Humorless A-holes Threaten ‘Bitch’ Comic For Making Really Obvious Hillary Joke

Tommy ChristopherAug 5th, 2016, 11:22 am
 

Ordinarily, I’m the last person to criticize social media “outrage culture” because it is a genre of criticism that’s generally devoted to silencing marginalized people, but there are some people who actually deserve to be marginalized. You can count, among that number, the army of Twitter trolls who leveled death threats and hate speech against stand-up comic and “I Know What I’m Doing — and Other Lies I Tell Myself” author Jen Kirkman for making a really, really obvious joke about Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

When I say the joke was obvious, that’s not to say it wasn’t funny, but that its intent was so obvious that even the most rudimentary Texas Instruments chess computer from 1981 got it, yet scores of people pretended not to just so they could beat up on Kirkman for tweeting this:

1thumb1

That’s an obvious reference to the right-wing fever swamp that has been asserting, for decades, that Hillary Clinton literally has people murdered. Let me correct myself, though, because the belief that Clinton might just be an actual murderer was actually mainstreamed during this year’s Republican presidential primary. You don’t have to think the joke is funny, but unless you are a complete moron, you have to understand it, and even if you are a complete moron, you’re not going to misunderstand it this way:


As it turns out, anti-Hillary liberals have their own set of grievances against Hillary Clinton that involve not just the consequences of U.S. military action, but also the violence in Central America that resulted in the migration crisis that erupted a few years back. Now, I am all for forceful and even strident advocacy for disempowered people, and I’ll leave it to others to judge the sincerity of that advocacy against the desire to just bash a political figure they already dislike for other reasons, as well as the pretzel-like merits. If that’s the case you want to make, for whatever reason you want to make it, then fine, you get to do that.

But what you don’t get to do, at least not while keeping me on your side, is lie and pretend you think someone was joking about something they clearly were not joking about. Feel free to tell me all about the Hillary Clinton Death Train, but not about how Jen Kirkman was joking about it, because she wasn’t. If you still think these people didn’t “get” Kirkman’s joke, then consider the fact that just days before Kirkman’s tweet, Bill Maher, who is a very popular destination for this crowd, made that exact premise the centerpiece of a five-minute bit to end his show. They “got” it, they just didn’t care, maybe because Kirkman is just a “bitch” like Hillary:


After a brief hiatus, Kirkman returned to Twitter to explain herself:


Yes, everyone knows how explaining a joke only makes it funnier.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

Tags: