Truly Tasteless Jokes

Toward the beginning of his routine at the Correspondents' Dinner last night, Jay Leno showed some fake footage mocking Geraldo Rivera for revealing U.S. troop movements in Iraq during a Fox News Channel broadcast last year. The punchline of the video clip involved Geraldo broadcasting the location of the attic where Anne Frank's family was hiding, then offering to repeat the entire report in German.

In today's New York Times, Maureen Dowd starts her column with the crack, "This administration is the opposite of 'The Sixth Sense.' They don't see any dead people."

The majority of entries on this blog involve a humorous comment on the news, usually in the form of an insult, and many times including a tasteless remark and/or unnecessary profanity. I certainly don't subscribe to the view that political humor must be inoffensive, polite, or even objectively "fair."

Still, I don't understand humor which relies on the suffering of others who are not -- or don't deserve to be -- the target of the joke. Does a humorous portrayal of Geraldo Rivera as a betrayer of Holocaust victims serve any purpose? (Why not depict Geraldo reporting on security weaknesses from Logan Airport, then turning around to help some swarthy men get their carry-on luggage past security?) How does adding a stale pop culture reference to a discussion of the deaths of thousands in the war against Iraq inform, or even entertain?

Bush and Geraldo are certainly deserving of ridicule, and much sharper ridicule than MoDo and Leno can muster. And no one should dictate what jokes people can tell. But it's a pity to see privileged jokers incorporate the suffering of the defenseless and less fortunate into their gags, particularly when (as in MoDo's case) the joker is claiming to champion the cause of those whose plight she diminishes.