Jay Thurber Show

Some of you know I’m a big fan of Jack Benny, even though he died before I was born. (What difference should that make? I’ve been dying on the radio every weekend for 20 years.)

Benny was probably the greatest American comedian of the 1940s and 1950s, so it’s a shame he’s not better remembered today. He centered Black and female talent — Benny was never shy about giving Eddie Anderson (Rochester) or Mary Livingston punchlines that scored off of him — and he did a lot to mainstream Jewish humor for gentile audiences.

Anyway, I love Jack Benny. Not for nothing does our Internet radio station, Tube City Online Radio, run Jack Benny every Sunday night at 7 p.m., just as it aired on network radio “back in the day.” (We’re currently running shows from 1945 in order. Check it out some Sunday night.)

Though he never completed high school, Benny was well-read. He loved language and he appreciated writers. While other comedians tried to pretend they didn’t use writers, Benny wasn’t above bringing them on stage and mentioning their names. When you see Seth Meyers or Conan O’Brien or David Letterman feature their writers in sketches — that’s a technique more or less invented by Jack Benny.

Benny also was a master of timing and misdirection. He famously got laughs just out of a well-timed stare or an uncomfortable silence. He knew that if he suggested the punchline but stopped short of saying it out loud, the audience would complete the joke in their minds and their laughter would be even louder and longer and more appreciative.

In more recent times, Tina Fey and Seth Meyers have talked about how they hate “clapter.” “Clapter” is when the audience claps instead of laughing because you’ve told a joke that has an obvious punchline and the audience applauds to show they agree with your opinion. It’s the hack who comes out on stage and says, “Hey, how about that Donald Trump? Is that guy a clown or what?” And his audience claps, they don’t laugh.

I like Stephen Colbert, but I find a lot of his punchlines generate “clapter.” To be honest, a lot of Jimmy Kimmel’s political jokes also are designed for “clapter.” Seth Meyers is equally hard on Trump, but his jokes are more circuitous and absurdist; he’s also not shy about making himself the butt of the joke, and that makes me laugh.

Benny used to tell his writers not to make the punchlines “too lappy.” That “You’re throwing it into their laps. Too lappy.”

Since I don’t have a daily radio show, I use social media as my radio show. I try to write a least a couple of jokes every day. Most of them are pretty bad, but some of them make me laugh.

On Sunday night, as the Steelers were falling apart against the Los Angeles Chargers, the Democrats in the U.S. Senate were caving into Republican demands to reopen in government but getting very little in return, other than an empty promise to vote on health insurance subsidies in a few months. So I wrote, “The Steelers defense tonight must be getting coached by Chuck Schumer. But I hear the Chargers have promised to give them a chance to score some points in the fourth quarter.”

I got a fair amount of clapter, but one follower — Dana Simpson, who writes “Phoebe & Her Unicorn” — took me task for a gratuitous smack at Chuck Schumer, and you know what? She was right. It also was a lazy whack at Steelers coaching, which has become a reliable, hacky punchline in Pittsburgh over the last few years, like making fun of the Pirates (which I’ve also done). Like I said, I try to write some jokes every day, but they’re not all gems.

I was thinking about all of this after social media platform Bluesky suspended two people for making what the company called threats of violence. Sarah Kendzior, a best-selling author and former writer for the New York Daily News, Toronto Globe & Mail, and other prominent publication, was suspended after she made fun of an article in the Wall Street Journal by Jon Fasman. Fasman wrote that he had recently “discovered” a “deeply uncool” country music singer who he felt was more or less forgotten. The country music singer was Johnny Cash.

Lots of people dunked on the article — how does anyone grow up in America without knowing who Johnny Cash is? — and Kendzior quipped she wanted to shoot Fasman “just to watch him die,” quoting a line from Cash’s most famous song, “Folsom Prison Blues.” Bluesky called it a “credible threat of violence.”

And then, comedian Patton Oswalt, whose grouchy exterior and profane jokes mask a really sensitive soul, was suspended by Bluesky for making an off-color remark about podcaster Megyn Kelly. In the wake of the release of thousands of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails, Kelly has been defending President Trump, who has a well-known interest in the sexual attractiveness of teen-age girls.

Kelly’s remarks have been cringeworthy, even by her (low) standards. Being sexually attracted to 15-year-old girls is no big deal, she suggested this week: “He wasn’t into, like, 8-year-olds. But he liked the very young teen types that could pass for even younger than they were, but would look legal to a passerby.”

Oswalt — who has a 16-year-old daughter — posted some of Kelly’s remarks and then said, “Wood chipper. Feet first.”

Bluesky regarded that as a threat; as if Oswalt was going to kidnap Megyn Kelly and give her the “Fargo” treatment.

The curse of our social media age is that no one gets rewarded for being nice and calm and polite. Calm and sensible doesn’t go viral on TikTok or Twitter; huffing aerosol cans until you pass out or taking massive doses of Benadryl does. What else goes viral? Writing horrible things about other people.

I’ve been on the radio for 20 years and writing professionally since I was 18 years old, and I’ve mostly stayed out of trouble. (Not always, but that’s a story for another time.)

And by staying mostly out of trouble, I also haven’t become rich and famous. That’s the trade-off. As a former boss used to say, “If you want to run with the big dogs, you got to learn to pee in the tall grass.” If you want to get rich and (in)famous from your writing or broadcasting, you have to push the envelope, and sometimes that means going too far and being offensive — and getting fired from your job or kicked off of a platform. Just ask Howard Stern.

I don’t know if either Kendzior or Oswalt should have been suspended from Bluesky. Kendzior’s joke was a bit more open to misinterpretation; if someone didn’t know who Johnny Cash was, and had never heard the song “Folsom Prison Blues,” I guess they could have assumed she really was angry enough to shoot the Wall Street Journal writer. It’s a stretch, but I could see it happening. Oswalt’s suspension is stupid; he’s a world-famous comedian best known for telling raw and sometimes raunchy stories. No one seriously thinks he was going to put Megyn Kelly into a wood chipper.

I suppose the moral of the story, if there is one, is that if you want to avoid getting kicked off of any platform — whether it’s social media, your company’s Slack channel or a radio station — you’d best not be too “lappy.” Make the audience work for the joke, just like Jack Benny did. Don’t go for clapter and don’t make it too obvious. Your fans will appreciate being in on the joke but it will go over the heads of the humorless idiots who control much of the Internet.