On the eve of the New York City Marathon, "Saturday Night Live" host Chris Rock opened his monologue with jokes about last year’s Boston Marathon bombings. Too soon? Well, the joke was pretty tame, all things considered. But that was just the warm-up for Rock’s main riff on the Freedom Tower, the new One World Trade Center building that’s now America’s tallest skyscraper. He went there — to the 9/11 joke.
“What were they thinking?” Rock demanded with trademark incredulity. “What kind of arrogant Floyd Mayweather crap is this?” then “Who’s the corporate sponsor, Target?”
The Freedom Tower is an architectural marvel that symbolizes hope rising from the ashes of tragedy and defeat. Or it’s a giant middle finger to the world. There’s no shortage of rhetoric pushing the former, but only a very good comedian could get away with suggesting the latter.
When Gilbert Gottfried made a crack about the 9/11 hijackings just weeks after the event, nobody laughed. His joke at the Friar’s Club Roast of Hugh Hefner (he couldn’t catch a direct flight there, they all had to stop at the Empire State Building first) was mere gallows humor, which nobody needed at that time. Gallows humor allows us to thumb our noses at the pressure of our inevitable mortality, but you need a certain amount of built-up tension for the release to feel good. That’s what “too soon” means. Gallows humor is useless to people who are new to feeling unsafe.
Rock’s 9/11 jokes aren’t that. They’re political commentary wrapped up in Rock’s flawless delivery. He acknowledges that we’re not supposed to joke about 9/11, but then turns that admonishment on its head with an even more damning truth: “In America, there are no sacred days, because we commercialize everything. We’re only five years away from 9/11 sales.”
It’s funny because it’s probably true. Veterans Day was once Armistice Day, honoring the end of fighting in the most bloody and horrific war the world had known. Now, early November door-buster sales are just one more way to get a jump on what Rock calls the “Jesus Birthday Season,” which, when sales are disappointing, prompts economic analysis that sounds awfully close to “hopefully business will pick up by his crucifixion.” And unto us a catchphrase is born: "Jesus Birthday Season" is the left's answer to the right's "War on Christmas."
You don't have to be a Shakespeare scholar to know that the sage is often ignored, but the fool? Everyone listens to the fool, and that's why comedians fill a necessary role as cultural critics, not just wisecrackers. To crack wise about the deaths of thousands is tasteless. But to question whether our arrogance serves us as well as humility might, or why we reserve our reverence for that which turns a profit, is useful. What Rock demonstrates so well is that the old adage of “comedy = tragedy + time” is incomplete. The equation demands an X the comedian must solve for — the quest for the larger truth.
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