Too Soon
Too Soon: Comedy After 9/11 is an excellent documentary about comedy just after September 11, 2001.
There’s the adage “Comedy equals tragedy plus time” which is pretty much the Onion’s operating principle but we basically skip the time part.
Comedians that genuinely wanted to do the right thing took cues from each other (including Letterman’s 09/17 return) on how to navigate the very challenging new territory in the midst of intimidation and threats of violence.
The comment that Bill Maher lost his job over:
We have been the cowards. Lobbing cruise missiles from 2000 miles away. That’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building. Say what you want about it. Not cowardly.
…was followed by the White House press secretary delivering the warning:
all Americans…that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do. This is not a time for remarks like that; there never is.
Although not included in the documentary, it seems the press secretary strangely wrote a letter to the Washington Post to deny making those remarks:
Ari Fleischer hasn’t been seen much since he stepped down as White House press secretary in 2003 and moved out of the public spotlight. So it was a surprise when he e-mailed recently asking The Post to “correct the record” on a comment he made nearly eight years ago. Fleischer, now a sports media consultant in New York, said that Post columnist Dana Milbank was guilty of repeating an “old canard” that has become an “urban myth.”
Also not included were any conversations related to the provenance of Maher’s comments. For instance, in Re: Hicks, Rogan and Leary mentioned on Stern, NY Post, different opinions were shared on how similar Maher’s comments were to those from the November 17, 1993 performance of Bill Hicks:
They seem very similar but I do not think Maher was necessarily borrowing from Hicks.
In the end, what I learned was that there was a lot of self-censorship and we missed out on a lot of good humor that could have been helpful.