Sanchez: Mark, you have a bit of a different take on this joke, these sets of jokes from this comedian, essentially that we shouldn’t be looking for serious political discourse from a guy that tries to make funnies.
Preston: A hundred percent, and I would remove him from the rest of that vulgar, angry, real hate rhetoric that we heard from all of the supporters of President Trump. I suspect we will not see comedians be involved in politics like this again. I will say, I do not know this guy personally. I have followed his career. I don’t find him to be racist. However, you can’t go out onto a political stage and say the things that he said and [not have] people accuse you of that.
Having said that, I do think we have to be careful in all this rhetoric, this hatred rhetoric, we have to be able to protect the right to free speech and for people to say these stupid, silly things and allow us to make the judgment of them. But for this guy in particular, I would remove him necessarily because I don’t think he understood necessarily that stage that he was on last night is not the same stage that he was on just a few weeks ago when he sold out Madison Square Garden to a, you know, for his show.
Keilar: This isn’t the comedy hour, right, that he’s doing. This isn’t a Netflix special. But what I found interesting was who he targeted because his defense of himself was “I made fun of everyone.” So I endured his spiel twice to see if that was the case. And it’s not.
Preston: Terrible.
Keilar: I mean, I just want to be clear. He did not make fun of White people the way he made fun of non-White people. He was really punching at historically mistreated groups. And there was no — you’re on as a comedian. I think you’re on safer ground, maybe making fun of a group to which you belong, certainly if you’re going to be making fun of other groups. And he was — I didn’t see a whole lot of that. He made fun of Travis Kelce , [President] Joe Biden . He made fun of the Clintons . But I mean, there wasn’t a whole lot of other jokes.
Preston: Listen, first of all, making fun of yourself is probably the smartest thing to do, because as you bring any criticism within, he could have probably brought the crowd along with him. Now what’s interesting, he didn’t even get the crowd last night. Everybody was kind of like, “ha ha ha ha,” like laughing, applauding. Not only that, but again, this guy went out and said these ridiculous comments. The Trump campaign, mind you, is not having a good day today, right? They don’t want us to be talking about this. They don’t want every major news outlet to be talking about this because that isn’t what they wanted to come out of this rally. However, when you play with dynamite and you light these sticks of dynamite, you’ve got to be prepared for them to blow up. And in this case, it blew up on them.
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