Once again, I was way ahead of the curve. I knew Ricky Gervais was a bad, bad man! I wrote about it here. There was something rather cruel about a successful comedian playing a terribly unfunny office worker whose whole self-image is wrapped around the idea of himself as a comic.
When he hosted The Golden Globes, Gervais first joke was something about how it would be "a night of drinking and partying, or as Charlie Sheen calls it, breakfast."
Well, no, that's not very clever.
I read a parody of Bob Hope's humor. He says a restaurant wanted to get Dean Martin as a customer, so they made Vodka the soupe du jour. "Now I'm not saying Dean's a drinker, but..."
It wasn't very funny, either. But they made an effort.
You might be able to make a joke out of Robert Downey, Jr, having gone to jail and having undergone treatment for drug addiction, but simply bringing up the fact that he did isn't a joke.
Now people are upset because Gervais went too far!
He didn't go too far. He just wasn't funny.
On the other hand....
These days, there's the Daily Show and the work of Baron Sasha Cohen, or Sasha Baron Cohen, whatever it is----and there's The Tonight Show. One of Jay Leno's things is making fun of people on the street. He asks them questions and makes fun of them if they give incorrect answers. Humiliating ordinary people who didn't ask to be on TV.
This is wrong. Ordinary people should laugh at celebrities, not the other way around.
