Speech Training: Don Imus and Insult Humor

When I heard Daniel Shore on NPR blame the listeners for the implosion of the Don Imus show, I felt a little ashamed, because I tuned in, I listened, and I laughed at Imus.

I liked how he insulted his colleagues and his guests on the air. His insults were pyrotechnical bursts of language that were Shakespearean in their richness. He didn’t say, “Thou wart-lipped scurvy knave! Son of a mongrel monkey with mange!” but he did call people “scum-sucking weasels,” or something similar, and I found that entertaining. It was colorful.

It was also funny because it was a performance, an exaggerated use of language executed with his tongue situated firmly in his cheek. And it was most often directed at people in the public eye who are fair game, whose social status is not easily questioned, and who already enjoy the enmity of a large portion of the population.

Imus, in some sense, is a court jester. As long as he makes fun of the courtiers, the ladies in waiting, and the King’s enemies, the King laughs and keeps him on the payroll.

But when the jester denigrates those close to the King, or makes the King’s life more difficult by demeaning those the King needs as allies, the jester is in trouble.

The King in our country is public opinion, and Imus crossed the King.  Satire is all well and good when its target is the pomposity of the powerful or the silliness of the striving classes.  Satire works well pointing its barrel up the social ladder, but it seems cruel to belittle, racialize and sexualize (if I can make up a word or two) young women who are young, dedicated, gifted and members of the second-best women’s basketball team in the country.  You look at them and think, “Boy, this is what’s right with our country.”

What if Imus had been more theatrical with his insult?  If he was upset with them because they’d lost, what if he’d fired up his insult engine and let loose with something truly Shakespearean, something so toweringly elaborate and verbally colorful that it would have been more entertaining than hurtful, more presentational than it was authentic?  Would he have gotten away with it?

I don’t think so.  Not if it derogated young black women.  We have free speech, but we are not free to arouse hatred. Words matter, even words spoken by jesters, because they can inflame dangerous human passions. And when the King sees that the jester has endangered the kingdom with his satire, the jester has to go.