It’s No Joking Matter

The talk-show host and dilettante Dick Cavett is quoted in the current issue of Entertainment Weekly: “If [O.J. Simpson] is acquitted, I will renounce my citizenship. And if I converse with him at a cocktail party, I will say, ‘Well, there are so many people here who haven’t murdered anyone, I think I’ll go talk to them.’ ”

The actress and stand-up comic Rosie O’Donnell said to Tom Snyder on his after-midnight television program Monday night: “I believe if O.J. Simpson was not O.J. Simpson, this trial would be over already. . . . I have strong feelings that he’s guilty. I have nightmares about him.”

The television entertainer Jay Leno said recently, not in a monologue but as a guest on another man’s program: “[Johnnie] Cochran’s so good, he’s got O.J. believing he didn’t do it.”

O.J. Simpson’s jury, or what’s left of it, will find this corner of this morning’s sports section clipped out. Not long ago, the jury’s censors missed a most casual reference to Simpson--”remember him?” a writer had joked--in these pages and a juror was obligated to report the slip-up to Judge Lance Ito, who elected not to make a federal case out of it.

Having assiduously avoided the football idol’s trial on the sports page, where accounts of Mike Tyson’s rape trial, Pete Rose’s tax evasion and Bruce McNall’s alleged financial transgressions could regularly be found, it would seem that this particularly sensitive case would be better left to the experts.

However, as this yearlong case proceeds, it is becoming increasingly clear that O.J. Simpson, American, is being publicly found guilty until proven innocent.

Like vigilante riders out of the “Ox-Bow Incident,” private individuals are making very public statements, exercising their right of free speech, to suggest or even declare to the world that O.J. Simpson executed the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman on June 12, 1994, without waiting for him to be convicted or sentenced.

Maybe they should just get a rope.

Should this defendant be acquitted, no matter what the reason, then these individuals, whether sincere in their public utterances or merely straining for a laugh, might very well someday find themselves, as Cavett suggests, side by side with O.J. Simpson in a public place, where perhaps they can tell him to his face how guilty he is.

Even to make a joke out of this, with a mother of two children found butchered on her sidewalk, suggests a hideous and bizarre need to make a joke out of anything.

David Letterman, on his show of June 17:

“O.J., trying on the bloody gloves, turned to Johnnie Cochran [when they didn’t fit] and said: ‘Look! Maybe I didn’t do it!’ ”

Here is O’Donnell again, on her HBO special of May 8, discussing Simpson’s low-speed ride on the freeway in his Ford Bronco:

“How guilty is that guy? . . . I think there’s no way in the world that’s how an innocent person behaves . . . [pointing an imaginary gun to her chin] I want my mommy! I want my mommy!”

She continued: “Three years from now, I’m going to be sitting by O.J. at some dinner. . . . ‘Nice to meet you. Listen, could I have the steak knife?’ ”

One of the greatest offenders of all, furthermore, is a weekday fixture in another section of this very newspaper known as Laugh Lines, where rarely a sunrise passes without the O.J. jokes du jour.

“Christopher Darden [a prosecuting attorney] proved you may not have an air-tight case if you have too-tight gloves,” quipped comedy writer Tony Peyser in a recent edition. Ba-dump-bump.

Followed by a submission from something called Cutler Rock Comedy that went: “Only 200 of those type of gloves were sold at Bloomingdale’s. How many were sold to Colombian hit men remains unclear.” Ba-dump-bump.

These gloves are being presented as evidence in a double homicide. Mr. and Mrs. Brown’s daughter was slaughtered. Mr. and Mrs. Goldman’s son and stepson was slashed to ribbons. Come on. Let’s have some more jokes about bloody gloves.

A spoonful of humor can offer relief--some. Judge Ito has been known to permit a snicker or two to break the tension. He himself has been mocked no end, a jurist subjected to ridicule while presiding over a double-murder trial. A New Yorker cartoon pictured Ito asking, “Lady and gentleman of the jury, have you reached your verdict?”

KRTH-FM (“K-Earth”), 101.1 FM in Los Angeles, this week is offering “handsome O.J. Simpson wristwatches, complete with highway patrol cars chasing the infamous white Bronco,” according to its commercials, to the first five callers whenever Ito calls a sidebar with attorneys.

Declarations of a man’s guilt or innocence, however, go beyond improper. They are ghoulish and foolish. Even someone taking Simpson’s side can speak as though air is leaking from his ears, as when Roger Craig, himself a former NFL running back, was quoted in a San Francisco newspaper as saying, “My man is not guilty. I think he was set up.

“For one thing, he was too much in love with himself to do something like this. He was the type to look in a mirror and say, ‘I’m so fine looking.’ ”

Thanks for sharing that. Now be quiet, all of you, until there’s a verdict.