The weekend after a jury acquitted O.J. “Well, it’s finally official.” He said. “Murder is legal in California.”
The 1995 trial of Simpson, who died Wednesday at age 76, didn’t just dominate the media and spark a revolution. It has also become a staple of comedy. The details of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald L. Goldman have become a daily staple on talk shows, sitcoms, and stand-up stages. And Macdonald’s obsession with OJ jokes, one of the biggest comedy genres of the 1990s, cemented his status as one of the best comedians of his generation.
Chris Rock’s button-pushing analysis of the dynamics of the OJ Simpson case in his groundbreaking 1996 special “Bring the Pain” helped change the course of his career. He claimed fame was what saved Simpson. “If OJ drove a bus, he wouldn’t even be OJ,” he said. “He’s going to be Orenthal, the bus-driving murderer.”
OJ jokes were so prevalent in the 1990s that you could stand out if you didn’t tell them. The week after Simpson’s arrest, Howard Stern appeared on “The Late Show with David Letterman” at the height of late-night warfare and asked the host why he was avoiding the topic. “Let me put my problem in context,” Letterman responded. “Double murder doesn’t break me like it used to.”
Letterman made a few jokes about the trial, including a list of the top 10 things that could end up getting kicked out of the jury (No. 1: “Keep chugging along.”). But his caution was in stark contrast to Jay Leno, who went all-in on OJ jokes on “The Tonight Show.” A study that tracked his monologues found that Leno said more punchlines about Simpson than any other celebrity, beating out Michael Jackson and Martha Stewart. For a moment, he imagined Judge Lance Ito and Chief Prosecutor Marcia Clark as members of the Broadway Chorus Line. In an even more perverse parody, Leno reimagined the murder trial as a sitcom, using the theme song from “Gilligan’s Island” and portraying Simpson as the lovable title character. Is this sketch an entertainment turn or a parody of a real tragedy? Looking at it now, the difference seems meaningless.
Those jokes paid off. Leno’s audience grew, and this period became a turning point for late night. ‘The Tonight Show’ surpassed ‘The Late Show’ in viewership ratings for the first time in July 1995, when the trial was in full swing.
While Leno joked about the Simpsons case like any other scandal, MacDonald brought a sharp conviction to his OJ jokes. Dr. Even the premise of reissuing Dr. Seuss’s books would lead to the crux of the book, titled “Green Eggs and Ham and OJ Is Guilty.” Anxious sounds can be heard in the crowd during these jokes. One of his best was booed. He said this after Simpson became emotional after seeing a bloody photo of his ex-wife during the trial. Here’s the key: “He knew at that moment that he could never kill her again.”
NBC executive Don Ohlmeyer, a friend of Simpson’s, fired McDonald in 1998, widely seen as revenge for the OJ joke.
Pundits regularly lament the hypersensitivity that prevents comics from making jokes anymore, but illuminating brutal murders on a regular basis for a national audience may have once been inconceivable. Just as the OJ Simpson trial changed the way the media covered scandals, so did the standards for what was acceptable to ridicule on television.
The driving force behind this change was the audience’s desire to laugh at dark and dull subjects. This has become even more evident with the decline in online gatekeepers. OJ jokes have dominated my social media feeds since his death. And while the “it’s too soon” idea isn’t old, it seemed bizarre and fresh when CNN anchor Jake Tapper concluded his interview with Conan O’Brien on Thursday and asked if there was an OJ joke, to which O’Brien responded that he’d never said anything like that. A joke about the day someone died. Tapper said, “Okay. “I will contact you tomorrow,” he replied.
