OJ’s Death Reminds Us What Courage In Comedy REALLY Looks Like

With the announcement that OJ has gone to appear before a judge in a far higher court than the one that acquitted him here, the more famous moments in his life are once again a matter for public discourse.

It’s a testament to some latent truth in that old Shakespearian line, ‘The evil that men do lives after them’.

OJ is best remembered, not for his athletic accomplishments, his career after football, his books, or even his family.

He’s remembered for a bloody act of violence that took the lives of two people.

Now that he’s dead, even one of his own lawyers, Alan Dershowitz, admits there was a mountain of evidence against him and that he probably did it. He says it was a piece of dubious evidence — a sock — that introduced enough uncertainty to acquit him. He even goes as far to say that if he was hired by the other side, he would have taken the case.

OJ, being as famous as he was, had some powerful friends. That included people in the entertainment industry.

That’s the element of this story where we see the courage of a comedian. Norm MacDonald saw OJ as clearly guilty, and an obvious target for jokes. It just so happened that Norm MacDonald was the face of SNL’s fake news segment at the time, where it was literally his job to riff on the news of the day. With OJ dominating the news cycle in 1994 every bit as much as Donald Trump did in 2016, it would have looked strange for them to ignore the story.

But Norm did more than make a passing reference to the OJ story… he chased that story like a terrier on a rat. He was relentless. Here are eleven minutes of OJ Simpson jokes as proof of his dedication.

for no particular reason, here’s 11 and a half minutes of norm macdonald shitting on oj simpson pic.twitter.com/HLUbw8AI3U

— kate bush’s husband (@airbagged) April 11, 2024

Why is that an example of courageous humor? Because the best kind of humor, at some level, tells the truth. Some of the VERY best humor brings you face to face with a kind of uncomfortable truth whose validity you would rather not acknowledge.

That idea gave rise to a whole genre of literature back in the days of Johnathan Swift and his peers.

Unlike all of the Trump jokes you hear late nite comics telling, where you know beyond any shadow of a doubt that everyone with the least degree of power or influence in those networks is all-in either in support of Democrats, or at minimum, in their opposition to and contempt for Trump. There is no joke in all of America that’s safer to tell than one at Trump’s expense.

OJ jokes were another story. For exactly one reason:

Macdonald was the host of Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live and on every episode would sneak in jabs — and often haymakers — towards Simpson. It became so notorious the Don Ohlmeyer, the head of NBC and a close Simpson confidant, eventually fired Macdonald over the jokes. Macdonald was one of the best standup comedians on the planet, but he’ll always be remembered for his work on Simpson during that era. — TheBigLead

Norm died with his integrity and reputation intact.
OJ and Ohlmeyer?
Well, that’s another story.

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