Yes, he did.
And it is fine. Kind of.
I don’t watch SNL that often, or any live TV for that matter anymore, as you cannot tell the little critters that they get no screen time if you get it at all. But tonight I happened to be watching the opening monologue of the season finale. And I was stunned. This guy has some guts, I have to give him that. But as I was watching, my jaw kept dropping, until it made it to our crawl space. I’m still trying to untie it from a pipe down there.
Anyone starting a monologue on racism is doomed to get criticism in this country. The Middle East part was not so shocking, after all, that’s far from here, right? But then he got into child molesters. And right then and there, when he said something on the line of “It must be good for them to risk that much, right?”, he lost me. Kind of. Because in that moment I couldn’t help but think that, in all likelihood, plenty of victims of pedophiles must have been seeing this. And I’m sure they didn’t appreciate this part of his monologue a bit. As I’m sure that any pedophile who was watching felt validated. At the end, we are talking about pretty insane people with no sense of humor, so I don’t think they would get the joke.
Was it funny? Perhaps. But it was also very, very raw. Surprisingly raw for a broadcast network. I can see some NBC executives having a panic attack and texting their lawyers and Olivia Popes as they heard him say that. Two minutes later, Twitter was on fire about this, and I’m sure that it will get plenty of media attention tomorrow morning. And maybe that was the whole point of it.
But at the end of the day, and as offensive as his monologue must have been for many people, he was within his right to say anything he wanted. And that’s one of the beauties of this country.
Kind of.
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