In the wake of the 9.0-magnitude earthquake that triggered a massive tsunami, wreaking havoc on the coastal cities of Japan with an estimated death toll of 10,000, comedian Gilbert Gottfried, best known for his wildly obnoxious voice, decided to offer up this joke on Twitter: "Japan is really advanced. They don't go to the beach. The beach comes to them," Gottfried wrote in one tweet, which has since been removed. The diminutive comedian was subsequently fired as the voice of the duck in commercials for Aflac, an insurance company that just so happens to do 75 percent of its business in Japan. Gottfried has since apologized.
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Mississippi Gov. and GOP presidential hopeful Haley Barbour is no stranger to controversy, having come under heavy criticism for his purported racist remarks late last year. It seems Barbour has passed along his penchant for slips of the tongue to his press secretary, Dan Turner, who fired off a string of insensitive emails, including one mocking the victims of the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan. In an email to fellow staffers Friday, Turner wrote, "Otis Redding posthumously received a gold record for his single, (Sittin' on) The Doc of the Bay. (Not a big hit in Japan Right now.)," Politico reported. Turner also mocked former Attorney General Janet Reno and the 1970s genocide in Cambodia in the emails. He resigned Monday night, according to a statement posted on Barbour's website.
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Before the Charlie Sheen saga really went into overdrive, the troubled actor went on Alex Jones' radio show in late February, where he blasted Chuck Lorre, the creator of Sheen's hit CBS TV sitcom, Two and a Half Men. Sheen called Lorre a "clown," referred to him as "Chaim Levine"—joking about Lorre's religion—and, the day before Sheen was fired from Two and a Half Men, he sent out a gem of a tweet that read: "fastball. the trolls are foaming from their toothless holes. rumor mill abundant with evil gossip. mainstream heretics smirking." Sheen has since filed a $100 million lawsuit against Warner Bros. and Lorre for firing him from the sitcom.
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Were they too funny for Saturday Night Live? The late night NBC show, run by Lorne Michaels, reportedly fired Adam Sandler and Chris Farley, two of the biggest stars ever to graduate from the sketch comedy series. In an appearance on last year's The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien, Sandler said, "I did get fired also. Back in the day," the New York Post reported. "Nobody wanted to tell me the truth that I was getting fired. All of a sudden Farley ran into my office and is like, 'We're getting fired!' Me and him got fired. That's when my manager at the time came up with, 'NBC: Nothing But C—ts!" Both guys of course went on to become A-list film comedy stars, while SNL is a shell of its former self.
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Wyclef Jean, if you're reading this, cover your eyes now. DJ Cipha Sounds, who hosts a show on the New York City radio station Hot 97, was suspended after he made a few highly insensitive remarks last year about the HIV epidemic in earthquake-ravaged Haiti. Sounds, whose real name is Luis Diaz, sparked public outrage when he said he is HIV negative because he doesn't "mess with Haitian girls," NY1 reported. Community leaders and elected officials protested outside the Hot 97 studios calling for his firing. Eventually, Sounds was pulled off the air and forced to undergo sensitivity training focused on the Haitian community.
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Before the whole Charlie Sheen fiasco, CBS President and CEO Les Moonves had a whole other headache to deal with. After the Rutgers University women's basketball team made a surprise run deep in the 2007 NCAA tournament, CBS Radio host Don Imus cracked some tasteless jokes about the women, referring to them as " nappy-headed hos." The comments incited several protests, with the Rev. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson meeting with Moonves to personally advocate for Imus' removal. Imus was first suspended from his radio program for two weeks without pay, and then he was fired, despite the program being worth an estimated $15 million in annual revenue to CBS, which owned Imus' home radio station, WFAN-AM in New York, and syndicated his shows across the country through Westwood One. Jackson called Imus' firing "a victory for public decency. No one should use the public airwaves to transmit racial or sexual degradation."
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Before he escaped to the unregulated arena of satellite radio, shock jock Howard Stern was a rising star in radio on WNBC. Still, he repeatedly ran afoul of management due to his risqué segments. The station eventually tasked program director Kevin Metheny with closely monitoring Stern and cutting him off the air if the material got too offensive (the entire saga is hilariously depicted in Stern's 1997 biopic, Private Parts). In 1985, despite claiming the highest ratings at WNBC in four years, Stern and his sidekick, Robin Quivers, were fired for what management said was "conceptual differences," according to New York magazine. Stern, meanwhile, claimed that Thornton Bradshaw, chairman of WNBC owner RCA, tuned in to his "Bestiality Dial-a-Date" segment, which had aired 10 days earlier, and ordered him to be fired.
