What Do You Call A Joke That Isn't A Joke?

On September 29th, 2001, eighteen days after 9/11, Gilbert Gottfried, decided to be the first comedian to tell a “really-poor-taste joke” about it:

I had to catch a flight to California. I can’t get a direct flight, they said they had to stop at the Empire State Building first.

This joke sounds so tame in 2025 that it’s hard to imagine what the fuss is about, but it’s impossible to overstate how raw people were back then.

Ben Stiller, whose New York-based movie, Zoolander, came out the day before Gottfried’s show, famously edited out all traces of the Twin Towers before he released it.

George Carlin’s comedy album, “I Kinda Like It When A Lotta People Die,” ended up being delayed for fifteen years.

And Clear Channel Communications, the largest owner of radio stations in the US, banned any song with even a whiff of death, war, and violence from the airwaves — 164 in total.

Two-and-a-half weeks after 9/11, nobody knew why it happened or if another attack was coming, nobody wanted to think about it too deeply, much less joke about it. So when Gottfried tried, his audience quickly let him know he’d gone too far.

And like any good comedian, instead of apologising or backtracking, Gottfried went even further, just in a different direction.

Barely skipping a beat, Gottfried launched into the filthiest joke in his arsenal. A nine-minute-forty-nine-second cavalcadeof incest, bestiality, p*ss and sh*t the likes of which televised comedy had never seen. And whether it was shock or comedic artistry or the alarmingly vivid imagery, Gottfried’s audience was suddenly right back with him, literally rolling in the aisles.

After an event as traumatic as 9/11, everybody in that room wanted to laugh. They needed to. They just needed a comedian who knew how to be the right kind of offensive.

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On May 26th, 2025, in Liverpool, England, a man drove a car into a crowded parade.

Seventy-nine people were injured (aged between seventy-eight and nine years old), nobody knew why it had happened or if another attack was coming, and less than 24 hours later, a comedian named Andrew Lawrence decided to challenge Gottfried’s “too-soonness” record:

To be fair, if I was in Liverpool, I’d drive through crowds of people to get the fuck out of there as well.

To anyone who doesn’t live in Liverpool, this joke might sound equally tame. But for the friends and families of the people affected, it was the wrong kind of offensive.

Several Liverpudlians invited him to come and repeat his “joke” to their faces, comedy clubs and organisers cancelled upcoming gigs or black-listed him entirely, and amongst the inevitable death threats and political tribalism, journalist, Tom Slater, came agonisingly close to putting his finger right on the problem:

…it is facile, censorious and philistine for comedy clubs to treat jokes as if they are straightforwardly sincere statements […]

A joke is a joke. Everything else is execution and personal taste. That goes for sick humour, gallows humour, ‘problematic’ humour. You don’t have to like it. But the point at which a comic is silenced is the point at which all of us should stop laughing.

Tom is right, a joke is undeniably a joke. But what is a joke?

How do we distinguish a joke from a “straightforwardly sincere statement”? How do we separate a joke from the person who chose to tell it?

After all, as Tom also admits, “it is never quite clear where [Lawrence’s] dark, nihilistic, blood-spitting comedy persona ends and his own view of the world begins.”

Is any “problematic” comment automatically a joke? Is any statement, no matter how crass, a matter of “execution and personal taste”? Is it possible to be so confused that you think that a comedian who gets punched in the consequences for joking about a parent’s recently injured child is being “silenced”?

The weaponised offence-seeking of the early 2020s has birthed something unbearably dumb.

The more people insisted that innocent gestures and commonly used words were offensive, the more they howled for people to be “cancelled” for edgy comments they made as teenagers, the more a different group of reactionaries insisted that nothing was offensive (unless it offended them, of course).

Anybody who acknowledged that a joke could be in bad taste must be playing the same game the “woke” mob did. Anybody who objected to Nazi salutes and Hitler apologia must be “virtue signalling.” Any negative reaction to anything they said, any feedback except silence or applause, must be an attempt at censorship.

But Andrew Lawrence isn’t being censored. He’s still free to attack comedians for jokes that he doesn’t like, as he did in 2014, he’s free to pour gasoline on a tinderbox of racial abuse, as he did in 2021, and he’s free to double down on his offensive comments, as he did the day after his Liverpool “joke.”

He’s even free to ask anyone who thinks it’s worthwhile to do these things to give him money.

But everybody else is equally free to stop supporting his “dark, nihilistic, blood-spitting” brand of humour. Organisers are free to decide they don’t want to host someone whose idea of comedy is so self-centred. And history will decide if”joking” about terror attacks is valuable enough to make a living out of.

Like everybody else, Andrew Lawrence is free to say whatever he wants. But also like everybody else, there’s no guarantee anyone will pay him to say it.

A joke, as old-fashioned as this definition might seem nowadays, is an attempt to make people laugh.

Ideally, while upsetting the smallest number of people.

A joke can be about anything. Suffering, death, an incestuous, bestiality-filled variety act, I’m 100% sure that a talented comedian could tell a joke about a terror attack that would give the people who had just survived it a (probably desperately needed) laugh.

But the further a comedian wanders into terrorism and incest territory, the harder it is to find the right balance. And the problem in our increasingly mean-spirited, attention-at-all-costs world, where rage-bait and simple-mindedness are the best ways to go viral, is that some people have stopped trying to find the balance.

Jokes, like people, are tricky and imprecise and occasionally unpredictable. They require practice and effort and careful thought. So if a comedian messes up, as humans inevitably do, that’s fine.

Nobody should have to make an apology video or bow down to the mob for making a mistake. But they should recognise that they made a mistake, even if only by changing direction.

Because the grace we give to comedians to “miss a shot once in a while” is based entirely on the understanding that they’re trying to hit that tricky, imprecise target.

And if they don’t feel like trying, that’s fine too! That’s their right. But then they’re no longer comedians, they’re just assholes hiding behind “jokes” to avoid criticism for the things they say.

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