TV comedy kept Michael Jackson allegations alive for decades -- and helped us laugh them off

Slate

For decades, shows ranging from Saturday Night Live to In Living Color to Chappelle's Show and Jay Leno's Tonight Show made Jackson's  relationship with children the butt of jokes. So, on some level, "we always knew" about the sexual molestation allegations made in HBO's Leaving Neverland, says Sam Adams. SNL, with Tim Meadows, portrayed Jackson as an asexual naïf incapable of relating to adult women, while Amy Poehler's Jackson was even more asexual and childlike, says Adams, who adds: "By then, Jackson had drifted so far from the realm of normalcy that having a white woman play him caused barely a ripple." Adams adds: "Late-night comedians and stand-ups took up the subject as well, more often than it’s possible to survey. A 2014 Slate study found that Jackson was the sixth-most-mentioned celebrity in all 29 years of David Letterman’s 'Top Ten' lists. According to another, Jay Leno alone cracked more than 500 jokes about Michael Jackson on The Tonight Show—and that presumably doesn’t include the period when Leno, who was called as a defense witness in Jackson’s criminal trial, was forbidden by a gag order from mentioning him on air and had to call in other comedians to tell the jokes for him. Like most late-night humor, their jokes seem largely opportunistic, devoid of anything resembling a coherent point of view. Individual stand-ups wrestled with Jackson on their own terms. On Chappelle’s Show, Dave Chappelle played a witness convinced of Jackson’s innocence for the simple reason that 'he made Thriller,' but onstage the same year, Chappelle merely said he was 'reserving judgment.' Looking back over all of this material, it’s hard to escape the feeling that we knew, or at least could have known, what Jackson was doing, and the responsibility for failing to stop it can’t just rest on the mothers of his victims. Jokes can serve to process anxiety, but they’re also a means of passing on knowledge, even if, like a kid in grade school, we may not fully understand it at the time." ALSO: Michael Jackson's sales, streaming and airplay decline following Leaving Neverland.