5 Jokes That Landed Comedians in Actual Jail

5 ‘God Might Speak to the World Through a Burning Bush’

The law bans you from threatening the president’s life. There’s a special law against it, above and beyond any other law just for threatening people in general. An additional law further bans you from threatening other people under Secret Service protection, including former presidents and presidential candidates. So, this week, following an assassination attempt on Donald Trump, many wondered: “Am I allowed to joke about this, or will that send the FBI to my door?”

As it happens, a joke about assassinating the president is not the same as a threat. It is legal to jokingly call for a president’s assassination, which is why Groucho Marx was not arrested for saying, “I think the only hope this country has is Nixon’s assassination” in 1971, despite Nixon not being the most forgiving man. But if you do deliver such a joke, and you aren’t Groucho Marx, you might have trouble convincing authorities that you were joking. 

Ahead of George W. Bush’s visit to Sioux Falls in March 2001, South Dakota man Richard Humphreys was heard saying the following at a bar: “God might speak to the world through a burning Bush.” He thought it was funny, the man would later say. The joke here referenced the Biblical Yahweh speaking to Moses through a flaming bit of bramble. Humphreys was also prophesying someone dousing the president in lighter fluid and striking a match.

The bartender phoned the police (a violation of the bartender code), and a prosecutor would go on to argue, “It wasn’t a joke. It wasn't funny.” Humphreys was sentenced to 37 months in prison, for what we’re confident the FBI would have concluded wasn’t a true threat if they sat the man down and had a few beers with him. 

4 ‘Now I Can Die Like Jesus’

Joseph Müller was a priest in the German village of Groß Düngen. In 1943, he was visiting an ailing parishioner, and he decided to comfort him with a joke about death. In the joke, a soldier is dying, and he asks a nurse to show him pictures of whom he was dying for. The nurse laid down portraits on either side of him, one of Adolf Hitler and one of Hermann Göring. “Now I can die like Jesus Christ,” said the soldier.

The joke here is that when Jesus was crucified, there were men on the crosses on either side of him, both bandits. So, like Jesus, the soldier would die between two criminals.  

Müller’s own son reported him to Nazi officials for this. As we’ve learned today, governments hate clever Biblical references, so they arrested the priest. They convicted him of the crime of Wehrkraftzersetzung (“undermining defense force”) and executed him. We guess that meant he did die like Jesus. 

3 ‘Hitler Is a Mongolian’

A few years earlier in Germany, joking about the Nazis didn’t mean a death sentence. In 1932, Hitler was not yet chancellor, and Fritz Gerlich’s paper Der gerade Weg was able to speak out about the Nazi threat. Then, one July day, he put out an article with this headline: “Does Hitler Have Mongolian Blood?”

Hitler didn’t look Aryan, said the article. In addition to lacking an Aryan soul, he lacked the facial features of an Aryan, as his nose looked distinctly Mongolian. This was not a genuine attempt to undermine Hitler by questioning his heritage but satire, mocking the Nazi obsession with racial purity. 

You could get away with writing this in Germany — in 1932. But then the Nazis did take control, and they didn’t forget Gerlich. They arrested him and took him to Dachau, where they killed him. They informed his wife of his death by mailing her his bloodstained spectacles. 

We just gave you two stories about the Nazis, and there’s a good reason for that. It’s because the Nazis were double bad.

The other reason is, today, with debates over censoring Nazis, some people interpret calls for free speech as Nazi sympathy. So, let’s quickly remember that Nazis have never supported freedom of speech. If you rank everyone in history by how much they support free speech, the Nazis would comfortably tie for last place. 

2 ‘Comedy’

Sometimes, people feel the need to protest with humor even though they don’t have the capacity to construct an actual joke. Consider what happened in 1949, in the Soviet Union. The nation held elections, but the ballot presented just one option: the candidate from the Communist Party. 

A beekeeper named Ivan Burylov didn’t feel very keen on participating in this farce. On his ballot, he just wrote the word “comedy.”

He didn’t mean this as a public protest. This was supposed to be a secret ballot. Still, that didn’t stop the Militsiya from later figuring out whose ballot that was — and from sending Burylov to a gulag for the next eight years. 

We don’t know what happened to him after that. We choose to believe the Jason Statham film The Beekeeper was based on his later adventures.

1 ‘We Used to Call Thieves Thieves. But Now...’

In 1996, Burmese comedian Par Par Lay visited Aung San Suu Kyi, and he did a little comedy routine at her house. Aung San Suu Kyi was under house arrest after winning an election whose results the government ignored, so visiting her was always going to be risky, and his choice to tell jokes proved riskier still. “In this country, we used to call thieves thieves,” said Par Par Lay. “Now we call them public servants.” 

Three days later, police came to his home at night and arrested him. He spent the next five years performing hard labor, breaking rocks. Sometimes, though, the other prisoners would break his rocks for him, in exchange for him telling jokes. 

Par Pay Lay and his comedy troupe, the Moustache Brothers, were later allowed to perform out of their home, but only to visitors from abroad rather than to Burmese citizens. They’d tell similar jokes about how terrible the government is in Burma, such as one about a Burmese man who goes to a dentist in Thailand because “in Burma, we cannot open our mouths.” 

If that didn’t get the crowd laughing, no matter. They also had a series of jokes in reserve about how Jennifer Lopez has a huge butt. 

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