearly getting more value for my money by going with Company B.

Yes, it's still competition within the market.

On to your other point, why SHOULDN'T that one complainer complain to 100,000 followers? He had a bad experience, so why the hell shouldn't he tell however many people he wants about his own experience? If his experience doesn't match what other customers experienced, then FINE. All those other customers with nothing but positive things to say are all free to write their own reviews praising the waiter's service.

Now, granted, I know that in practice it doesn't exactly work like that. People expect things to work right, therefore things working right is sort of a non-event. Have a great night out at a restaurant and you're likely to not tell ANYONE about how great the staff was. But if you have a bad night out, you're gonna tell at least a dozen people about how those assholes at the restaurant ruined your night. Sucks for the employees who are doing their best to do a great job, but boo-freaking-hoo. They chose to get into the business of pleasing customers and that's how this stuff works. Negativity is almost always going to be proportionally more vocal than positivity simply because that's just how it works. Same as how "if it bleeds, it leads". Bad news is almost always going to dominate the media outlets simply because that's what sells. Which kind of makes sense if you think about it. If everything is fine in the world, then you sort of don't NEED to read the paper or pay attention to what's going on. But if there are wolves at the door, you should probably know about that.

So in a way, I sort of get how it's not fair that a minority negative experience can drown out a bunch of positive experiences. At the same time, tough cookies. That's just how it works and businesses that can't handle that should probably get out of the business. Again, if this is actually such a problem, then those thousands of people with good reviews are free to tell everyone they know about how awesome this or that company/whatever is. You know, fix the "problem" by focusing on the positive instead of the negative. But I think you know how likely that is. The only way you're going to tweet to a hundred thousand followers about your restaurant experience is if your restaurant experience sucked. That's not the fault of the one guy who goes out to eat and finds out that his restaurant experience actually DID suck.

In the UK, you get arrested for thought crime and non-violent expression.

In other words, they've got this huge Muslim issue. I'm sure you've heard about it.

If you complain about it, you get locked up. Complaining about your countries issues, to be faced with legal punishment, is much too close to a scary authoritarian dystopia for my taste. Many countries in Europe have similar laws to these.

Same goes for Canada.

If you can't complain about stuff you disagree with in your country, you essentially live in a crap country without free speech. I honestly can't believe you've never heard of any of this. These would be massive issues of concern in the USA. It's not just that these are free speech issues, but it shows the police in the UK are spending more of their resources and efforts policing the internet than arresting potential jihadis.

It would be like Trump locking you up for speaking out against his Muslim ban or saying Pro-Muslim speech. I know it's difficult to imagine it this way but it's truly the same thing. Scary stuff.

None of your first paragraph contradicts anything I've said. That's the exact correct response that I consider a proper use of the market.

On the second part, it's not that he shouldn't. It's that it's not really the free market at that point. The whole point of a free market is that it's about the individual decisions people make regarding the quality of products, such that good ideas and products beat out bad ideas and products.

People in general are fairly good at evaluating this, especially when there are noticeable differences in quality. That's why it's a good system. People are NOT, however, good at doing statistics and drawing reasonable conclusions based on anecdotes. That's why companies like Disney panic when WSJ write hit-pieces on pewdiepie. They're not afraid because of anything pewdiepie actually did. They could easily see no-one had a problem with his controversial videos. What they're doing is incorporating a certain level of human irrationality and confusion into their model. Which it's rational to do. People aren't particularly smart at determining truth in this way and will often make decisions based on political biases or trust in certain authorities.

That's a very different form of decision making from something like deciding which brand of batteries last the longest, for a given price. Nearly everyone is capable of evaluating that accurately.

@garywood69: So, I take it that you've also got a problem with advertising seeing as how it's commonly used to make a mediocre product/service/whatever look like the best thing ever.

And since when has the free market ever been solely about things succeeding based on a rational assessment of the quality of the thing sold?

I guess it depends on what those tweets are. If they're hate speech then they shouldn't be ignored. There's a difference between going on social media to say "McDonald's food is shit" and "**** those Muslims, I'm going to shoot up a mosque". If they remain at large and then end up shooting up a mosque while the police is busy investigating what do you think would happen? Everybody would say that the police was warned and did nothing.

