During the Comedy Central Roast of Charlie Sheen, Amy Schumer addressed Steve-O in the following joke:
I truly am — no joke — sorry for the loss of your friend Ryan Dunn. I know you must have been thinking, “It could’ve been me.” And I know we were all thinking, “Why wasn’t it?”
There are any number of variations on the “shoulda been you” joke — that same night, Jeffrey Ross told essentially the same joke about Anthony Jeselnik, with Greg Giraldo as the deceased subject. Hell, I told a “shoulda been Steve-O” joke the morning after Dunn’s death. But because people are idiots and because “Jackass” fans get butt-hurt any time someone says “Ryan Dunn” without crying, Schumer’s come under fire for mentioning Dunn’s name in a joke directed at Steve-O. Schumer, amazingly, responded to the criticism without calling anyone a moron.
“I don’t feel the need to apologize,” Schumer says. “I respect people’s opinion as long as they understand what the joke is. It wasn’t a Ryan Dunn joke. It was a Steve-O joke. It was a typical roast joke. It had the formula of any roast joke. That wasn’t even one of the jokes I had where I was thinking, ‘here it comes, I’m going to drop the hammer now.” [Laughspin]
Good for her. Something like this happens at every roast. People who never watch stand-up tune in hoping to see lots of mean jokes, then they inevitably decide that someone crossed an arbitrary line that doesn’t actually exist. It’s like they get off on being offended. And really, THOSE are the people who deserve to die in fiery car wrecks.
