Dammit, Sarah Palin, I thought you’d disappeared from the pop culture consciousness, but now you have to stampede back onto the pages of People magazine, demanding an apology from David Letterman over a joke about your daughter getting knocked up by Alex Rodriguez at a Yankees game:
“I would like to see him apologize to young women across the country for contributing to kind of that thread that is throughout our culture that makes it sound like it is OK to talk about young girls in that way…
“No wonder young girls especially have such low self-esteem in America when we think it’s funny for a so-called comedian to get away with such a remark as he did,” she said. “I don’t think that’s acceptable.”
Alright – while I don’t profess to be Cultured McGee when it comes to women’s issues, I am very aware of the role of misogyny in comedy as an extremely lame, easy fallback option frequently used to illicit shock responses or “am I right guys” mindless agreement, but that’s not what Letterman is doing here; it’s a joke specifically about Sarah Palin’s daughter who did get knocked up and is also extremely famous. Palin’s comments immediately transport the joke to the most general possible issue, using an arguable connection to instead talk about the self-esteem of all young girls, which no one would dare attack. It’d be like making a joke about something someone in the military did, and that person responding with “Do you not support our troops? Do you know how many people sacrifice their lives every day…” etc.
I’m not saying Letterman should be totally absolved of any out-of-bounds implications his jokes contain, but does this clearly absurd Alex Rodriguez joke strike anyone as particularly offensive, especially by Letterman’s nightly standards?
Or maybe I’m just automatically pissed at anything that causes me to hear more from the woman who I thought had mercifully disappeared from my day-to-day pop culture life. And for that, I suppose, I will blame Letterman.
Feel free to preach away in the comments, I imagine there’s people who care about this story more than myself.
