No one should be punished for retweeting my jokes

Coming out isn’t easy.

It especially isn’t easy when you have to sit your wife and five children down and reveal that you are, in fact, an incel.

I’m not sure which orphanage to send the children to, but I’m sure they’ll understand that that the screeching Bezos-funded blue checks on Twitter know what they’re talking about.

Here’s what happened: I tweeted what turned out to be an old joke on Wednesday June 1. “Every girl is bi,” it said. “You just have to figure out if it’s polar or sexual.” I thought it was the perfect little bit of wordplay to end the first day of Pride Month. And the internet agreed.

I’ve had a couple of banger tweets go far in the past. When you have a small account like mine, it’s nice when one passes 1,000 likes. So, I’m stoked. I get to rebuild my Twitter following after losing it last year for throwing a schoolyard taunt at a certain prime minister of a certain snowy wasteland just above the border of these beautiful United States.

When the tweet hit 2,000 likes, it was a bit surprising. This was a banal throwaway joke that made me chuckle. At around the 2,000-mark, I learned that I am fat and bald and the reason women can’t break through glass ceilings, or something. The joke had started hitting the feeds of the Karens.

Then it devolved further. At around 4,300 likes, I started being tagged in tweets about how awful I was from disparate parts of the internet. As it turns out, some Washington Post blue-check called Dave Weigel had thought my joke was funny and retweeted it.

I never actually saw his retweet. It was deleted before I could get to it. Felicia Sonmez, another WaPo blue-check, called him out: “Fantastic to work at a news outlet where retweets like this are allowed!”

It’s bizarre to see someone else apologize for a tweet that you wrote. But, that’s exactly what Weigel did. “I just removed a retweet of an offensive joke. I apologize and did not mean to cause any harm,” he said.

Now, I don’t know Mr. Weigel. Although I doubt he’s a sexist, I do question the strength of his spine at this point.

Having my tweet featured prominently in a graphic on the New York Post and knowing that they had to reprint the tweet while pretending to be offended was the highlight of my day. As well as the addition of 1,200 or so followers on Twitter and a handful of subscriptions on my weekly podcast, The Mad Ones.

At the end of the day, this sort of blow-up only happens because culture is dying. The last two Netflix stand-up specials I watched, Dave Chappelle and Ricky Gervais’s latest, were both funny. They were both comedy. But, more than anything, they were comedy apologetics. They were defending comedy because it needs defending.

It’s important to laugh. It’s important to be able to look at the absurdity of the world around us and find some brief vacation from the utter seriousness that surrounds us. The woke can’t have that, though. They’re deadly serious about all things. So much so that a man can face professional repercussions and even potentially lose his job from laughing at another man’s joke. This is a great loss.

I’m not ready to let the screechers win. So, I’m still going to tell dumb jokes and not apologize to the mob. I hope you’ll do the same. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go listen to my wife laugh as I break it to her that if I was the only man on the planet then “every woman would be a lesbian.”

Cam Harless is a comedian and the co-host of The Mad Ones podcast.