After Katrina, the laughs start to return

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Late-night blitz
Most of the late-night TV comics’ barbs have been directed at the Bush administration.

When told it was going to take 80 days to drain flood water out of New Orleans, Conan O’Brien joked that Bush said, “that’s almost half a vacation.” Jay Leno said the Federal Emergency Management Agency head recently appeared at his doorstep and said, “I’m here for the earthquake damage you had back in ’94.”

As Hurricane Ophelia neared North Carolina, David Letterman said that “the Bush administration is getting ready to ignore it.”

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“One thing that made this comic territory was that there was very quickly somebody they could go after, and somebody they could go after in a separate, safe kind of way,” Thompson said.

Any notion of taboos crumbled when comic D.L. Hughley, on his late-night Comedy Central show last weekend, took on looters who had stolen electronic equipment in a flooded city with no power.

“What are you going to do with a 42-inch plasma TV? Drag it to the roof?” he said. “Take me back! I forgot my remote!”

He also noted how many New Orleans residents were religious, and chose to stay behind while putting their faith in God: “Sometimes God sends the weatherman to say there’s a Level 5 hurricane. Sometimes Al Roker is God.”

'The ironic things'
Hughley, who is black, can get away with jokes that would raise eyebrows if told by white comedians. In an interview, he said one of his staff members had asked if it was too soon to laugh at Katrina.

“That’s sort of a silly question,” Hughley said. “Day 15 is too soon, but Day 16 is all right?”

Ten years ago, Hughley said, he participated in a Harvard University seminar on comedy with Robert Klein and Joan Rivers. The question was posed: was there any subject they considered out of bounds for comedy?

Yes, Klein replied. There had just been a flood in India that had killed thousands of people. He saw nothing funny about that.

Rivers piped up: “I just want to know. Who got all the jewelry?”

Hughley filed that away as a lesson.

“The event itself, of course it’s not funny,” he said. “It’s the ironic things around it that everyone can relate to.”

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