Aaron Hernandez Ex-Fiancee is 'Pissed' About the Jokes Made at His Expense at the Tom Brady Roast
Watching the roast of Tom Brady last night, it's hard to remember exactly when you first realized this was going to be much less like the ESPYs, with the safe, basic cable-ready, Disney approved TV-Y humor and fawning celebrity worship, and a lot more like the classic Comedy Central roasts with 2.5 jokes per minute about Pam Anderson's vagina. It might have been the first time Brady got ripped for his marriage breaking up. It could've been a bit about Giselle banging her Jiu-Jitsu instructor. Possibly it had to do with him getting taken in by cryptocurrency grifters. A lot of this is in the eye of the beholder.
But one moment when we all said to ourselves some variation on "Holy schniekies, they're gonna be going THERE" was the first Aaron Hernandez joke. That's when you knew for sure to strap in because we were in for a while ride. And the rest of the night did not disappoint in that regard. In chronological order:
And that's not even all of them. Although I should correct myself and say that at least one person was, in fact, disappointed:
Source - The late Patriots star's partner Shayanna Jenkins -- who's also the mother of his only child -- tells TMZ she's disappointed in the fact that her deceased fiancé was the butt of multiple jokes during the Netflix program … which ended up making light of his sad story.
She says, "It’s sad that I’m trying to raise my children in such a cruel world."
Shayanna goes on to say that while Aaron is gone and many people have opinions about him and his life -- their daughter together, who's 11 years old now, is still quite present.
She also says the fact her daughter is coming of age now as a preteen means there's no doubt she'll see what was said about her father Sunday … coming from a bunch of grown men finding amusement in his tragic death and from someone she viewed as her hero.
Bottom line … Shayanna thinks Aaron should've been off-limits, and he definitely wasn't.
I'm going to choose my words carefully here and tread lightly. Because without a doubt Shayanna Jenkins, who for what it's worth recently started adding "Hernandez" to her name, and her daughter are collateral damage in what her boyfriend did. Not what any of these comics and athletes did, but what he did. To Odin Lloyd. Possibly to those two men who were murdered outside a Boston nightclub that he got tried and acquitted on. And to himself. There's one person responsible for the situation she finds herself in, and it's not anyone who was telling jokes or laughing at them. Let's keep that clear.
Yes siree. It sure is a cruel world alright. There's no doubt about that. Every philosophy and religious faith ever followed have wrestled with the questions of why that is, what we can do to make it less cruel, and how to deal with that fact. So no argument from any of us about how hard it is to navigate your way through this vale of tears. And it's infinitely harder when your child's father is a convicted murderer who took the coward's way out in his jail cell.
But if there's a mentally healthier way deal with the harsh realities that get thrown our way than turning them into jokes, I'd love to hear what it is. Life is unfair. It's painful and grim. We all check out in the end. And as Conan O'Brien puts it, "At some point, every grave goes unvisited." Life is also fleeting. And you can choose to spend the brief time you're given trying to police the people trying to have a few laughs in the face of all that heartbreak, or you can accept that that's how humans are wired.
Yes, last night had jokes about a convicted murderer who hung himself. There were also jokes about 9/11, Anti-Semitism, race, Hamas, race, divorce, sexuality, penis sizes, short jokes, dumb jokes, ugly jokes, jokes about Danny Amendola's lack of production. You can join in or you can try and comedy-shame everyone for the crime of trying to make humor out of tragedy. That's a choice everybody has to make.
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Of course we feel bad for a girl having to grow up in that situation. That's also human nature. But you can't expect the world to stop making jokes just because you shush them like a school librarian. Jeffrey Dahmer had a family too. So did Whitey Bulger. I'm sure those smelly hippy chicks who followed Charlie Manson loved him. But if we stopped making jokes about every cold blooded murderer because somebody in the world cares about them, every joke would be about Hitler. And that subject has pretty much been covered by now.
So while I have some empathy for a single mother who didn't sign on for this situation, I'll save my sympathy for the family friend who got led out to a vacant lot and gunned down by a heartless murderer. And the people in his family. Hopefully they take some comfort in hearing the deranged maniac who took their loved one away from them mocked and ridiculed on international TV. I like to think in the same situation, I would.
Regardless, keep the jokes coming. Like Hernandez, they killed.