Comedy As a Weapon

Last month on Pluto TV I watched a documentary from about 8 years ago called Hot Coffee.  The starting point for it was the famous case of a woman suing McDonald's because she was burned by coffee.

The tragic thing is this old woman was lampooned in the nightly talk shows, on an episode of Seinfeld, and in a "Weird Al" Yankovic Song.

But most of us probably never really understood the true facts of the case.  For instance, the old lady wasn't suing for millions of dollars; her basic goal was just for medical costs Medicare hadn't picked up.  The jury awarded the punitive damages of $2.7 million--which a crooked judge knocked down to only about half a million and then was probably knocked down even more in a settlement.

Another thing is the old lady wasn't alone.  There were hundreds of complaints of people being burnt by McDonald's coffee--according to McDonald's own records!  Like cigarettes or the Ford Pinto the company knew of a problem and yet refused to do anything about it.

And yet comedians dragged this old lady through the mud and in so doing helped red states usher in "tort reform" that while on the surface seems like a good idea actually makes it much harder to sue companies who put out unsafe products.

This was before the age of social media with memes and "fake news" even.  It's a problem that's only worse now.  We make something a joke without really understanding the consequences of that and in the end wind up hurting ourselves.  I mean that Seinfeld episode is pretty funny and so too is that "Weird Al" song.  I'm sure a lot of the monologue jokes on Leno and Letterman were good too.  But it unfortunately turned public opinion against something we should actually be for because the best way to really hold corporations accountable is through making them pay.  We need to realize that these jokes are just jokes and we shouldn't take them seriously.  As with "fake news" we need to take the time and understand these issues for ourselves.

It isn't just professional comedians either.  Politicians like to use humor to change public opinion on an issue.  The documentary showed Reagan joking about a guy in a phone booth hit by a drunk driver who sued the phone company.  Which on the surface it sounds ludicrous.  Obviously the drunk driver is at fault.  We need tort reform!  Except like the McDonald's case those weren't the actual facts.  The guy sued the phone company because the phone booth door jammed so he couldn't escape the car.  And also the phone company had received numerous complaints about how dangerous the location of the booth was and yet like McDonald's or Big Tobacco or Ford just tried to sweep it under the rug.

But as the documentary shows the whole issue may soon be a moot point because Corporate America is making sure you can't sue them.  Not just by buying politicians but by working mandatory arbitration into as many contracts as possible.  For all you know you've probably signed a few of those when you signed up for a credit card or cell phone.  Then if you have a problem and want to sue you have to go to an arbitrator instead of a court.  Who's more likely to side with you, some arbitrator or a jury of your peers?  And of course the arbitration will be secret so no one will know the grisly details, sparing the company any bad publicity.

There was the horrible story in the documentary of a woman who worked for Halliburton in Iraq.  They promised when she went over there she'd be living in a trailer with another woman and other women nearby.  Guess what?  They lied.  Instead she was surrounded by men and I think you can guess what happened to a single woman alone with a bunch of horny men.  After the inevitable rape some of the evidence was "misplaced" and the woman was kept in a storage container by armed guards for days.  But because of the fine print in the contract she signed, she wasn't able to take anyone to court.  The perpetrators and company got away with it.

(There's a bitter irony in that the senator who championed the woman's cause in Washington later was none other than Al Franken, who was run out of town by #metoo and #timesup because he kissed a woman before he was a senator and apologized instead of stonewalled like the oaf in the Oval Office.)

That's an extreme case of what can happen when you inadvertently give away your rights because you didn't fully understand something and didn't take it seriously.