If You See Something (Should You) Say Something(?): an Examination of Our Moral Imperative by a Guy Who Didn’t Quite Minor in Philosophy
I’d like to write a funny essay today, but I don’t feel funny or feel like being funny. Maybe it’s too hot to be funny. Maybe it’s because nothing feels funny anymore. Maybe funny stopped when the actual news headlines started reading like “The Onion” news headlines. Maybe funny stopped when Harvey Korman died. Maybe funny never was. After all, Pontius Pilate probably didn’t have a thhpeech impediment or a bff named Bigus Dickus. Everybody who signed my middle school yearbooks exclaimed that I was “so funny!”, but what the hell do kids know?
Not being famous for being funny, or being famous at all, I get the lucyry of choosing how I want to be in the public sphere. Jerry Seinfeld, for all his riches and power and fame, can’t do that. He can’t just get into a 1950 VW Beetle with Larry David while filming an episode of “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee” and decide to have a serious conversation, about orcas, or about gun control, or about the Holocaust.
We’ve decided, I think, that very, very few, very, very specific certain funny people get to also be taken seriously while deciding to be serious. They’re called “people on The Daily Show.” They’re allowed, for some reason, to ebb and flow and…