Modified On March 5, 2005
According to an AP story Jay Leno, who has been subpoenaed in the Michael Jackson molestation case, might be barred from doing jokes about Jackson due to Judge Rodney Melville’s gag order forbidding anyone involved with the case from speaking about it outside the courtroom. Of course, this has driven normally sane and reasonable people to say all sorts of ridiculous things. Like law professors who say that “The court, in order to avoid a Constitutional showdown, would try to draft a very carefully worded gag order that would allow him to make fair comment on the public aspects of the case.” Huh? Or, Jay Leno, might just want to shut his yap for a couple months in order to save the court and the people involved in the case a lot of trouble, time, expense and heartache. Are a few dozen monologue jokes about Michael Jackson really worth going to the mat over? If you’re going to wake up the First Amendment in the middle of the night and dance it around the room, shouldn’t it be for something that’s kind of… oh, let’s see… important?!?
And then there’s David Brenner chipping in with a whole different kind of dumb. He takes the opportunity to engage in his two favorite pasttimes– Making himself seem important and dissing other comedians:
Comedian David Brenner decries what he sees as creeping censorship for entertainers but thinks Leno might want to restrain himself on the subject.
“Making jokes about Michael Jackson is like shooting fish in a barrel with a shotgun. It’s so easy … Pick on something that makes you reach a little bit,” said Brenner, who was a frequent Tonight guest host in the late Johnny Carson’s day.
“Creeping censorship?” Is he serious? Has he never heard of a gag order? What planet is he living on? (And, more importantly, why doesn’t that planet’s cable system carry Court TV?)
And, while we normally don’t like to say un-nice things about other standup comics, in Brenner’s case, we make an exception. This is a familiar pattern of behavior for him. You’ll recall, in the buildup to his HBO special a few years ago, he boasted incessantly how it was going to be all off the cuff, ripped from the headlines. He ended up doing 25-year-old Uncle Momo jokes instead. (Don’t get us wrong– we don’t mind 25-year-old Uncle Momo jokes at all. We just took offense that his talk show spiel leading up to the special did little but berate and belittle other comics for their lack of spontaneity and their lack of risk-taking.)
His invocation of the C-word (Censorship) is insulting to folks in other parts of the world who live with that ugly monster on an hourly basis. (Not to mention totally baseless.) People who toss around the term with such carelessness make it hard for other folks to clearly identify genuine censorship when it actually does occur.