On Tuesday, host Carson Daly made a tasteless gay joke on his morning radio show “The Voice” during a discussion about the midair meltdown of JetBlue pilot Clayton Osborn. When Osborn began behaving in a disruptive and unruly manner during the New York-Las Vegas flight, the crew locked him out of the cabin. But his erratic behavior continued, forcing passengers to tackle and restrain the captain until the plane could make an emergency landing in Texas.
Here’s Daly’s take on the situation:
“… turns out, on this particular flight, most of the people [on board] were on their way to some sort of security conference in Las Vegas. So there’s a bunch of dudes — and well-trained dudes — what are the odds of that? Thank God. If that were me, I mean, my luck, it would be like, this is the flight going to Pride in San Francisco… I mean, that would be my colleagues.”
Then Daly switched to a stereotypical queeny character voice and said, “Uh, we’re headed down to Vegas for the floral convention. Can we get a little help up here with the pilot? Oh no. Thank you! Handle it…”
Here’s the audio:
To his credit, Carson Daly did tweet an apology: ”This morning on my radio show I attempted to make fun of myself & offended others by mistake. I sincerely apologize.”
But Jeremy Kinser wasn’t going to let Daly’s comments slide without giving the star an important reality check about in-flight acts of heroism by LGBT people. Writing for the Advocate, Kinser reminds Daly (and all of us):
Carson Daly had obviously forgotten about the heroic effort of the late Mark Bingham when he joked that gay people wouldn’t have been able to restrain the JetBlue pilot who suffered a mid-air meltdown Wednesday. No one knows exactly what happened after Bingham, a gay man, and other passengers stormed the cockpit on September 11, but it’s safe to say they were the inspiration for the new culture of activist passengers on planes these days.
Kinser goes on to note that Bingham, a 6’4″ rugby player, was part of a core group of courageous passengers aboard United Flight 93 who stormed the cabin on 9/11 and prevented al-Qaeda terrorists from hitting their fourth target that day — either the United States Capitol or the White House.
I’d like to see him make a crack like that around a bunch of ‘bears’. I had a bear bf at one time and one thing I always felt around those guys was ‘safe’. Even if people knew we were all gay, no one would dare f–k with them.
I think we need to give Carson some serious cred here — think how many people have made tasteless jokes and only apologized AFTER a ton of controversy, after a bunch of publications talked about it, after advertisers started withdawing, etc. No, he apologized the SAME DAY — probably as soon as he learned people were offended.
Sometimes people make tasteless jokes. It happens. It’s how they *handle* it that we should be judging them on. He apologized of his own free will before there were any repercussions on the table — this is something we should be applauding. How many other tasteless jokes have been made and we had to raise a fuss for weeks before anyone apologized?
So, no, I don’t think we should still be criticizing Carson. How are *we* supposed to gain any respect if we can’t forgive people and can’t be respectful when they apologize?
Comon Carson, your better than this….apology accepted. Like your shows…