When we did the Aristocrats which is the movie I did with Paul Provenza, Provenza directed it, a movie about the dirtiest joke ever. Trying to be as transgressive and as shocking as possible. And for those of you who saw the movie you know that Bob Saget takes it way out. He goes way, way out in violent, sexual, scatological, horrific imagery. Horrible. He’s fabulous in it. We did a press day in New York. One of the press people came up and sat down with Saget and said “I was abused as a child by my family. I was abused as a child. I was raped as a child and watching you do that brought that all back to me and it was horrible. What gives you the right to do that?” And she was on camera. I was watching off-camera. Saget looked like he was about to cry. He had nothing to say, he was completely trapped. I ran over and had them turn the camera off and took her aside and said “You bully. You have no right to treat someone like that. He did not attack you in any way, shape, or form. You KNEW when that movie started it was gonna be transgressive. You could have VERY easily asked someone else in your staff to take that over. You PURPOSELY put yourself in that position so that you could be offended and make him feel terrible. The fact is that Bob Saget was doing an artistic thing on that subject and if that theme happens to bother you, you can avoid it or you can confront it but that is your decision. That’s the decision you make.” And I said “In this particular situation the guy that was telling the incest jokes is the guy who is completely innocent and the one who is the victim is the one who is the bully. You leave him alone and get out of the room now.” It was just completely and utterly unfair. And Saget couldn’t finish the rest of the day. Saget was completely shook up and kept saying to me “I didn’t intend to hurt anybody” Of course he didn’t intend to and of course she’s gonna make him feel really really shitty. The point is NEVER “Hey, I think that adults should rape children.” That’s NEVER the point. I don’t know any joke that that’s the point of it. I don’t know one joke like that. I don’t know that “9 out of 10” is an aggressive rape joke. It’s not. It’s a joke about statistics and it’s a joke that’s about always thinking in terms of the aggregate and in instead thinking about things in terms of the specific. If you describe that joke it’s that we always think of the aggregate and sometimes it’s a specific. It’s a very important joke that way. And the Kennedy joke is “we should not use tragedy as ice breakers”. Gilbert Gottfried is on the SIDE of fucking Jacky Onassis. He is NOT on the side of Lee Harvey Oswald. End of story. And if you cannot separate theme from thesis in art SHUT THE FUCK UP.
Penn Jillette (Penn’s Sunday School Dec. 1 2013 talking about the backlash from jokes after Gilbert Gottfried was harassed for making a JFK joke on Twitter)




















