On the edge. Walking a tightrope. When we admire comedy for its outspokenness, we make it sound like a death-defying act. But now and then there are casualties. The career of the comedy-rock band Tenacious D has been put on ice this week after one half of the duo, Kyle Gass, made an impromptu joke about the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. Outrage was duly provoked. “All future creative plans are on hold,” according to the band’s other lead vocalist, Jack Black. It’s a classic case study of an on-the-edge gag tumbling off that edge, and falling a long, long way.
This is not a first: egg-on-face is an occupational hazard for those who make a living from saying outrageous things, often off the cuff, in public. All the more so when amateurs have a go. In the pantheon of backfiring jokes, none occupies a more ignominious place than the note left for his successor in government (“there is no money left”) by Gordon Brown’s chief secretary to the Treasury, Liam Byrne. Like Gass, Byrne presumably saw this as just a jaundiced wee jibe, more or less for private consumption. But it went public, was ruthlessly weaponised by the incoming coalition government, and helped stoke the “Labour bankrupted the country” narrative that kept the opposition on the back foot for years.
Byrne later wrote that he “burnt with shame” at the joke-gone-wrong. Gass is getting his shame in early, self-abasing on Tuesday with the words “I’m incredibly sorry for my severe lack of judgment. I profoundly apologise to those I’ve let down.” The words recall those of another apology for a joke conjuring with violence against politicians, the one cracked by Jo Brand on the BBC Radio 4 show Heresy in 2019. In response to a milkshake-throwing incident visited on Nigel Farage, Brand quipped: “Why bother with a milkshake when you could get some battery acid?” “It probably was somewhat a crass and ill-judged joke that might upset people,” Brand later said. “I’m sorry.”
Here was an apology that stopped some way short of self-abasement, despite Farage – he of the supposed bonhomie – claiming that the joke was an incitement to assault and asking the police to intervene. Brand’s career was unaffected – but the same can’t be said of her namesake Russell, whose work for the BBC came to a swift conclusion after his notorious prank call to the actor Andrew Sachs, on his BBC Radio 2 show in 2008. That boorish call, which featured Brand’s co-host Jonathan Ross shouting “he fucked your granddaughter” into the answerphone of the Fawlty Towers actor, triggered a media storm and a motion in the House of Commons. Brand’s BBC career was over.
Sachsgate, as it became known, was a rare instance of a “cancellation” row leading to – well, an actual cancellation. Career-ending jokes are usually nothing of the sort – although there’s a notorious exception to that rule. Michael Richards, AKA Kramer from Seinfeld, was one of America’s best loved comic performers when he stepped onstage at the Laugh Factory in LA in November 2006. It was to be his last gig. Irritated by disruptive behaviour by several black audience members, Richards addressed to them the following words: “Fifty years ago we’d have you upside down with a fucking fork up your ass.” He then directed the N-word repeatedly at the same members of the audience.
“I’m a performer. I push the envelope,” Richards told David Letterman the following week. “I work in a very uncontrolled manner onstage. I do a lot of free association. But for me to flip out and say this crap,” Richards went on, “you know, I’m deeply, deeply sorry.” The apology for his racist outburst was not accepted; his career didn’t recover. But more often, bounce-backs are possible. One early Trump-related comedy furore involved the US act Kathy Griffin, “cancelled” when she posed for a photograph with what resembled the bloodied and severed head of the then-president. Her tour was pulled, an FBI investigation launched. “I’m a comic, I crossed the line … I beg for your forgiveness,” said Griffin in apology. One year later, her tone had changed. “I take the apology back. Fuck him.” Her subsequent tour, entitled Laugh Your Head Off, went global.
What Griffin belatedly realised is that if controversy doesn’t cancel you, it can burnish your shock-peddling, truth-to-power brand. Do we look at Chris Morris’s Paedogeddon special edition of Brass Eye and think “backfire”, just because – after the huge political and media hoohah it provoked – he seldom worked in television again? We do not. The outrage felt like part of the spectacle. The consequences bolstered the myth of Morris.
More likely this Tenacious D episode will fall into that middle category, of incongruous moments in the careers of otherwise harmless acts, passing instants where people who usually make us smile briefly make us (or some of us) furrow our brows. When Billy Connolly joked onstage in 2004 about the UK hostage in Iraq, Kenneth Bigley, then under threat of beheading, (“Don’t you wish,” said Connolly, “that they would just get on with it?”), the condemnation was fierce. And yet, two decades on, and despite his stubborn refusal to apologise, Connolly has returned seamlessly to national treasure status. “Severe lack[s] of judgment” don’t have to be terminal. There’s a way back from even the clumsiest of gags.
