No laughing matter? Michael Jackson and celebrity death jokes
There was the one that blamed the boogie, and the one set in the children's ward. There was the one about being melted down into toy soldiers, and the one about heaven not accepting plastic. And so on and so endlessly forth. It was widely reported that Michael Jackson's death brought the internet to its knees last week, as news and social networking sites buckled under the strain of the millions searching to see if the rumours of his fatal heart attack were true. The deluge of Jackson jokes that followed nearly did the same for email inboxes everywhere.
Jokes inspired by the death of a celebrity are nothing new, but the speed and ferocity of those that flooded the web in the aftermath of Jackson's death was unprecedented. In some respects, this should come as no surprise. Jackson's status as the most famous pop star in the world, combined with his changing appearance and allegations of child abuse, had long made him an easy comedic target. As Chris Rock put it, "All comedians should send Michael Jackson a cheque ... If you give your agent 10 dollars, Michael should get three dollars." Most of these jokes only required a small tweak to incorporate the new development of his death, and the advent of Twitter et al means that the global distribution of the newly-adapted one-liner has never been easier.
Even taking that into account, the speed was still extraordinary, with the general public even beating professional comics to the punchline. Marcus Brigstocke was travelling to Glastonbury with a carload of fellow comedians when he heard the news. "When it came on the radio, everyone in the car went quiet," he explains. "Not out of any sense of respect, but because the race was on: who was going to be the first person to come up with the definitive joke? And the answer was none of us. By the next morning, I'd already seen someone on the Glastonbury site wearing a T-shirt with 'The Jackson 4' on it. Now that is quick."
A common perception is that a joke about death offends because it is made too close to the event. Brigstocke claims the opposite is true. The importance of a speedy celebrity death joke for a professional comedian is therefore not just about beating the competition, it is about being able to joke about the subject at all. "For the first 12 hours, it's fine, no matter who it is," he says. "The day Rod Hull died, for example, I went on stage and did three minutes on his death, and everyone laughed their arses off. Come the next day, though, everyone had read about his family and developed affection for someone they'd previously been neutral about. So there's only a short window of time to get your best jokes out - but it is always there. Even after 9/11, there was a small pocket of time, before the reality had really sunk in, when people could get away with joking about it."
When that window shuts, and the mainstream media coverage reverts to eulogy and, in Jackson's case, exoneration, there can be negative consequences for comics who heedlessly return to the subject. Mock the Week's Frankie Boyle found this out last weekend, when the Daily Record refused to publish his weekly column because it contained a stream of one-liners about Jackson. Boyle subsequently quit the newspaper in protest. Jokes relating to the singer were also pulled from Sacha Baron Cohen's new film, Brüno, and Channel 4's The TNT Show.
Like many comics, Richard Herring began tweeting jokes about Jackson's death within hours of its announcement. He defended his, and other comedians', irreverent reaction to the news by arguing it acted as a counterweight to the mainstream media's "mawkish" coverage of the story. Rather than focusing on Jackson himself, Herring's Twitter updates concentrated on the singer's "friends" lining up to comment on 24-hour news channels. But he was adamant that there was nothing wrong with jokes directly targeting the singer.
"I think laughing in the face of horrible and tragic death is an appropriate response and actually much less offensive than the TV coverage, or the hysteria of people eulogising someone that they didn't know and never met," he wrote. "If Jackson had lived an exemplary life then it might have been less dignified to joke so quickly, but to be conferring sainthood on this man without any dissenting voices would be just as wrong." Brigstocke agrees, believing that both Jackson's stratospheric fame and alleged misdemeanours meant that he had sacrificed any right to posthumous comedic restraint. "He was a man who lost the sympathy of most of the world a long time ago. It's not like the jokes dehumanise him – he was dehumanised already by existing in the world of ridiculous, mega-celebrity. Celebrities like that are not real people – it's like making a joke about an EastEnders character that's died."
In the eyes of most comics, their role is to push the boundaries of what the public will accept. According to Arthur Smith, humour is an entirely natural reaction to death – he has even included jokes about the death of his own father in his sets. "There's no doubt that people go to a comedy club to hear something said that they can't hear on the TV or radio, things that they've thought but don't want to actually say," he observes. "That's where comedy thrives. People do want to hear Michael Jackson jokes, because most people don't care really and are just amused by the whole kerfuffle. It's a different situation to when Diana died because, although comedians were itching to make jokes about her, I don't think audiences would have taken it in the same way."
"The hard part with Michael Jackson is to say something interesting – if it's just an excuse to do a load of paedophile jokes, then that's boring. A good joke has to in some way reveal something that you'd thought but hadn't quite realised, and not many of the Jackson jokes flying about at the moment do that."
And that, ultimately, seems to be the crux of the matter. After all, Michael Jackson has provided us with peerless entertainment over the past 50 years, from the often superlative music, to his fascinating physical metamorphosis and the sheer farcical horror of his later years. Coming up with a half-decent joke about him seems to be the least we can do in return.
