Protecting Your Brand Against Success

Sorry, or really sorry?

There was a small but telling moment of celebrity brand management last week, and it reminded me of some of the things that I have ran into at past start-ups. It also ran into one of my personal interests – stand-up comedy – and an increasingly common aspect of modern life. That would be the public celebrity apology, delivered under duress.

Anyway… the back story is that comedian Amy Schumer, who made her reputation with edgy work that played with race, sex and class, apologized after an initial spate of defiance for the following one liner.

“I used to date Hispanic guys, but now I prefer consensual.”

For the record, here is Schumer’s apology.

“I wrote this joke 2 years ago. I used to do a lot of short dumb jokes like this. I played a dumb white girl character on stage. I still do sometimes. Once I realized I had more eyes and ears on me and had an influence I stopped telling jokes like that on stage. I am evolving as an artist. I am taking responsibility and hope I haven’t hurt anyone. And I apologize if I did.”

I have a few issues with this.

First, the joke in question? It does not strike me as the least bit dumb, and here’s why – it works with just about any noun you’d like to swap in. Schumer could have used it for local crowd work to call out a college. She could have gone for a political edge, made it absurdist with a non-human species, called out an entire gender, or even directed it at herself. She is on a national tour later this summer, and could just put in the name of a different comedian every night. It really is that versatile, and especially on stage, quick hitters are always welcome. Had Schumer simply not been a growing star, not used a racial term, or someone with, well, a lot of eyes on her, I doubt anyone tries to pressure her to move off this kind of material.

Secondly, we are in something like a golden age of comedy right now. Between podcasts, streaming channels, a growing number of outlets and paid options, there are literally dozens of extremely strong pros working right now… and good work does not come from telling these folks what they cannot joke about. Or, even worse, that we need to consider the demographic of the speaker before judgment can be made. If a Hispanic comic had used a variant of the joke, is there a hue and cry? And if we have to determine who the speaker is before we decide whether or not it is OK to laugh, are we simply making the act of edgy comedy more or less impossible?

Finally, what does the degree of your celebrity have to do with the relative taste and appropriateness of your joke? Schumer has been a stand-up for over a decade, and has clearly served up far redder meat than this. Should her work come with a date and a context as to where she was in her career before anyone gives her a Tweet?

My suspicion is that Schumer was particularly sensitive to her past in the lead-up to promoting “Trainwreck”, and simply worked up as sincere an apology as possible in the middle of a press run, so that the movie would not get co-opted by PR. I also suspect that as a successful stand-up in the midst of a booming career, she might be looking to expand her repertoire to prove her chops in being able to work up new material. By apologizing, she gives herself the most precious gift a creative person can give themself -- a deadline.

But on some level, I’m hoping that success in this field brings liberty, rather than restrictions. The best example to set for future generations is to stay as funny as possible, as long as possible. If the reward for many years of club work and a great writing and acting performance in your first starring movie is a correctness straitjacket, that seems like a terrible payoff.

Oh, and as to how this relates to past start ups? I've worked at places that have shut down lucrative consumer categories once we got to a certain revenue level, because it was The Wrong Kind Of Business. Never sat well in my stomach, because it seemed to be so very far afield from Real Capitalism and Business, but PR is its own world. And so are start ups.

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