JEFFREY DAHMER JOKES AND THE INVENTION OF “TOO SOON”
The Complex takes a look at tasteless jokes in the post-cannibal era.
It isn’t too soon to make jokes about Jeffrey Dahmer. Milwaukee’s favorite cannibal was arrested back in 1991. The jokes started rolling out a couple hours before the arraignment.
What made Jeffrey Dahmer so weird?
It was the little kid inside him.
Now that’s a stupid, horrific joke, completely inappropriate yet repeated about a billion times between 1991 and the present day. It’s probably not as stupid as the one that Dane Cook made about the James Holmes massacre in Colorado, but pretty stupid nonetheless. In case you’ve been locked in an icebox, here’s Cook’s joke:
Well, what do you expect, right? That Dane Cook was going to come up with something that was any more clever than what the average twelve-year-old would push through a mouthful of mashed potatoes? You know better than that, right? For a couple days there, Cook played the role of YouTube pariah for that shitty little joke. But don’t be too hard on him. He was probably just riffing, at play in that creative fever dream that Cook so often falls into when he’s hashing things out on the road, seeing what works, what doesn’t. It’ll be a tough joke for Cook to cut. It’s currently in a tie with every other joke he’s told for the Funniest Dane Cook Joke Ever Told.
What did Jeffrey Dahmer do when he finished his vegetables?
He got rid of the wheelchairs.
Both are tasteless and cringe-worthy, to be sure, but nobody ever issued a public apology for a Jeffrey Dahmer joke. Hasn’t happened. Won’t happen.
Okay, so what about the James Holmes/Colorado massacre joke that Roastmaster Jeffrey Ross made at the Roseanne Barr Roast while dressed up like the late Penn State Coach Joe Paterno?
Ross came in to visit Howard Stern earlier this week and played the audio of the joke prior to the airing of the Barr Roast on Comedy Central. The joke was directed toward Seth Green, seated at the dais, who bears what might pass as a vague resemblance to Holmes (they’re both redheads, see). The joke was, in essence, that the difference between Holmes and Green was that Holmes had done something in a theater that people would remember.
In case it doesn’t come through in my typed-from-memory dissemination, know that it was a pretty funny joke, as Jeff Ross’ roast jokes generally are. It was also told within the context of a roast, different from a comedy club in that the basic object is to skirt the very bounds of the offensive at all times. And really, it falls well in-bounds on the clay court of the offensive versus the innocuous, unless maybe you’re Seth Green. Or his mother.
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