The Worst Joke

There was a joke on the last episode of "Saturday Night Live" that I didn't care for. It was during the Weekend Update segment. The premise was about how the band Kiss wouldn't be performing at their induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame because there was disagreement about what lineup to use. In my opinion, that's a little complex of a premise, having two parts, but it's useable. The joke was how they also wouldn't do the performance because of the additional reason that they couldn't get off work at Radio Shack.

The joke's presentation included an amusing picture of the band in their makeup and Radio Shack uniforms. I don't deny it was amusing-looking. The trouble of the joke isn't where it got to, but where it began. We're asked to accept the logic of the band becoming so destitute that they are reduced to retail jobs. I just can't do it. The joke completely falls apart in that crucial element of logic. I expect a joke to make sense.


Maybe you'll say that Kiss isn't as popular as it once was, or that they're just total sellouts. A person could make the argument that the former is true, and clearly the latter is. The trouble is that what the joke requires is that they're not just unpopular enough that they draw zero income currently as a performing and recording band, but that they have completely lost any and all savings from past earnings. Neither of these things is remotely true.

Dating back to their heyday in the 70s, the band has made obscene amounts of money. To this day they continue to be a huge draw as a performing band, and their status as sellouts, something you could make a joke about, means that they make piles of money on all kinds of merchandising. Their records continue to sell well. They are, in short, the very last band about whom you could make a joke on the basis of poverty.

That joke drives me insane. As bad as the poor logic of the joke is, its lack of originality might be worse. Suffice it to say that jokes about public figures who are no longer as popular or as prominent as they once were are legion, because the public loves knocking people off pedestals that it put them on to begin with. One of the most common variations of that very played out joke category is that the person is, as in this case, now so reduced in circumstances that they must work a menial job.

I don't happen to like jokes at the expense of someone whose great crime is no longer being as marketable as they once were. When someone has it coming that's one thing, but when they had a good album or two and then failed to sustain their success, the joke just seems mean-spirited. It also invites the question of whether the joker has managed to enjoy as much success as the so-called has-been they make fun of.

I think SNL did a poor job with this particular joke. It's not impossible to make such a joke work, but you have to meet a lot of conditions in my opinion. The public figure has to be straight-up broke, or near enough to it. They probably have to have gotten that way by doing bad things, or they have to be unliked. It might work if their success is widely perceived as undeserved. The trouble is that even if you can get them to that place of working the menial job logically, it's still such an old, lame, played out joke. It's so lame.