What's Funny

Everybody else seems to be piling on Don Imus and his recent comments about the Rutgers women's basketball team, so I might as well get in my two cents before the fifteen minutes allocated to this debate is over and we all get back to worrying about the more important things, like what that kid on American Idol will sing next or what other method Karl Rove will come up with to take over the rest of the government in the name of truth, justice, and the permanent Republican majority.

There are two points to be made about what's going on. The first is that there is nothing new about Mr. Imus's performance. He's been doing this schtick for years and every so often he goes over the top. Nevertheless, he attracts the famous and the wannabe-famous who willingly subject themselves to his brand of caustic humor and adolescent antics because they know he has a large following. The risk must somehow be worth it because Mr. Imus, along with the bathroom humor and fratboy chatter, somehow manages to discuss politics. That makes it okay for Cokie Roberts and John Kerry to yuck it up with the I-man. The same people wouldn't be caught dead going on Howard Stern because all he does is talk about tits. No politics there. One thing you have to give Howard Stern is there's no artifice to his approach; he doesn't pretend to be an intellectual. So why anyone is surprised that Mr. Imus finally crossed the line from marginally acceptable humor to just plain racism is a little lame. He's skated very close to this many times before, so it was only a matter of time. The shocked-and-saddened brigades can put their outrage on simmer; if they didn't see this coming, they haven't been paying attention.

The second point is that while many people may think that Don Imus is funny, he apparently lacks the basic understanding that humor requires a deft touch. For example, if you have to tell someone you were joking, then you didn't do a very good job of telling the joke in the first place. He needs to know that context and delivery count for a great deal in being funny, and that also includes the appropriateness of someone like him making a joke based on someone else's race. Richard Pryor could get away with using racial humor, and he frequently did, but that was because he was black and when he used a racial epithet, he was including himself in the joke. Don Imus, regardless of his background or his political views, is on thin ice when he tells a joke with a racial component because he is white. Just the same as Ann Coulter and her "faggot" comment about John Edwards was over the line because she, as far as anyone knows, is not gay. The same joke told by Harvey Fierstein would have been a lot funnier and greeted with a lot less outrage. (And he would have told it better.)

Humor also requires that your victim is worth laughing at. Making fun of the weak is not funny, it's a cheap shot. A little old lady slipping on a banana peel is cruel; the same thing happening to a pompous windbag is hilarious. That's because, as Aristotle noted, there's a lack of sympathy for the windbag. But Don Imus has a tendency -- as do a lot of people who think they're funny -- of taking the cheap shot and picking on the weak, and there's very little humor in that. Rush Limbaugh may think it's funny to mock Michael J. Fox and his Parkinson's disease, but all that does is prove that he is a bully, and the same is true of Don Imus. It isn't a matter of political correctness; it's just not funny. You get a lot more laughs by taking the arrogant down a peg or two because they can afford it -- and perhaps deserve it. But all the Rutgers women's basketball team did was just play a game, and what Mr. Imus did was heckle them from the stands, and had he actually done what he did in the arena, he would have been forcibly removed.

Now that would have been funny.