He was also pretty good and suprisingly likeable as Robert Kardashian in American Crime Story.

“When you think about it, what price would you put on your health?”

That’s the way you feel, and you’re absolutely entitled to view comedy that way. I just take issue when it’s implied--and I don’t think you did this--that that’s the correct way, or the only way, to view comedy now, and anything that doesn’t fit in that box should be wished away into the cornfield.

Okay, I guess that’s a definition of harmful, but it goes back to what we expect from comics, and whether we’re owed an apology when we hear a joke we don’t like, or one we unilaterally deem harmful.

Part of me loves that you now have a screenshot with a comment I left on an online article two weeks ago. You should consider a career as a “freelance comedy journalist.”

There’s just a real sense of “if you follow the script we wrote for you, then we’ll let you off” to a lot of this that I’d imagine feels extremely patronizing. This idea that Kevin Hart or whoever giving a rote apology that checks all the boxes is helping anyone, whether or not he actually means it.

I agree, but he’s not defending people getting fired or losing opportunities based on things that haven’t “aged well,” and I imagine if someone were to suggest that he lose those things because there were homophobic jokes in a film he wrote from 2007, he’d have a problem with that.

“One-sided” here seems to mean “not one-sided enough the other way.”

I appreciate the detailed response. In all honesty, I didn’t know about his family being threatened, and certainly don’t think he did anything to deserve that (I think he only locked his twitter account recently, so I’m not sure if that was the reason, or there was a general hostility he was looking to avoid).

For what it’s worth, here’s his apology.

https://www.reddit.com/r/HowNealFeel/comments/icor3l/seth_simons_fucking_sucks/

I’m not knocking their experience; if they had fun, great. I’m just saying, I don’t think the host or the show were as good as this review is making them out to be. Just my opinion.

I have no idea how or if that factored in to his firing, but I’d just say that 1) I think we’d all want a chance to apologize in that situation, not be immediately dismissed and 2) in professional comedy, I don’t think it’s possible to consistently uphold the standard of, if you made a joke about the ethnicity of your…

Right. And spoiler: he comes up with two songs right after this clip cut off. Crisis averted, I guess.

The kind of bottom-feeder who goes looking into someone’s past output for things that will get them in trouble, because we’re in a moment where outrage can be manufactured. 

I think from the context he’s trying to be funny. I don’t think it worked (I think he acknowledged as much), and I don’t know how much is to be gained from mining the meaning of them. But it’s not like was being looked at by SNL, and then they saw this, and decided to move on. He was hired; they’d seen enough to think…

Yeah, the comedian who made *jokes* that obviously didn’t work. Once he gained something worth losing, the vermin (sorry, “freelance comedy journalists”) started digging in the muck to find something that could get him in trouble.

I agree completely with the second paragraph; as to the first, I’d just say that that approach dilutes the bite, at least for me personally. You think of the best Borat bits, where people are enthusing about slavery (seemingly) unprompted, or needing very little prompting to sing along to a song about throwing Jews…

So just wait 4-8 more years until they get another shot? Also, I’d argue that “gaffe-prone” and “out of touch” are more benign descriptors for what SNL was at least trying to do with Trump. Whether they succeeded or not is another question.

“Cancel culture” is an illusion, most frequently conjured up exclusively by people who are utterly terrified of it for no particular reason