What’s the harm in making a few jokes? Typically, nothing…oh, you might hear groans or mock-offended shouts of “Too soon!” We’ve all laughed at something inappropriate. Still, think before you speak, because there’s a chance you could say something so incredibly offensive, your entire life will be over. Here are six times when people should’ve stuck to seriousness.
The guy who joked about flying with Ebola
Just last week, a US Airways passenger in Philadelphia joked, after a coughing fit while boarding the plane, “I have Ebola — you are all screwed.” With the highly-deadly disease on everyone’s mind, a compact flying tube was probably not the right venue for this sort of humor, and Hazmat-clad authorities came to escort him away. Other passengers booed him, and even the flight attendant told everyone, “I think the man who said this is an idiot.”
The publicist who failed miserably at public relations
Who can forget Justine Sacco, the P.R. flack who tweeted an unbelievably offensive AIDS joke while boarding a flight to Africa? Unbeknownst to her, it got thousands of retweets while she was in the air — and by the time Sacco landed in Cape Town, she’d been canned by her employer, IAC, which must have been the easiest business decision any company’s ever made.
The TSA worker with a bag of fake drugs
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It’s not always passengers who pull the pranks. Back in 2010, a TSA agent planted a plastic bag of white powder in an unsuspecting 22-year-old’s carry-on luggage, and then demanded to know what it was. “He let me stutter through an explanation for the longest minute of my life,” she explained in the Michigan Daily. A short time later, he “told me he was kidding, that I should’ve seen the look on my face.”
If only she could’ve seen the look on the TSA worker’s face when he was promptly fired.
The 14-year-old girl who pretended to be a terrorist
We all want to be famous, and so did a Dutch teenager who tweeted a bomb threat to American Airlines, claiming that she was an Al-Qaeda fighter in Afghanistan. Not surprisingly, neither the airlines nor law enforcement found the girl’s offbeat comedic stylings all that humorous. She tried to backtrack, but it was too late. Police arrested her, but hey, she got 30,000 Twitter followers almost immediately.
Gilbert Gott-fired
Sometimes even the professionals blunder. Like Gilbert Gottfried, who in 2011 made a series of jokes about tsunami-devastated Japan. The world was outraged and Gottfried summarily lost his gig voicing the Aflac Duck. Who’d have thought the man behind the most famous “Aristocrats” joke ever could be so crass?
Aaron Goldfarb
Aaron Goldfarb is the author of the upcoming “The Guide for a Single Man” and “The Guide for a Single Woman”.
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