JASON BIGGS: Comedy Is Hard. Being a dick is easy

If you don't know who Jason Biggs is...most of the planet doesn't know, either.

His great claim to fame, apparently, is acting in a few of the tasteless "American Pie" movies. A fair actor, he played a Jew even though he isn't one.

Tasteless or "sick" humor has a place in this often tasteless and "sick" world. At its best, it's a healthy reflex to most any horrible event. Tell a "sick" joke and you're saying, in essence, "I'm immune. It doesn't hurt. I'm not going to cry."

It verges on cruelty and most sick jokes aren't funny, but if humor helps heal, maybe it's not so bad. This assumes that the joke is being told by somebody known for abrasive humor (a Gilbert Gottfried perhaps) and done with some wit.

Biggs was witless today.

Lenny Bruce, after the Kennedy assassination, was expected to make some kind of flippant, irreverent remark the next time he took the stage. The audience waited. He finally said, "Poor Vaughn Meader!"

And the audience laughed. Yeah, what about the famous JFK impersonator who had scored a million selling "First Family" album??

Enter Jason Biggs, and today's news about a plane shot down by terrorists in the Ukraine. His instant Twitter joke:

"Anyone wanna buy my Malaysian Arlines frequent flier miles?"

Anything funny about that?

No. Biggs may be able to recite stupid lines in some smelly movie where everyone's waiting for the next dopey bad-taste joke. But can he write a funny line?

When he instantly got the scorn he deserved, he flipped out and blamed the audience:

"Hey all you too soon assholes, it's a fucking joke. You don't have to think it's funny, or even be on my twitter page at all."

A fucking joke is, most important, supposed to be funny. That's where Jason failed.

I asked Steve Allen once, in referring to a line in a Poe story, 'Is there really a subject "of which no jest can be made?'"

And he said, "No, you can make a joke about anything. The question is whether you should." And, I might add, whether it's a joke in the first place.

Jason merely continued to get redder and redder in the ass, sulking and raging about how he had empathy for the victims (as if that was obvious from his crappy ad-lib?).

The bottom line IS that comedy is hard. Every day real stand-up comics, real comedy writers, make choices involving self-censorship. Sometimes they go for a line that's over the edge...and it works. Sometimes it gets silence or even boos. They are pro enough to know that they just might've made a mistake. Amateurs just keep on ranting as the flop sweat puddles the floor. They make themselves look more desperate and delusional. Biggs could've said, "Sorry...I knocked out a line a little too fast and should've bounced it off a few people first..." But his ego got the better of him. In other words, sometimes fucking an apple pie can be funny...but more likely if it's up on a screen in a film and not at the next table at Applebee's. And some actors are best when they read what's on the cue card and don't try to ad-lib.