It’s been rough few years for America’s racist, sexist, and sexually predatory comedians as they continue to struggle with the oppressive prospect of a world in which they can no longer profit from openly racist, misogynistic, or homophobic routines. Faced with the threat of losing their television shows, audiences, and status as cultural icons, some comedians are asking: Where’s our safe space? is trolling the libs such a crime? Isn’t it all just a matter of free speech?
This fall, the answers to these questions and more will surely be answered with Roseanne Barr’s and Andrew Dice Clay’s comedy tour, “Mr. and Mrs. America.” According to Fox News, Barr, the disgraced sitcom star, former macadamia nut farmer, and failed presidential candidate, will join her longtime acquaintance, Celebrity Apprentice season 2 contestant and Fonzie impersonator Andrew Dice Clay for a politically incorrect pilgrimage across Trump’s America.
According to Fox News, Clay says the tour was inspired by the “national obsession with political discourse” and the “policing of comedians’ language.” Certainly, Clay and Barr are no strangers to liberal oppression. Clay was temporarily banned from MTV after performing three-minutes of homophobic and misogynistic stand-up as part of his introduction of a live performance by Cher at the 1989 Video Music Awards (for a sample of Clay’s offensive humor, check the Slate 2012 interview in which he explains his comedic preference for the word “fag” over “gay”).More recently, Barr was killed off her rebooted sitcom after sending out a racist and Islamophobic tweet about Obama aide Valerie Jarrett. Barr attempted to reframe that tweet as an awkward joke, blaming the dubious combination of Ambien and Memorial Day for inducing a bout of poor taste and delusion. Unfortunately for Bar, the joke didn’t land with ABC executives who promptly fired her.
Despite the fact that he has led a successful career since his brush with the PC police, even scoring a role as Lady Gaga’s father in A Star Is Born, Clay is tired of the persecution against freethinkers like himself and Barr. He told Fox, “America really needs to lighten up and not worry about the words comedians use because it’s all we have,” he continued, “there’s clean stuff and there’s street stuff. I’m a street guy because I tell it like it is.”
So far, only two dates have been posted, one at the Paramount Theater, apparently one of the last strongholds of civic entertainment not besieged by MS-13 gang activity in Long Island, and another in Atlantic City’s Hard Rock casino, newly opened in the space once home to one of Donald Trump’s most embarrassing and most expensive financial failures, the Trump Taj Mahal. (So much for the $500 million spent in the effort to “de-Trump” the space.) As more dates are announced, expect the duo to continue to kick up controversy, intentionally inching closer toward career suicide while righteously claiming free speech martyrdom.
