This is a lousy way to start a Sunday morning, but so be it…

From Law and Crime regarding an incident in Indiana:

…According to a probable cause affidavit, officers with the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department shortly before 11 p.m. on Tuesday responded to a call regarding an injured toddler at the Days Inn located in the 8300 block of Craig Street. Upon arriving at the scene, first responders said they immediately located a 1-year-old girl who was suffering from what appeared to be a stab wound to the neck.

Emergency medical personnel rushed the child to the Riley Hospital for Children… the child was initially admitted to the facility in critical condition but was later upgraded to stable condition.

The child’s mother…told investigators that [her 32-year-old sister, Sharon Key] called her at about 10 a.m. that morning and asked if she could stay with her at the Days Inn. Key was dropped off at the hotel later that morning and drank alcohol for “most of the day.” At about 10:30 p.m. that evening, the sisters went to Burger King and arrived back at the hotel…

The mother said she laid her daughter down on her stomach atop the bed closest to the window and went into the bathroom to give her son a bath. A short while later, the mother said she heard “loud noises from the bedroom so she walked out and saw that [Key] was holding a knife in her hand and [her daughter] was bloody and screaming on the bed.” Key [said] “it was an accident” as the mother grabbed a towel and wrapped it around the wound on the back left side of her daughter’s head and applied pressure before calling 911. …after she called 911,[the mother] turned around and saw [her sister] “walking down the hallway towards the exit.” ….Officers found Sharon Key hiding in some bushes near the hotel and placed her under arrest…[She] allegedly said that her pit bull had taken the chicken sandwich she got at Burger King and eaten it. Key then became “mad” and…went after the dog with her knife. The dog… jumped on the bed where the [baby] was [lying]…In an attempt to stab the dog, Key allegedly said that she missed, accidentally hitting her niece instead of the animal.

Observations…

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The New York Times actually has a comedy critic, Jason Zinoman, which is fine. Still, someone needs to tell him to avoid writing about ethics, which he apparently does not comprehend. I, in contrast, have extensive experience in both comedy and ethics, and can say with confidence that his column “Lying in Comedy Isn’t Always Wrong, but Hasan Minhaj Crossed a Line” is the worst published ethics analysis I have read this year, and perhaps ever. Zimmerman’s column is ethics nonsense from the headline to the end.

Let’s start with the headline. There is no lying in comedy, any more than there’s lying in any performing art. Since the sole purpose of comedy is to make a targeted audience laugh, anything goes, or should. (This is one of the rare instances of my being in agreement with Bill Maher). For now, I don’t want to be distracted into justifying anything other than making stuff up, which stand-up comics do regularly and should, but if they are pretending something is true when it isn’t, that’s not unethical. It isn’t unethical because they are comedians, and their audience knows—or should— what their purpose is not to inform, but to amuse.

Since so much of what a comic says is not true—a duck, a Canadian and an acrobat did not walk into a bar—-there is no breach of trust when that comic states anything else as a fact when it isn’t. Dave Chappelle often starts a story by saying, “This is true,” which means that he has decided that the story is going to be funnier if the audience thinks of it as really happening. I don’t assume the story is true because Chappelle says so, but he’s asking for the suspension of disbelief from his audience, just as “The Exorcist” was when it showed Regan’s head turn backwards. We suspend our disbelief in the possessed little girl to be horrified; we suspend disbelief in what comedians say to be amused.

The target of Zinoman’s accusation of unethical comedy is, as the headline states, Hasan Minhaj, who has a Netflix concert streaming. He can’t have “crossed a line” because there are no lines. There are no ethicd rules for comics, nor can or should there be.

Here is an example of what Zinoman calls “crossing a line”:

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