The latest show on Tenacious D’s Australian tour has been postponed after senator Ralph Babet demanded the pair be deported following an apparent joke about the assassination attempt on Donald Trump.
American comedy rock duo Jack Black and Kyle Gass were due to perform in Newcastle on Tuesday evening, but the show – part of the band’s Spicy Meatball Tour – was cancelled without notice on Tuesday afternoon.
Concert promoter Frontier Touring said on social media that it regretted “to advise that Tenacious D’s concert tonight at Newcastle Entertainment Centre has been postponed”.
Video from the event showed (Kyle) Gass being presented with a birthday cake and told to “make a wish” as he blew out the candles. Gass then appeared to say “don’t miss Trump next time” – just hours after the shooting at Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania that left the former president injured.
So, is there any set of jokes a comedian could make that are filled with enough punching down or hateful rhetoric that you would condemn, even if the comedian was adamant they were just jokes and that he doesn’t believe anything that’s actually racist/sexist/transphobic/pro-genocide/etc?
Or is it a “no true Scotsman” thing where, if the jokes are bad enough, you just decide that he must actually mean them for real, and therefore you can condemn them out of hand?
Why does it need to go to the extreme? Are you telling me you have this all figured out theres no room for improvement in your view on morality? Im navigating this as it comes. Anything i say or have said is and should always be subject to change. And im also not willing to be the one who sets the bar here. Im not the one who decides whats ok and whats not. That is a collective thing that must be decided by society. You are too adamant in your beliefs for me to take you seriously. Its not on the individual to decide. Its up to everyone.
I would say, yes there must be a point where i would condemn a comedian based on jokes they are telling. But im still working that out.
I think intent matters. I think it is a strong factor in deciding if a joke is ok or not. To me the joke was more about kyles political leanings. I dont think he was advocating for murder. I think he was using that attempted assasination as a vehicle to state he doesn’t want trump to be president. Sure, there are better ways of saying that but if you truely belive there is no room for nuance here then i belive it is a failing on your part to understand the joke as opposed to a failure on my part to have a divine sense of morality.
Of course there’s nuance. Of course every set of jokes fall on a spectrum from universal to heinous.
And obviously a lot of factors go in to deciding if something is truly unacceptable, up to and including if the person truly believes what they’re joking about.
I’m not really arguing against any of that, and I think we’re in fact largely in agreement on that score.
The point I’m actually fighting is one of introspection. To what degree is your opinion on whether a joke is okay or not dependant on your personal political leanings?
How much are you using things like “whether they meant it or not” as a post-justification to make you feel less biased about why you took the position you did? If I provided a hundred different jokes by a hundred different comedians, would your “this is acceptable” vs “this is not” graph more align with a graph of how much they meant what they said, or with how left or right leaning the joke was?
And maybe for you, it wouldn’t be politically skewed at all. Maybe you truly hold an objective metric that can be applied across the board, without a bias towards accepting more things that align to your own beliefs. But you must admit, if so, that it would make you an overwhelming outnumbered minority.
And furthermore, surely you would admit, that most people who do have the “it was a joke against my candidate, and therefore it’s unacceptable, but it’s fine if the joke was about the enemy,” mindset, are quick to argue that they are in fact the most objective person on earth and only make decisions about acceptability based on cool hard logic and rules, not partisanship.
I just dont think that morality and politics are the same thing. I can judge a joke for its morality without it being skewed by political bias.
I think that when a former president makes jokes about nancy pelosi’s husband being attacked with a hammer, and people are laughing it up and joining in, that when someone attacks donald trump, and someone makes a joke about it, those same people should be either joining in on the joke or apologising for making their jokes in the first place.
They can’t have it both ways.
This is not a political stance because i could argue that from any side of the street. It is a moral argument that happens to be about politicians.
Replace the two subjects with anyone else, and the argument would be the same.
The thing is that i despise donald trump so much that his jokes just added to how much i dislike him. But its exactly what i expected of him and didnt lead me to despise him. No his actions as a president and as a human over the course of his career and life have lead me to that.
Kyle gas has only ever inspired me to like him. He has been a nice guy and very funny his whole career. So im inclined to think that he didnt actually wish death on the former president. Whereas if tump made the same joke i would be very inclined to think that he meant it, because he has given me very little proof to the contrary.
My view on morality is what’s skewing my opinion here, not my political bias.
Many political leanings are based on morality, so when making a judgement on morality, saying they shouldn’t be involved is nonsense. It’s not hypocritical to say joking about Klansmen dying is cool and good, but joking about BLM protesters dying is fucked up. There’s no enlightened objective viewpoint where you just pretend that there’s no moral difference in the targets because believing racism is evil is “political”.
Sure, but it’s equally as unenlightened to say that politics hasn’t devolved into tribalism.
And let it not be missed that your example has one group actively participating in illegal and violent activity and one group that isn’t. The two groups aren’t equivalent on their face.
A more apples to apples comparison would be joking about people at a Trump rally getting killed vs BLM protestors getting killed.
And it absolutely would be hypocritical to joke about the one and not the other, and justifying it to yourself as being fine because people who go to Trump rallies are racist is in fact just tribalism.
To phrase it another way, it sounds like you are saying, to some greater or lesser degree, that, “it’s fine because my morality is perfect, and therefore anyone not on team ‘me’ is obviously pure evil and therefore anything said about them or done to them is clearly and perfectly justified as they aren’t people deserving of moral consideration.”
Sure, if you change the morality of a question, it changes the morality of the question. And it’s not illegal to be in the Klan. And BLM protesters did break laws. But the point was not that it’s ok specifically to joke about the Klan getting killed, it’s to illustrate that morality is clearly relevant and intertwined with political belief. People are joking about Trump simply because he’s a Republican. No one’s saying Susan Collins is fair game. It’s because he’s done serious harm and will continue to do serious harm.
Moral relativism is not morality. It’s not “enlightened” to think that because some other people have terrible morality that your own morality shouldn’t guide your beliefs and actions.
I think you’d be surprised at the number of people who would in fact say that Susan Collins is fair game, but that’s neither here nor there.
I think we’re largely on the same page honestly. I think our difference, if there is one, is the degree to which we think morality vs tribalism is the true influencer.
And this is a bit of a tangent, but I think this is exacerbated by the fact that morals are held to varying degrees of closeness. As an example, everyone agrees that cheating on your SO is wrong. Everyone also agrees that punching someone in the face is wrong. But if a husband cheats on his wife, and she slaps him, you will have people take (often very vehement) different sides on the issue, depending on which “sin” they consider to be worse.
And so, expanding that to the tribalism issues at hand, the majority of people on both sides are attempting to stand for and push for virtues that they believe are most important. Sometimes that’s inclusivity and caring for the poor. Sometimes it’s family unity and economic security.
And don’t hear me wrong, while any of that can be turned towards hate by malicious actors, it is clear that that is occuring on one side more than the other. But that doesn’t make the virtues themselves invalid.