Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2010 > February > 15 > Entry
Kevin Smith vs. Southwest Air, Sarah Silverman vs. TED
Over the weekend, Twitter blazed brightly with not one, but two exciting feuds.
Helen Anders blogged about it this morning and linked to Smith’s podcast about the incident. I listened to the whole thing this morning (the benefit of having a long commute) and I would urge anyone who thinks Smith has been unfair to the airline to listen to the podcast first and then read the airline’s apology. If what Smith says in the podcast is even half true, the airline’s apology comes across as incredibly insincere and fails to address what Smith happened on the flight and why he was ejected.
There also seems to be a misperception that Smith buys multiple airline seats because of his weight. According to Smith on the podcast, this isn’t true; he says he and his (much slimmer) wife buy multiple seats on Southwest flights because the seats are so cheap and they would rather leave space next to them to stretch out, lie down and not bother other people. He says he’s flown many times on the airline and his ability to fit in an airline seat has never been an issue. Of course, he says it much funnier and much filthier than I can here. Most damning: Smith says that on the flight he was put on after the ejection, an overweight woman in his row was also warned that she might have to buy more than one seat in the future. True or not? Who knows, but it’s quite a story.
My take? Southwest has a major social media crisis on its hands and so far their response won’t quell Smith’s fans. We’ll probably hear much more about it when Smith visits Austin next month. He promised in the podcast to make the story of what happened a regular part of his frequent speaking engagements.
According to several reports, Silverman’s presentation at TED was full of bad language, sexually explicit material and the frequent use of the word, “Retarded.” In other words, it was a typical Sarah Silverman stand-up comedy routine.
Anderson was said to have criticized Silverman’s performance via Twitter, calling it “god-awful” (the post has since been deleted) and Silverman shot back via Twitter, predictably in a way I can’t repost here.
When former AOL co-founder Steve Case chimed in, posting, “The sad thing is you’re not that funny,” Silverman went after him, too, writing, “You should be nicer to the last person on earth w an aol account.”
So, this is where we are in social media. 2010 is officially the year of the Twitter Celebrity Feud.
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By MadameMoodle
February 16, 2010 3:26 PM | Link to this
Kevin Smith was channeling Sarah Silverman when we spoke at MacWorld. Not even funny, just inappropriate.