5 Celebrities Who Played Off Terrible Actions As 'Jokes'

In any given interaction, there are two sides to the story. We're conditioned to believe this. It's a platitude -- a thing you say that immediately works as a kick in the gut to the first side. In Cross' case, that side was that he didn't fully believe her. He said that while he didn't remember the interaction with Yi, he admits that it could have happened. He's certainly not saying Yi is a liar. And then he dug deep.

In a follow-up explanation to his original explanation which was mostly "I'm not a racist, sorry if I was," Cross explained that he has never said "ching chong ching chong." Unless he did. But he'd only do that if he was playing his famous wacky racist Southern character. And then about two sentences later, he explained how he does the racist redneck character because he grew up in the South. Don't you get it? He knew racists in the South, so upon meeting an Asian American woman for the first time, he said racist stuff to her as a joke. Because [page missing].

I, of course, don't know David Cross or Charlyne Yi. I don't know the circumstances of their meeting, or how often Cross might pull out racism as a way of breaking the ice. But I do know that, in general, first meetings are never a good time to bust it out, because the person you're being racist to is never, ever going to find that funny. And it sucks because I want Cross to be a great guy and for this to be a terrible misunderstanding between the two of them (and now all of us). But as it sits in the world right now, it's as fucky as a Bangbus blooper reel.

Back in 2006, Israeli President Moshe Katsav was accused of sexual assault and rape by ten different women. Five of the accusations were beyond the statute of limitations, but Katsav was found guilty of the other five. So naturally, Putin observed that he didn't look like the kind of guy who could get with ten women! Zing!

I have started a new paragraph so that you could use the gap in between to laugh. If that didn't hit home for you, here's another knee-slapper from Putin: "What a mighty man he turns out to be! He raped ten women -- I would never have expected this from him. He surprised us all -- we all envy him!"

A couple of years later, he made an off-the-cuff comment about Hillary Clinton: "A head of state should have a head." But wait, I'm pretty sure Hillary already has a head. She does, right? I'm ... I'm not crazy? Oh wait, that's not the head he's talking about. It's a dick joke! Because she's a woman! Penis!

The Kremlin probably doesn't have a ton of shits to give about Putin offending people out in the world, but for the sake of at least keeping up the pretense that he's a human and not a lizard man bent on world domination, they offered up an explanation of his uncouth remarks: "Sometimes translation from Russian into English does not reflect the essence of a joke. This was such a case." So now I'm worried that if you run this article through Google Translate, Russians are going to get a version in which I praise animal fucking or something.

By the way, Putin speaks fluent English, so if he wanted to ever clarify his remarks, he's perfectly capable of doing so.

Despite being wheelchair-bound and carrying an air of dignity, Bush is something of a lecherous old coot. And that means if you're a woman posing for a picture with him, keep your eyes on his little broccoli-grabbing digits. He has a habit of butt-fondling these days.

So far, eight women have come forward to accuse Bush of sexual assault, all with similar stories of attending events with the former president and taking the opportunity to pose with him and his wife for photos. During the posing, Bush's hands go all akimbo, and he grabs asses the way a Trump grabs pussies, which is to say without consent.

Jordana Grolnick, Heather Lind, and others have described how Bush would get them in close to ask if they knew who his favorite magician was. Sometimes he changed it up to "favorite book" ... you know, to keep it fresh. Laughter was then loaded into the chamber and ready to launch, as he busted out the punchline of "David Cop-A-Feel." Laughter was them aborted, as the punchline was accompanied by a wizened Crypt Keeper talon clawing at their asses.

Once the accusations surfaced, Bush's people released a statement:

"To try to put people at ease, the president routinely tells the same joke -- and on occasion, he has patted women's rears in what he intended to be a good-natured manner. Some have seen it as innocent; others clearly view it as inappropriate. To anyone he has offended, President Bush apologizes most sincerely."

The further explanation offered, "His arm falls on the lower waist of people with whom he takes pictures." Which is basically Bush's people saying, "His hand is at ass level, so what do you expect?"

So what most people (and the law) would view as sexual harassment and assault, the ex-president views as good-natured fun with a complete stranger. Some may argue that this is no big deal, that he's just an old man who's harmless. And to that I say first that the earliest alleged incident so far is from 1992. And second, his oldness is a compounding factor in the grossness. It's always offensive to grab someone's ass. Most parents teach their fucking three-year-olds that.

Wuerker went on Twitter to defend his alleged wit by saying the point was to mock secession. One of any number of problems with this is that as recently as August 2016, only about 26 percent of Texans polled supported secession. UC Berkeley managed to conduct a poll in March of 2017 that had over 30 percent support for California secession, so why not make fun of them? And why not make fun of either side at any other time than when they're dealing with deadly floods? The death toll in Texas was at 45 people at the time this cartoon was published. You'd think that would be enough to not take jabs at the 26 percent of 944 people polled who favored Texas leaving the U.S. Or even if you ignored the numbers, you'd think that a cartoonist would have at least a basic idea of how comedy worked at all.

This article will bloat to a few thousand words if we account for all the times he's been accused of exposing himself or groping others, so we'll just jump forward to 2017 when Dick got fired from a pair of indie films after new allegations of abuse. According to reports, at least four people accused Dick of groping their genitals, licking and kissing them, and/or propositioning them sexually.

So how does a man with a long, uncontested history of gross behavior respond? He said that, "I don't grope people anymore. I don't expose myself anymore," which is a hell of a sad statement to make, followed by the admission that he does lick people, but "It's me being funny. I'm not trying to sexually harass people."

Ha ha, don't you get it? When serial harasser and sexual assaulter Andy Dick -- who is so well-known for this behavior that they made a movie called Everybody Has An Andy Dick Story -- licks your face, it's not assault or harassment. It's comedy! Someone bang a cymbal, we need a rim shot.

Want to make jokes that aren't excuses for being awful? Here's a fart machine!

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Check out Robert Evans' A Brief History of Vice: How Bad Behavior Built Civilization, a celebration of the brave, drunken pioneers who built our civilization one seemingly bad decision at a time.