> There really is a joke there somewhere at Fiverr’s expense, and I think that’s what he was going for.
> The parts are there, loosely, if you cock your head and squint a bit. There’s an air of exploitation (on Fiverr’s part, but also often claimed to be on PewDiePie’s part) but it was a rush job. Seinfeld, in contrast, maps out goofy jokes about Pop Tarts down to the syllable.
I read and understood what slowbeef wrote. Delivery is the unmentioned point of discussion -- landing the delivery. It's the difference in whether a joke is funny or not. But changing delivery keeps the raw essence of the joke the same.
And I don't think it's fair to call it "holding someone accountable", if the same raw essence of a joke told with better delivery is suddenly OK. It's the same accountable action. If you're really interested in "holding someone accountable", shouldn't the same raw essence of a joke be wrong no matter how it's delivered?
I don't disagree that delivery is extremely important to landing a joke and it being funny. I do disagree that holding people accountable for bad delivery of a joke is somehow a moral impetus. That good joke was just as morally bad as the bad joke.
In other words, you could have taken a lot of George Carlin's material and run it through the ultra-politically-correct filter and come out deaf from the blaring alarms. But he's somehow above moral reproach because he's good at it? I don't buy it.
I think all this really goes back to the idea: Only the fool can criticize the king. Anyone else, and it was grounds for treason. I would have hoped we moved beyond that model.
I think that's why you see a lot of people saying that none of this was surprising for people who knew his material before hand. And I think the comparison elsewhere to shock-jocks is very apt. Such material is often suddenly found lacking when it gains an audience wider than it was targeted for.
And this also plays into the wider idea of, how responsible should a speaker be for "triggering" [0] a listener? That's a very heavy burden when your audience suddenly -- and not necessarily intentionally -- becomes "everyone".
[0] Yes, this is a somewhat lax usage of that term. However, it is also a common usage, so I use it as such.