By now you’ve probably heard about the Mike Ward OMGSCANDAL. Basically he made an off-colour joke about Cédrika Provencher in a bit about Revenu Québec. (There was a video on YouTube, but it’s been pulled because of that minor pesky copyright thing that bloggers think doesn’t apply to videos posted on YouTube.)

Today… (err, yesterday), Ward posted a video on his website responding to the OMGontroversy (via The Domster). There, he lambasts people who haven’t seen his show for suddenly having a problem with it a month later, and talks about how he’s being judged by random people on the street, getting death threats and is too afraid to start his car.

Now’s about a good time to remind people what the limits are on free speech:

1. Making a tasteless joke about a missing girl is legal and acceptable, no matter how offensive or unfunny it is. Especially at a show made specifically for offensive humour.
2. Criticizing said joke is legal and acceptable, no matter how unfair or harsh the criticism is, and it’s not censorship to criticize something.
3. Criticizing something without knowing the context is legal and acceptable, no matter how uninformed that criticism is or how much it hurts someone’s feelings.
4. Whining on your blog that people are judging you is legal and acceptable, no matter how pathetic it makes you look. It is also not censorship to do this.
5. Making death threats based on a bad joke is not legal and is unacceptable, no matter how offensive the joke is or how much you care about this little girl you’ve never met and been told by the media to care about. Ditto for stalking a guy outside his house and suggesting that harm should come to him.

Leave Mike Ward alone. Comedians don’t change based on criticism, they change based on people not laughing at their jokes and not paying attention to them.

(P.S. Speaking about criticizing criticisms, Claude Poirier totally goes ape-shit on Bazzo (from Mike Ward’s blog))