Weird national grieving over dead standup comedians

Sam Kinison is dead?! Where the hell have I been?

Get back to me when Rosanne OD's

Sam Kinneson was an asshole. So no, people weren’t all choked up.

There was a big reaction to Farley’s death, however. Lots of young kids really liked Farley’s fat guy physical comedy. Lots of interviews of friends of his on ET, Access Hollywood type shows and People magazine. Average person wasn’t on the internet however, so no mass outpouring on social media.

Same with Belushi & John Candy. People were shocked when they died. So much so that Jim Belushi got a career out of his brother’s death. But no internet presence, no mass outpouring on non-existent social media.

Btw, my husband used to listen to a lot of talk radio back in the days before Clear Channel took over & dictated rightwing talk only. So I listened when I was in car with him. One day some woman was on a radio talk show - I’m not sure if she was the host or a celebrity guest on the show - and Gilbert Gottfried called in. She told everyone Gottfried liked to talk to her daughters on the phone. So she got her children to call in and talk to Gottfried on the show. It was FILTHY. These girls were young and he was making all kinds of sexual remarks to them. The point seemed to be “Haha Gilbert is such a funny, weird, edgy guy that he makes dirty jokes to little kids.” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. He claimed he babysat for them and said dirty things to them all night long.

It was the 90s, before internet and social media made “dirty old men” taboo.

The examples above simply are not funny.

I feel that there is a performative aspect to a lot of this. Someone sees a few blue checks tweeting that norm macdonalds death is the saddest thing ever so they tweet a variation of that and then someone else retweets it, etc etc. This country is big on histrionic over the top displays of emotion. It's not sufficient to say " Wow. He was a funny guy RIP". The current culture demands that people post something like " This is the worst month ever! Ugh. I'm going to go cry in the bathroom now. ". Or some dumb shit like that.

Kinison was an asshole, but he was an ex-Pentecostal preacher, so there was also an element of cathartic subversion of the televangelist genre in the runaway popularity of his raunchy act (he became famous at the height of the "Satanic Panic" and related evangelically-fueled culture wars of that time).

He also had some kind of affair with Jessica Hahn, who had accused PTL evangelist Jim Bakker of rape and herself went on to a kind of tabloid celebrity. If Kinison had died in 2022, her Twitter feed would be all lit up with "So. Much. Love." "Prayers to the family." Broken blue heart/praying hands emojis. Calling Kinison a prick or an asshole would get some overwrought/negative callout.

I think it's time to reclaim raunchy comedians, especially the dead ones, from all these obnoxious hysterics. It's what they would want.

Saget. I twas mostly the millennial and z twaddle crying how he was their daddy.. like a part of their family. go back and read those initial threads. I sent him off proper. Pretty sure I got flagged so much I couldn't post for the rest of the day. Gottfried is similar. "oh my childhood" - it's like kids, first you'd have to grow up to say goodbye to it.

to be fair, the straight up media gave Gottfried a wider send off while social media got caught up in the Jew thing more with him than they did with Saget. So, they were too busy making it about Israel to beat off to their fantasies about the number of parrots and other birds he's voiced.

[quote]There was never this kind of sugary grief-porn over the death of... Chris Farley

1997 was a different time, OP, Google didn't even exist then.

There were shocking celeb deaths in the pre-Google 90s. There was even an element of collective grief expressed without recourse to online media (River Phoenix and Kurt Cobain, for sure. Brandon Lee, to a certain extent).

It's not just the current social media platforms, it's the tone, especially when it comes to comedians. Saget's death was definitely nasty, I don't even need to see the pictures to imagine in a general sense what kind of shit is on them, and God knows, if he were alive today, he'd probably get 10 filthy "Aristocrats"-type bits out of the crime scene photos alone.

But in American culture, no matter that he was probably discovered with a dildo and a turd hanging out of his dead ass, he's suddenly mourned as a quasi-statesman. It's weird.

Maybe because subversive comedy itself is kind of dead or dying.

Really? I remember Phil Hartman's death gripping national attention for months.

[quote]There were shocking celeb deaths in the pre-Google 90s.

Gilda Radner and John Candy are two that I can think of and R11 is right about Phil Hartman.

I'm still not over the Will Rogers crash.

You could see that big uncut cock flopping in those dungarees when he was doing the rope trick. My "Wiley Post" would have gone down with him, too!

What a man.

Also, most people remember Saget as Danny Tanner and Gottfreid was Iago and the Aflac duck.

Put down the Sunday Pictoral supplement and live your life, OP.

R11 Well ...Hartmans death was pretty crazy. I mean who would have seen that coming?

To be fair, I knew it was going to happen weeks before it occurred.

Standups have a special relationship with their fans because their only job is to make you laugh. I mourned when Joan Rivers died, because I had watched all her standup specials and I knew there would never be another.

People were shocked about Phil Hartman, but they weren't taking photos of sunsets as proof that he was in a better place, and "praying for Lorne and the SNL family."