The American public is sick of Trump jokes, especially when it’s clear they are motivated by a sense of malice.
Comedian George Lopez decided to bash Trump while hosting a charity benefit in Denver recently. It didn’t work out so well:
An attendee of the event told Page Six that [Liberty Media CEO Greg] Maffei had asked Lopez “nicely to stop making Trump jokes … George doesn’t, continues, gets booed.”
“Thank you for changing my opinion on old white men, but that doesn’t change the way I feel about orange men,” Lopez responded to Maffei.
Lopez then apologized for making the event political before ripping the audience for its “white privilege.”
“I apologize for bringing politics to an event. This is America — it still is. So I apologize to your white privilege,” he said.
Maffei had donated $250,000 to the cause. All he did was ask Lopez to find other targets with his humor. Instead, Lopez went with the “white privilege” smear — which wasn’t going to play well with an audience donating a tremendous amount of money to try to help children.
This benefit was to combat … juvenile diabetes.
Classy.
A note to comedians: Yes, political humor has its place. It always has, and I love a good political joke as much as the next guy. My favorite political joke is Congress, after all. Yet there’s also a limit to what people will put up with being politicized.
And people want comedians to make them laugh, of course. You can get away with a lot of stuff if you can make people laugh. Chris Rock’s routine supporting “bullet control” instead of gun control — a topic I will fight against until my dying breath — always gets a laugh out of me because the routine is funny. So I still like watching Rock’s standup routines.
But no one wants to be lectured, especially when they’re spending money to be entertained. It’s why preachy films tend to do so poorly.
If you want to maintain a career, you need to understand how to handle the political stuff. If you can’t do that, then enjoy obscurity.
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