Salon, your one-stop shop for dangerously misinformed essays by noted Vaccine Truther Robert F. Kennedy Jr., recently had a sad because one of their killjoy authors didn't get a joke made by Patton Oswalt.
To set the stage: Remember the Asiana crash? And remember the television station that named the pilots with stereotypically jokey Asian names like "Ho Lee Fuk"? And how they blamed it on an intern for the NTSB? On Twitter, Oswalt joked:
Perhaps not belly-laugh funny but certainly chuckle-funny. The joke, obviously, is at KTVU's expense. But don't tell The Very Serious People at Salon. This is the sort of humor that got Trayvon Martin killed or something.
No, seriously:
UPDATE: This seems to be a night where it’s clear why race remains central, and why crude and unsophisticated elementary school jokes about it need to be called out, no matter how bullying the joke’s teller may be.
Just so we're clear, the "night" in question was the night when the Zimmerman verdict came down. Is this real life? The interim editor in chief of Salon really wrote something that remarkably stupid?
But Oswalt doesn't need me to stick up for him:
Salon: "But really, this is the same tired line we’ve heard from Oswalt and other comedians before."
Oh, it’s certainly tired, but not in the way you’re thinking, Salon. It’s "tired" because me and everyone I know in the comedy business (as opposed to you and your fellow dullards in the professional outrage and desperate click-bait business) are tired of explaining ourselves to the 21stcentury schoolmarm brigade.
Salon: "…most of them of the "you’re so politically correct" variety that probably also weren’t all that smart when he first told them in 1993."
Did you even stop to wonder why stale, 1993-era "politically correct" criticisms still apply to you, Salon? Is it maybe because your mindset is two decades behind the rest of the planet?
If the Salon Scolds don't want to be criticized for being schoolmarms, they shouldn't act like schoolmarms. This isn't rocket science. Don't criticize a comedian for a joke you didn't get and then react with outrage when he points out that your vapors are unwarranted. You'll just look like a soulless killjoy who takes himself too seriously and has no idea how comedy works.
Maybe we can really get the Salon Scolds' blood boiling with this horribly offensive no good very bad five seconds of tripe: