The Male Half of the Staff can recall that when Karen Carpenter died, way back when he was starting out in 1983, he was fielding phone calls and a answering machine message or two from colleagues who facetiously expressed sympathy at the concomitant death of his Karen Carpenter bit. Pretty funny, really– a major star dies a protracted and most likely painful death and comics, with their grim sense of humor, were seemingly more concerned over the death of a joke. (The Male Half was grieving slightly, too, because, at this point in his development, he could ill afford to lose any material, no matter why.)

Some years later he was forced to “retire” a bit that hinged on Lucille Ball. He heard from a handful of comics later on that, upon learning of the TV star’s death, they immediately thought of the bit and instantly knew that it would necessarily be banished from the act.

We recount these incidents to illustrate how comics react to such tragic news. It provides insight into how comics think… or at least how they did in the past.

We were stunned by the news of the death of Steve Irwin. There was no one on this planet who approached his gig with more enthusiasm, which was, by all appearances, genuine. Our thoughts went immediately to his two small children, left fatherless after a freak accident in the waters off of Australia’s Golden Coast.

Perhaps even more stunning was the reaction we perceived “out there” among comics with regard to the celebrity death. It appears that some comics (and maybe not a small number) are taking the opportunity of Irwin’s demise to castigate fellow comics for their decision to incorporate material into their acts that played on the popularity of The Crocodile Hunter. There seems to have been an undercurrent of rage (some of it genuine, some of it imitative) among some comics that their colleagues have been somehow letting down the artform by covering topics/subjects that they deem to be hackneyed. They seem preoccupied, obsessed with the idea that there’s more than one comic out there who is doing material that wrings humor from the audience’s recognition of a quirky Australian TV star. They rub their hands together with vindictive glee at the prospect of a few dozen of their colleagues being forced to drop a bit that they find beneath their standards. It is unbecoming, to say the least.

Steve Irwin, it has been written, reached a worldwide audience of 200 million people. It is incomprehensible that a standup comic– any standup comic– would refrain from trying to play upon that renown. (Unless he/she wanted to claim a reputation as one who traffics in the obscure, the vague, the enigmatic. Along with that reputation, however, comes a reputation for getting few or no laughs.) So, we are all forced to find that magical combination of the ambiguous and the familiar which also adds up to actually results in us being regarded as… funny.

To dismiss, out of hand, an entire subject or premise is ridiculous. (To use the occasion of a tragic death to grind the “hack” axe is more akin to something that some of our unenlightened journalist friends might do. From comics, we expect more. Much more.)

To dismiss an entire premise, to declare it off limits, is an exercise in futility. To declare that any bit (or any comic) is less than honest or artful merely because a proscribed subject, celebrity or annoyance has been touched upon is bogus. To do so without ever having seen/heard the bit/performer– a preemptive strike, so to speak– is totally bogus as well and reminds us of the lunkheaded blowhard who won’t go to a comedy club “because the potty-mouthed comics who perform there just talk about sex all the time.” It is generalization, it is lazy, it is the very definition of prejudice… and our colleages deserve better. And we expect more from our fellow comics.

We’ve all seen the lazy comic who merely uses buzzwords or a reference to (or a less than dead-on impression of) a salient celebrity to elicit what might be called a cheap laugh. But we’ve also seen comedy gold come from some of the most familiar and ordinary things, people or habits.