With any luck, Sarah Palin this morning finally dispatched David Letterman’s joke about her daughter to the landfill where by all rights it should have been deposited a week ago.
But even Palin’s acceptance of Letterman’s apology on last night’s “Late Night” may not completely kill one of those “controversies” that inexplicably develops a set of media legs strong enough to run 45-minute marathons.
And that may be the most fascinating part of this way-too-long conversation: Why, in a TV and media world where hundreds of potentially offensive and tasteless remarks circulate every day, do a small handful that seem no better or worse than dozens of others somehow survive through news cycle after news cycle?
For latecomers, the backstory is this: Letterman’s monologue on June 8 included a joke about Palin’s daughter being “knocked up” by Alex Rodriguez during the seventh inning stretch of a Yankees game.
Letterman later claimed he thought he was joking about 18-year-old Bristol Palin, who did get knocked up. Trouble is, the Palin daughter who attended the game was Willow, who is 14, which makes it a different joke.
In any case, assuming Letterman is telling the truth, this was no more or less tasteful than a thousand other Dave jokes over many years. That’s the kind of jokes he tells. This was just the first one for which he had to apologize twice, half-jokingly last week and quite seriously – well, as serious as Dave ever gets – last night.
Palin said today the second apology was sufficient. Whether it will also pacify those want Dave’s scalp may take a little longer to resolve, because they obviously consider this way too righteous a crusade to simply drop.
The good news for Dave is that while CBS can’t be happy about any of this, there has been no indication he’s going to be Imus’d over it.
Still, why did this one hang around so long?
1. The principals. Sarah Palin and her family are news in both the political and gossip worlds, and she, like others in that sphere, is not reluctant to step into a scenario where she’s victim and heroine.
She can also command attention in a way that not everyone can.
“Not unlike Nancy Pelosi on the opposite side,” suggests news director Tim Scheld of WCBS-AM, “jokes that include her get a bit more attention because the outrage/humor is multiplied by the passions they evoke.”
2. Slow news cycle. Like Don Imus in May 2007, Letterman didn’t get rescued by some other big celebrity story. Sure, there’s plenty happening in the world, but in the celebrity game, this story didn’t get the kind of competition that almost always buries previous stories within 48 hours.
3. Latent resentment of the jokester. Letterman is seen by many conservatives as the epitome of a smug media liberal on a smug liberal network. Like a Sean Penn or Jane Fonda, he’s a ready target.
4. This story fits perfectly into the unending argument over what’s tasteless in the media and what targets are acceptable and how far comedians should go – who is a hypocrite for getting angry about a Michelle Obama joke, but not a Willow Palin joke. That nasty argument, which consists almost entirely of finger-pointing, is always looking for fresh meat.
So Letterman joins a long parade of other talk hosts who have suddenly had to defend one comment they had no idea would spark such fury.
A pre-planned joke in a monologue is actually quite different from, say, Imus’ off-the-cuff remark, or the moments that got Bob Grant, Star, Opie and Anthony, Rush Limbaugh or Michael Savage in trouble.
But they all had the same result, and they will have the same result for the next host: a brief stint as a human lightning rod.
“If you stay on the air long enough,” says Grant, “eventually something will come out wrong.”
For folks on the edgy side of talk media, it’s almost the cost of doing business.