8 Comedians Who Received Serious Death Threats For Their Jokes
6. David Letterman
Al Qaeda famously has very little humor when it comes to their religion. David Letterman decided to test their funny bones in 2011 with a joke about the recently departed successor to Osama bid Laden, Ilyas Kashmiri.
So they picked a successor to Osama bin Laden, and his name was Ilyas Kashmiri. Well, guess what? He was blown up by an American drone. It wasnt going to work anyway, because they got off to a rocky start with this guy. He botched up the story of Paul Revere.
It's an awkward joke, at best, trying to equate Kashmiri with US Presidential hopeful Sarah Palin, who'd been ridiculed for her misinterpretation of the story of Paul Revere. It pretty much bombed (as much as any late night talk show monologue joke can), and Letterman continued along with more hit-or-miss material. But an "Internet jihadist" (which is apparently a thing) found this not only not funny, but worthy of bodily disfigurement. In a forum where radical Muslims meet to discuss the finer points of "Jew pigs," one commenter urged his fellow radicals to cut off Letterman's tongue and break his neck. Presumably, the order of these was very important. Due to the fact that everything written on the internet is tracked by one agency or another, the FBI was alerted to the threats and immediately began an investigation and security around Letterman's studio was beefed up. It didn't stop him from mocking the anonymous menace, telling this joke the very next week:
"I have a fatwa on me. And they say the guy that issued the fatwa is an Internet jihadist. Well, heck, who says Obama isn't creating jobs?"
So this just proves that you never threaten David Letterman. And also, if you want to go after him for anything, it should be for shoddy writing.
