Artie Lange Has Been Pulled From Thursday’s @midnight For His ESPN Slave Joke On Twitter

It certainly didn’t take too long for folks to get extremely upset over Artie Lange’s Tweets from yesterday. We covered the comic’s posts pertaining to ESPN First Take’s Cari Champion a little earlier, but it would seem that other groups got involved and now Lange has been removed from a scheduled appearance on Comedy Central’s @midnight on Thursday night. Lange confirmed as much on his Twitter feed and even offered an explanation for the joke:

ESPN released a statement on Lange’s comments, calling them “reprehensible” and “hateful language.” From Variety:

 “They objectify and demean one of our valued employees under the thin guise of ‘comedy’ and are offensive to all of us. We will not dignify them with any other comment.”

It’s tiring to talk about outrage today. And when you do talk about it, it’s very easy to get lumped in with people who are beating the drums. When someone like Lange or Anthony Cumia makes a poor joke or goes on a rant, I think it is proper to cover it because they’re in the public eye. I would just rather leave it up to the people who read the article to pass judgment, even though personal thoughts will bleed into discussions from time to time.

There was some really nice discussions on the posts covering Chris Rock’s SNL monologue over the weekend and I think this fits in alongside them. Where many don’t think Rock crossed a line with his jokes, the response to this earlier seemed to be the opposite. Also a lot of folks didn’t find the joke that funny.

For what it’s worth, Lange is not actually going out to live out slave master fantasies. People are protesting him though and his supporters may have taken things to an extreme level, causing him to respond again:

All of this from a post on Twitter. It certainly says a lot about the pitfalls of modern communication and where we’re heading.

(Via Artie Lange / Variety)