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Howard Stern and Don Imus aren't the only big-name radio hosts to be fired for their on-air antics. Stern's NYC competition, WNEW-FM radio hosts Greg "Opie" Hughes and Anthony Cumia, better known as Opie and Anthony, were fired from their show for airing a segment in which a couple was purported to be having sex inside New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral back in August 2002. The couple in question, Loretty Lynn Harper and Brian Florence, were caught red-handed and arrested in the vestibule of the church. Infinity Broadcasting, which aired Opie and Anthony, also was fined $357,000 for indecency by the FCC—then the second-biggest fine ever for indecency. Like Stern, the duo now are broadcasting on FCC-free XM/Sirius satellite radio.
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Before Gilbert Gottfried, there was the "Tsunami Song." In late January 2005, just after the Indian Ocean tsunami devastated Southeast Asia, killing more than 230,000 people in 14 countries, a producer and a pair of disc jockeys at New York City's Hot 97 aired a parody song about the tsunami victims. To the tune of "We Are the World," the lyrics went: "There were Africans drowning, little Chinamen swept away you could hear God laughing, 'Swim you bitches, swim.' So now you're screwed, it's the tsunami you better run or kiss your ass away, go find your mommy I just saw her float by, a tree went through her head and now your children will be sold to child slavery…" The song was played every day for a week until an Internet petition, sidewalk protests outside the Hot 97 building, and Sprint and McDonald's dropping their advertising finally got the station to change its tune. Producer Rick Delgado, who penned the song, was fired, along with comedian and morning DJ Todd Lynn, who sang the lyrics. Lynn's co-host, Miss Jones, was suspended after issuing an apology.
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A celebrated Irish tenor, Ronan Tynan has performed at a variety of high-profile events, including Ronald Reagan's state funeral, George H.W. Bush's 80th birthday, and George W. Bush's second inauguration. In New York City, Tynan was best known as the man who sang "God Bless America" during the seventh-inning stretch at Yankees baseball games. However, Tynan was canned from his post-9/11 gig after allegedly making an anti-Semitic joke back in October 2009. While chatting with a real-estate broker who was showing Tynan an apartment, the broker reportedly joked, "Don't worry, they are not Red Sox fans," to which Tynan allegedly replied, "I don't care about that, as long as they are not Jewish." Tynan forgot the thousands of Jewish Yankee fans—and he was subsequently shown the door. After apologizing profusely and performing at a dinner for the Anti-Defamation League, the ADL head Abraham Foxman said, "It is our belief that when an individual who has a record of good works, as does Dr. Tynan, slips up on one occasion, a sincere apology should help everyone move on."
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Apparently, Aflac isn't the only insurance company with an aversion to off-color jokes. Actor Lance Baxter, who goes by the stage name "D.C. Douglas," was once the man whose voice informed audiences exactly how much money Geico would save them on car insurance—that is, until he left a message last April at FreedomWorks, a D.C.-based Tea Party organization, in which he asked how many "mentally retarded" staffers there were and what the group would do if an incensed Tea Partier "killed someone." Douglas was fired a few weeks later, and claimed that he was motivated by "the recent gay and racial slurs slung by Tea Party members at Congressman Barney Frank and Representative John Lewis during the Health Care Reform Weekend."
D.C. Douglas
Here's another tweet #fail. After Mother Jones magazine tweeted about the Wisconsin labor protests back in February, Indiana Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Cox tweeted back, "Use live ammunition," and referred to the protesters as "thugs physically threatening legally elected state legislators & governor," before adding, "You're damn right I advocate deadly force," according to the magazine. Mother Jones reported the incident and, despite Cox's contention that the comments were intended to be satirical, he was fired. "I think in this day and age that tweet was not a good idea and in terms of that language, I'm not going to use it anymore," Cox told Indianapolis television station WRTV.
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In yet another case of a GOP joke gone awry, Florida Committeewoman Carol Carter sent out an email to her Republican colleagues in the Tampa Bay area wondering how so many black people were able to travel to Washington, D.C., for Barack Obama's presidential inauguration. "How can 2,000,000 blacks get into Washington, DC in 1 day in subzero temps when 200,000 couldn't get out of New Orleans in 85 degree temps with four days notice?" Carter wrote. Hurricane Katrina humor, get it? Yikes. Carter was forced to resign from her post as state committeewoman representing Hillsborough County as a result of the racist email joke. "Carol Carter has been a hard-working, loyal Republican for many years," state GOP Chairman Jim Greer said in a statement. "I appreciate her many notable contributions to our party, but this action I have no tolerance for, regardless of the circumstances or intent."
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This one comes courtesy of our friends across the pond. Ann Winterton was a British Conservative Party politician and the member of parliament for Congleton dating as far back as 1983. But in May 2010, Winterton was at a rugby club dinner in Congleton and cracked what she thought was a funny joke about how an Englishman threw a Pakistani out of a railway car because they were "10 a penny" in the U.K. The Sunday Mirror got wind of the joke and reprinted it verbatim, prompting Tory leader Duncan Smith to call Winterton's remarks "offensive and unacceptable," after dismissing her. She would later apologize for the joke, saying, "I unreservedly apologize if anyone was offended or took offense to what I said," the BBC reports.
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