John Malkovich tears apart 'outrage mob' canceling comedians over jokes: 'A tidal wave of idiocy is created'
John Malkovich has railed against 'outrage culture' and denounced the recent trend of people calling for comedians to be 'canceled' over jokes they deem offensive.
The 66-year-old Hollywood actor is part of Netflix’s 'Space Force', a satire loosely based on the real-life military branch created by President Donald Trump, Fox News reports.
In an interview with the New York Daily News, Malkovich said he's not worried about the show standing up to the test of time as much as he's worried about the risk of its humor being 'canceled' by the outrage mob.
“What’s funny yesterday becomes illegal today and the person uttering it must be canceled,” Malkovich told the outlet. “Outrage culture is as strong as it is toxic.”
“Part of what makes [comedy] difficult is also the tidal wave of idiocy that can be created on social media in a day... the outrage mob," he added.
Malkovich's comments bear a similar tone to those made by Jamie Foxx after 'Tonight Show' host Jimmy Fallon landed himself in trouble earlier this week for donning blackface while impersonating Chris Rock in a 2000 SNL sketch. Foxx urged people calling for the host to be canceled to "let this one go", saying he was only doing an impression for the sake of comedy.
But Fallon is barely the first celebrity to be ostracized for their apparent indiscretions by a certain group of social media users who go on to demand the end of their careers altogether. Others who have been targeted in a similar manner include Kevin Hart, James Gunn, and Shawn Mendes, all of whom have had to apologize for tweets that didn't sit well with people.
Malkovich's role in 'Space Force' is that of Dr Adrian Mallory, a scientist tasked by an unnamed president (eerily reminiscent of Trump) with achieving larger than life goals given to the new branch of the military. Malkovich stars alongside a cast of veteran actors such as Steve Carell, Ben Schwartz and Lisa Kudrow. The show is about the impossible lengths people tasked with the new military branch would go just so they are not seen as failures.
“It’s about the possibilities of an unlikely directive to achieve a goal,” the actor concluded. “On a certain level, it’s about teamwork, a concept quite lost in this United States of America at present."
Coming to the doings of the real-life 'Space Force', the stakes are astronomically high for Elon Musk's aerospace company SpaceX, which is touted to become the first commercial spaceflight company to launch astronauts into space on Saturday (May 30). Apart from making history with its first astronaut launch, the Demo 2 test flight will also mark the dawn of a new era of human spaceflight in the United States, which hasn't launched astronauts into space ever since the space shuttle program ended in 2011.
"This is a unique moment where all of America can take a moment and look at our country do something stunning again, and that is launch American astronauts on American rockets from American soil, and we're going to go to the International Space Station. And what we do there, of course, is we're transforming how we do spaceflight in general," NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a press conference on Tuesday, May 26.
The takeoff was originally scheduled for Wednesday, May 27, but had to be postponed due to bad weather conditions. It is now scheduled for 3.22 pm ET on May 30.