Odd humor that hides a probem. . .

On May 16, 2026, SNL included a joke which, even by the standards of shocking Michael Jackson jokes,  was too far.  “Michael Jackson did nothing wrong,” Michael Che, one of the co-anchors of Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update,” said during the episode. “He was right to molest all those kids.” This was delivered with palpable surprise at the words coming out of his mouth, but Che kept going: “They were lucky. I would have paid him to do it. And I did! That’s right, when I was 10 years old, Michael Jackson molested me, and the only thing it gave me was a fetish for middle-aged white women.” He then smiled and said, almost as an aside, “That is not why I have that.” 

I did not see it.  I do not watch SNL -- for various reasons.  But reading about this joke revealed a great deal about us.  We seem adept at laughing at the things that should not be funny.  It is not just nervous humor.  I can understand that.  But this is laughter that, by making things funny that should be shocking, makes it easy for us to ignore real problems.  It is not about Michael Jackson.  It is not about child abuse or pedophilia.  It is about how corrupting this kind of humor is for our values, for the things that should be sacred but end up being crude and ugly.  Our use of humor to cover how wrong some things are is a sign of the way we have screwed up these things -- whether by tolerating or ignoring these wrongs or by making a joke out of the things that should be serious.

We laugh at things that should shock us and we are shocked at things which do not qualify as moral issues.  This is what sin has done when we take from the shadows and darkness the things that belong there and bring them into the daylight.  When we try to make normal what out to disordered and unacceptable, we turn upside down right and wrong, who we are and what we are here to be and do.  Then we pass this onto our children and they do not realize the background behind such things and simply accept them as normal, even laudable.

I have no idea what Michael Jackson did or did not do but I am shocked at the thought of abuse he might have suffered as some suggest and the abuse he might have done to others.  I do not understand how we can make humor about murdering babies or making pleasure the most important principle of life.  I do not understand how we can normalize what is perverted and make perverse what ought to be normal.  But I do not know that using humor to cover such things helps nothing and no one.   We have made vulgar speech normal until language seems to shock no one anymore.