Tenacious D thrive on black humour. So why gag themselves now?

Amid all the talk about the “cancel culture” in America, there is one special form of it – the outrage that arises when a pop or comedy performer says something untoward.

I should put the word “outrage” in quotes, however, because what we’re really talking about is what Jon Stewart calls the “right-wing faux outrage machine”, led of course by Fox News and the country’s toxic talk radio network.

After a low-brow, even callous crack by a member of a comedy rock duo Tenacious D in Sydney last weekend, we might be able to have a ringside seat as it unfolds in real time in the coming days.

Kyle Gass and Jack Black of Tenacious D on stage in 2022.Credit: AP

In the pair’s second show at the Sydney Convention Centre on Sunday night, Kyle Gass – one half of Tenacious D, the other half being actor Jack Black – was presented with a birthday cake and asked to make a wish. “Don’t miss Trump next time,” quipped Gass. It was a clear reference to the attempted assassination of the former president that same day. The audience responded with loud cheers and laughter.

In the aftermath, both Black and Gass apologised, profusely and without reservations. Black, in particular, specifically said he was “blindsided” by the remark and that the band’s activities would be put on hold. More on that in a minute.

Now, jokes about assassination attempts are risky, especially in the United States. Given the country’s experience with political shootings in the 1960s, such talk, even in jest, is generally frowned upon. It’s actually against the law in the US to make violent threats against the president. Indeed, just today, a man in Florida – who was being treated at a mental health facility – was arrested after saying something about wanting to slit the throat of President Joe Biden.

During my time in Washington, D.C., I happened to live next door to a well-known government official, and had Secret Service agents living across the hall. I can remember more than once being a bit uneasy if friends visiting were casually flippant on the subject of harm coming to the commander in chief.

The Dixie Chicks (now called The Chicks) with their Grammy Awards in 2007, four years after being “cancelled” for criticising then-president George W. Bush.Credit: AP

That said, wasn’t Tenacious D’s “improvised line” just a dumb joke? What a clownish comedian quips about a political issue in America from a far corner of the world is not an earth-shaking event. This week, Fox News and its cohort have their collective media hands full with the Republican convention. It will be interesting to see whether they decide to jump on Tenacious D.

It’s happened before. The highest-profile occurrence came in 2003 when, during the start of the Iraq War, a member of the country music trio, the Dixie Chicks, on tour in England, remarked that they were ashamed that George W. Bush was their president. This hit the news and stayed there – fuelled by the right, gleefully wielding a patriotism bat in the sensitive post-9/11 years – and the group’s career was waylaid.

More recently, in 2017, Kathy Griffin, a bruising comic and absurdist reality-TV show star, released a picture of herself proudly brandishing a fake severed head of Donald Trump. Griffin was abandoned even by many of her friends on the left, and the move vaporised her career.

However, in time, both got their careers back and even became icons of resistance for the protection of free speech. The Dixie Chicks returned three years later with a song about the controversy, Not Ready To Make Nice. They dominated the Grammys the following year and remain stars – as their rousing arena show in Sydney last spring attested. (They are called simply The Chicks now.) Griffin is back as well, with a comedy special about the controversy, A Hell of a Story.

In retrospect, we can see that neither deserved the obloquy they got. Why can’t a performer say she was ashamed of the president, particularly since she came from the same state? And as for Griffin, while the tableau was indeed a bit bloody, the pose was a plain reference to a famous painting by Artemisia Gentileschi, a feminist icon, featuring the severed head of John the Baptist. Was it in the best taste? No. Was it anything approaching an actual threat to then-president Trump? Of course not – and yet, Griffin was still investigated by the Secret Service.

The ironic thing, of course, is that Trump and his crusaders on the right have been making statements an order of magnitude worse for years, fetishising all manner of weapons and making violent rhetoric a staple of their campaigns. And that was all before the violence of January 6, 2021, in which the rhetoric became explicit.

Explicit threats and calls to violence aside, all of this – the distasteful jokes, the metaphoric (we hope) calls to arms – is protected First Amendment speech in the US. And folks who don’t like the things others are saying have a right to speak out about it. That’s not cancelling. And in this case, of course, Tenacious D have in effect cancelled themselves already. Still, as I said above, it will be interesting to see whether the stray remark captures the right-wing mediasphere’s attention, apologies or no. Indeed, that’s why, I think, Jack Black – generally a pugnacious sort – distanced himself from his partner’s crack so carefully.

Black makes a very nice living as the voice of the titular panda in the highly remunerative DreamWorks Animation Kung Fu Panda films and TV series. Black and DreamWorks plainly were worried that even a preoccupied Fox would not be able to resist spending some time trying to tarnish a franchise of one of their enemies in Hollywood.

Soon we’ll know whether Black and Gass become the right’s newest whipping boys – or manage to dodge – you’ll excuse the expression – a bullet.

Bill Wyman is a former arts editor and assistant managing editor of National Public Radio in Washington. He teaches at the University of Sydney.