There were a lot of television shows that presented and talked about the death of Osama bin Laden. News stations, such as CNN, were all on this topic. The death of bin Laden has definitely caused uproar in the American society. There were actually people who sung the national anthem once they heard about Osama bin Laden’s death. I was watching a show on Comedy Central called, The Colbert Report. This show is a comedy news station that takes current events on news and turns it into a comedy which people find humorous. He brings up the topic that Osama bin Laden was become more of a symbolic figure head. In comparison, Colbert brings up the British monarchy and how we adore them aside from Osama bin Laden. He even brings up the topic on how the military team that killed Osama, The Seal Team Six. Although the identities of the assault team were kept hidden, Colbert continues to make jokes and assume that the team members consisted of characters such as Kung Fu Panda and The Batman. Colbert uses different approaches to sensitive topics in order to make it humorous. In a way, it eases tension from the topic and applies a satirical flavor to the news.
When the death of Osama Bin Laden was announced, it wasn’t going to take long before we started to hear jokes and humor related to the incident. There are a group of people who took advantage of this and they are the late night show hosts. Everyone from Jimmy Fallon to Jimmy Kimmel took advantage of this big news and used the incident and poked fun at it. I feel as we joke around with incidents because we do it as a defense mechanism. I mean in reality, there is worry about the repercussions of the death such as people getting revenge. But at the same time, I believe that these people who poke fun at it are just trying to make the best of a good situation. I mean it’s bad to laugh at someone’s death, despite that person being a mass murderer. In the end, we all need to move on and people cope with situations different ways, whether it’s just to silently move on, laugh at it or ignore it. In this clip from Jimmy Kimmel, he talks about the controversy surrounding Osama’s death picture. Prior to watching this, I already knew of this picture that was circulating around because of Facebook. In Facebook, people fall into these spam tricks where they click on something thinking it’s the “real video of Osama’s death”. It has a thumbnail of a photoshopped picture of Osama’s face bloodied and then it ends up being a lie because it gets the users facebook information and spams the link everywhere. Anyway, to get back on track. Jimmy Kimmel talks about the picture and of course, pokes fun at it. At first, he discusses both point of views. One he states it may be better not to show the picture because he doesn’t want the possibility of causing more tension to people who may want to take revenge. On another end, he talks about how we, as citizens of the United States should have the right to view the pictures if he wanted too. He then comes up with a humorous solution where he has a picture of a watermelon with a turban and a beard with the insides of the watermelon acting as the blood and guts to represent his death picture to which the audience laughs at it. It was pretty funny and somewhat tasteful because it wasn’t gory, but it’s still hard to look at a situation like this and celebrate. Sure, it’s a step in the right direction in terms of eliminating terrorism, but at the same time. It’s still someone’s death that many people are celebrating. It’s somewhat awkward because of the balance between nationalism (with US happy that someone who terrorized the country was killed by US Military) and general moral values (Violence is not the answer, etc.).
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