Comedians and their fans have spent the last few days trying to reckon with Steve Rannazzisi’s admission that his many stories about surviving the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001 were lies. The timing of this confession couldn’t have come at a worse time for the 37-year-old comic and actor. The seventh and final season of The League, on which he plays the put-upon family man Kevin McArthur, just kicked off on FXX. His Comedy Central special Breaking Dad is set to premiere this weekend. And he was going to be a fixture on television during the next six months of the NFL season with his many commercials for Buffalo Wild Wings.
Of course, this isn’t the first time that a comic has let his or her comments about 9/11 get them in trouble, nor will it be the last. Sure, most of the examples below aren’t quite on the level of the out and out fabrication that Rannazzisi has engaged in for the past several years, but they should provide some comfort to him that his fans and the comedy community will likely help him move on from this embarrassment.
1. Bill Maher
Less than a week after the World Trade Center attacks, the nerves of the general public were frayed, raw and very sensitive as we tried to recover from the horrors that played out that day. So when Bill Maher, on his former talk show Politically Incorrect, said, “We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building? Say what you want about it…not cowardly,” the already ruffled feathers of a reeling U.S. populace got even more ruffled. Though the host issued an apology, the show never really recovered and was canceled the following June. Maher obviously came out of it with a better deal, moving to HBO where there are no advertisers to appease nor censors to skirt around.
2. Gilbert Gottfried
The mood in New York City in the weeks following 9/11 was a defiant one. Every event that went on felt like the attendees were thumbing their noses at anyone that dared think they could topple the metropolis. So you can imagine the response of the folks who attended the Friars’ Club roast of Hugh Hefner when Gilbert Gottfried joked, “I have to leave early tonight. I have to fly to L.A., but I couldn’t get a direct flight. I have to make a stop at the Empire State Building.” Even amid the raunch and insults tossed around like confetti, that was, for the audience, a step too far. As Gottfried told The Las Vegas Sun, “People were booing and gasping, and one guy yelled out, ‘Too soon!’” Pilloried though he was for the joke, the comic’s career stayed the course until he made a potentially “too soon” joke about the tsunami that struck Japan in 2011, which cost him his job as the voice of the AFLAC duck.