![]() For all I know he’s out there calling me an unrepentant racist to this very day. I explained the Kim Jong-un joke to the angry tweeter but he wasn’t having it I think I may have blocked him in the end. It’s very difficult to explain to someone who hasn’t ‘got’ a joke, but thinks they have, how mistaken they are. Utterly bewildered, I managed – after several attempts – to get him to explain why he thought the joke was racist, and he explained that obviously the point of the joke is that Koreans are all stupid. But not one guy soon after I posted the picture this one tweeter started demanding I apologise for posting such a racist joke, and, when I demurred, started calling me a racist to anyone who would listen (I seem to recall he didn’t have many followers). Nice little joke, as the few dozen people who retweeted my retweet seemed to agree. Now the joke, obviously, is the idea that Sony’s sole layer of internet security had consisted of a single firewall to which the password was ‘password’. The joke took the form of a photo of Kim Jong-un sat at a computer terminal, surrounded by uniformed generals, to which someone had added the caption ‘I dunno, try ‘password’… OMG!’ This is always a danger with comedy it’s inherently subjective and will, on occasion, be assessed by those with either a limited sense of humour and imagination, or indeed, none whatsoever of either.Ī few years ago I retweeted a joke on Twitter it was just after North Korea had successfully hacked Sony Pictures’ computers (apparently in revenge for a Seth Rogen movie). Of course, it’s possible that Wolf’s decriers are sincere in their outrage, and simply didn’t get the joke. Now I’m sure Sanders did feel uncomfortable nobody likes being called out for being a liar and a bully, which is why I’ve spent my life confronting bullies and try to keep lying down to a bare minimum, but at no stage did Wolf call Sarah Sanders ugly or make any other reference to her physique or appearance, and yet it is for that offence – that entirely imaginary offence – that she finds herself being hauled over the media’s coals. Wolf makes reference (complimentary reference, in fact) to Sanders’s make-up by way of taking a dig at her blithe disregard for facts. If you’re interested, the relevant section comes at about 13 minutes in. This is easily verified: her whole set is up on YouTube. ![]() I can’t stress this enough: what Wolf is being criticised for – and in certain quarters, threatened with career-ending boycotts for – is something she did not do. Eminent print and television journalists are lambasting Wolf for having made fun of Sanders’s appearance for cheap laughs. What’s telling about a lot of the criticism being aimed at Wolf is not that it’s unfair (although it is: she turned up and did exactly what she’d been hired to do) but that it’s dishonest. The American media – and just for once, not just the right wing-nut fringe of the American media – seems to be joining in a chorus of condemnation of Wolf, with particular reference to the cruelty of her digs at White House press spokesperson Sarah Sanders, who was in attendance on behalf of her absent boss. The fall out from Michelle Wolf’s set at the White House correspondents’ dinner continues to rain down, and the ultimate outcome is as yet unknown.
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