Not to get into the debate of whether or not freedom of speech covers hate speech, if people getting in trouble for threatening tweets means the country has no freedom of speech how about this girl?

....it was just a tweet, why threaten her with the FBI? Freedom of speech and all that, or don't Americans have that?

Also, why is Kathy Griffin being investigated by the secret services for throwing food colouring onto a rubber mask? She's just expressing herself...

Also, I've expressed myself plenty, online and off and while I didn't always have a sympathetic ear I was never arrested for it...then again, i never threatened to harm anyone...don't see the reason to be scared of living in Europe...definitely less scared than I was at the thought of moving to the US as was my plan a few years ago.

There should be no limits to what anyone says (comedian or not) as long as the hilarity of what is said is equal or greater in magnitude to how outrageous it is.

So if someone makes an outrageous joke about things like the holocaust or genocide etc., I better not be able to hold in the laughter. (That line made me sound like a terrible person!! Then again, I am a massive free speech advocate so go suck a lemon)

I have no problems when it applies equally to everyone. If one side starts to complain, then it also applies when the tables are turned.

For example, no one complained when chimp photos of Bush Jr. showed up. Yet, there were some who cried foul when chimp photos of Obama showed up.

@korvus said:

I guess it depends on what those tweets are. If they're hate speech then they shouldn't be ignored. There's a difference between going on social media to say "McDonald's food is shit" and "**** those Muslims, I'm going to shoot up a mosque". If they remain at large and then end up shooting up a mosque while the police is busy investigating what do you think would happen? Everybody would say that the police was warned and did nothing.

Not to get into the debate of whether or not freedom of speech covers hate speech, if people getting in trouble for threatening tweets means the country has no freedom of speech how about this girl?

....it was just a tweet, why threaten her with the FBI? Freedom of speech and all that, or don't Americans have that?

Also, why is Kathy Griffin being investigated by the secret services for throwing food colouring onto a rubber mask? She's just expressing herself...

Also, I've expressed myself plenty, online and off and while I didn't always have a sympathetic ear I was never arrested for it...then again, i never threatened to harm anyone...don't see the reason to be scared of living in Europe...definitely less scared than I was at the thought of moving to the US as was my plan a few years ago.

Firstly, there's a difference between being investigated and committing a crime. Like, the Secret Service investigated Kathy Griffin, since it's potentially an indication of an intent to do harm to the President. However, they investigated her and she didn't do anything actionable. There was no crime committed, she's not being arrested or charged, what she did was within her first amendment rights.

Secondly, we aren't just talking about threats. Since we're on a gaming website, let's bring up some examples such as legal restrictions of the depiction of Nazi imagery, or killing kids in video games. Are you a fan of Fallout 2 who got annoyed when Fallout 3 was released and wouldn't let you blow those snotty little kids' heads off? Well, that's one of the main reasons why. Here in the USA the ESRB just might not give you an acceptable rating for a game with particularly heinous content, while in other countries that content is legally banned. The result being that developers don't care enough about killing kids to make their games banned in European markets, and they're not going to go to the effort to make two different versions of the same game just so people in the USA can shoot a kid in the face. So, no killing kids.

And there's the thing about "hate speech". In lots of other countries, "hate speech" is an actual crime. Hate speech is NOT a crime in the USA. Shit, dude, the 1st Amendment protects the Ku Klux Klan. You ever wonder how the Ku Klux Klan is still permitted to exist in the USA and perform public demonstrations? It's because the USA, relatively speaking, takes freedom of speech VERY seriously. Even a lot of actual threats aren't actually actionable since there are specific criteria that have to be met before speech becomes a crime. This is not to say that the USA is better than any given other country, or that the USA is more safe than any other given country. I'm just saying that right now, the USA ranks very highly as a country in which you're allowed to say almost anything you want.

@MrGeezer:

Donte Jamar Sims, Jarvis Britton, that kid who tweeted about Sandy Hook, "@Mark12394995", "@Rileyy_69", Paul Chambers, Elliot Madison, Cameron D'Ambrosio, Daniel Hadyn, John Rayne Rivello.

