Michael Ian Black Welcomes an Investigation Into His ‘Pedo’ Tweets

Michael Ian Black wants you to know that he is not a pedophile, he just pretended to be one on Twitter. After all, if he really was one of the internet’s many diddlers, he’d pretend to be a kid.

In the early 2010s, the Wet Hot American Summer star and member of the iconic comedy troupe The State had a humorous fixation with a topic not typically known for its levity. For at least half a decade, Black loved — and I mean loved — to tweet jokes where the punchline was some variation on the idea of “I’m a pedophile, haha!” This joke structure was not unique to Black, as every comic who has dabbled in, well, “black comedy” has pulled a misdirection of a similar orientation. Hell, Anthony Jeselnik made a career out of the concept.

Today, Black is just as terminally online as he was when he was firing off tweets like, “What’s Latin for ‘Bring me some boys,’” and, “@greggutfeld My mouth is all the bathroom you need, big boy,” but each of his posts is followed by replies from conservative users showing the same compilation of Black’s many sex crime-y tweets along with other innocuous ones that presumably link Black to the “Pizzagate” conspiracy. While Black admits to the profound tastelessness of the tweets in question, the implication of his haters that his offensive jokes were somehow an admission of horribly criminal behavior begs the question, “Would a single person on Jeffrey Epstein’s flight logs ever be so reckless as to tweet the words, ‘Boy caviar?’”

While I certainly have no knowledge of Black’s sex life or theoretical sex crimes beyond what’s publicly available on his Wikipedia page, I’m inclined to take the disgusting jokes at face value. Though the internet loves to catch misbehaving celebrities “telling on themselves,” it strains reason to think that an actual pedophile would be that blatant as to loudly and repeatedly tell the world “I molest kids” to the degree that Black has. Even the likes of Luc Besson knew to shroud their sliminess in at least one layer of artistically plausible deniability — though, maybe the true title for Leon, The Professional is literally Leon, The Pedophile.