You might have seen the tweet and the accompanying photo posted by Jay Feely, a football analyst on CBS.
Wishing my beautiful daughter and her date a great time at prom #BadBoys pic.twitter.com/T5JRZQYq9e
— Jay Feely (@jayfeely) April 22, 2018
Feely can be seen standing between his daughter and her prom date, and he’s wishing them a great time at the prom.
Sweet. Oh, and very funny.
Why? Because we see Feely holding a gun, pointed at the ground.
I guess you know what happened next.
Nothing less than the usual firestorm, as the condemnations hit the fan.
That’s when Feely caved. And, of course, he made the requisite apology.
“The prom picture I posted was obviously intended to be a joke. My daughter has dated her boyfriend for over a year and they knew I was joking.
I take gun safety seriously (the gun was not loaded and had no magazine in) and I did not intend to be insensitive to that important issue.”
It’s hard to blame Feely. He’s a former player, and he wasn’t ready to be known as a former broadcaster. No doubt, he got the phone call from the higher-ups at CBS, who told him (and I’m paraphrasing): “That’s a nice broadcasting job you’ve got there. We wouldn’t want anything to happen to it.”
Besides being funny, the joke Feely made is an old standard told by protective fathers. Give Feely credit for delivering it in a new and refreshing way.
There’s a funny scene, perhaps the only funny scene, in the movie “Clueless.” As his daughter prepares for a date, the Dad, played by Dan Hedaya, approaches the teenage boy and has a little heart-to-heart with the young man.
“Anything happens to my daughter,” the Dad tells him. “I got a .45 and a shovel. I doubt anybody would miss you.”
Very funny. That’s what Dads are supposed to say. Even Dads who don’t say it, wish that they did.
Guess this means “Clueless” will no longer be shown on cable TV, and is, at this moment, being erased―Stalin-like―from the list of available Netflix movies.
Okay, not a big loss.
But not being able to kid around like Feely did is a big loss.
We’re getting to where we can’t say much about anyone or anything. That’s not funny.
The only ones left making jokes are the late night hosts—and they’re only making jokes about Trump.
But those jokes are humorless, made by people who are clueless.