Imus Sides 4:

“It wasn’t funny”

Of all the opinions I’ve read and heard about the Imus incident, this one, which I’ve encountered all over the place, has to be the oddest.

Funny is subjective. If we’re gonna castigate people and fire them, let’s pick a more objective standard. If everyone gets fired for "not funny," well, for starters, it'll be a much shorter broadcast day. It's the content, not whether anyone laughs. Though, being tasteless AND unfunny is rotten, I'll grant you that.

Consider: Years ago, working as a comedian in New York and New England, there was one comedy bit I’d hear time and time again from successful comics: the one about drunk driving. “Be sure to quiver when they take your license picture, so the cop who stops you will think he’s drunk too.” “Thank God the new Hondas have the beer holders where you can reach them.” And various jokes about walking straight lines, drive through windows to get loaded, and so on.

All of these jokes absolutely killed in every club I heard them. Uproarious laughter. Comedians had to stop to wait for the laughs to finish, before adding the next drunk driving joke.

These weren’t prison audiences. These were ordinary folks, coming in for a laugh at the end of a tough workday. Ask any one of them, this stuff was wonderful. Meanwhile, at that very moment some drunk driver is plowing into someone out there.

In the workplace of years ago, racial and ethnic putdowns were often part of the daily conversation—excused because the jokers and the listeners thought the stuff was killer material. The same for the crude jokes about women.

Perhaps in some other world, “The Philadelphia Story” “Punk’d” Sara Silverman, Chris Rock, Dom Irrerra, Steve Martin, Ellen DeGeneres, Peter Schickele, Wanda Sikes, David Letterman, “Borat” and “I Love Lucy” are of equal value. They all belong to the category funny. But you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who thinks they all are.

What Imus said wasn’t funny to me. But you can bet it was funny to someone. The good news is, that way of thinking doesn’t rule our time.