These are all people who got arrested in the USA for their comments on social media...now granted, these are just names from the first page of the search results and I didn't bother to check their sources (kind of in a hurry and this is not really an argument I feel passionate about to spend a bunch of time researching it XD) so it's possible some of these are wrong but my point is, the US is not all that different from other countries, regardless of how much nationalists like to tout their country as the bastion of freedom. Go shout bomb at an airport in the US and see what a fun day you'll have...a drunk friend of mine did it in Portugal...nothing happened. So yeah, there are differences and one can argue whether they are good or bad and for a lot of Americans having the KKK protected from consequences for their hate speech is something to be proud of, to me as a European I feel safer knowing that if someone tweets at me saying that my son should get run over by a truck their ass is going in jail until it's certain he's just an idiot, not a potential murderer.

Now none of this is against anything you said. My original reply was in response to KH's disingenuous statement that you get arrested in Europe for speaking your mind when even in his own links it's clearly stated that you can get arrested for threatening behaviour, which even if you're American, is different from "complaining".

As for video games I hear what you're saying, and yeah, your life as a gamer sucks if you live in, say, Australia, but I can't say it bothers me too much not being able to spend hours in a game shooting kids and puppies. However, I do understand that you were making a larger point than that.

@korvus: Yeah, the larger point was that the restrictions against free speech in the USA are pretty loose, relatively speaking.

Now, we can go on and on about anecdotal evidence of people getting arrested or not arrested. And in fact, in any given country some people who shouldn't be prosecuted will be prosecuted and some people who should be prosecuted get off scott free (and furthermore, a LOT of arrests don't lead to any kind of charges).

None of this is to say that the USA is better or safer than other countries, and any of this kind of stuff can (and does) happen in the USA same as anywhere else.

My point was simply that right now the USA is pretty much a place where you're allowed to say almost anything you want without fear of legal repercussions. As far as protecting free speech, we're doing pretty freaking good right now. And stuff like a comedian (or anyone, really) facing social repercussions for saying stupid stuff doesn't concern me in the least. Those kinds of social repercussions are the RESULT of freedom of speech. There are a lot of countries right now that are a LOT less free when it comes to what people are and are not legally allowed to say, and relatively speaking the USA is pretty freaking serious about protecting peoples' right to free expression. I know it's common to hear "you can't say that" but in almost all cases here YOU ABSOLUTELY CAN. You might not be able to say it without becoming a social pariah, but you can say it.

@MrGeezer: Again, I wasn't contesting anything you said, but "we can go on and on about anecdotal evidence of people getting arrested or not arrested" is precisely what made me comment to begin with. That was the base of his argument.
Besides, let's be honest, you guys can probably speak as accurately about what's happening in Europe as we (Europeans) can accurately talk about what's happening in the US, which is to say, not very. There's a big difference between reading/watching news about a country and actually living there. I trust that we can agree on that as well.

Well, the problem with this example is that the chimp was used to mock Bush's intelligence, whereas it was used to mock Obama's ethnicity, which is sort of an attack on an entire race as well.

Well there is a slight difference between the two.....

I'm a huge defender of freedom of speech. But that comedian was not jailed or sued. She just lost sponsors and opportunities. So I dont think it applies.

No.

I'm offended by some comedy routines but that's okay: I get it. I don't get upset, but I may roll my eyes.

This discussion again calls to mind that jesters were the only people who could insult the king. They were often also used to tell the king bad news. I have read of one jester who was told to tell the king that his navy had just been defeated. If I recall the revelation went something like "Our brave sailors took the fight to the bottom, unlike our cowardly enemy."

... Not just that, but where hell was the joke? There was no punch line, no irony, no satire.. It was just her staring stone faced with the bloody head into the camera.. How can that not be seen as a call to violence or a threat towards the president? A better example of actual jokes offending people is the recent thing with Bill Maher which WAS ACTUALLY A JOKE he cracked, that triggered people.. Nothing should happen to him, it was a joke.. It had a clear punch line and it could not have been misconstrued as a call to violence.. And the very same people who are trying to defend Kathy want Bill Maher to be completely destroyed, for saying the n word..