Joke Gone Too Far

I personally am not a Bam Margera fan, I don't dislike him, it is simply that his thing is not my thing.  But, I am a Howard Stern fan and Bam appears on the show often, so I have gotten to know him that way.  Despite his bad boy appearance and reputation, he always comes off on the show as a pretty nice guy.  So when I heard about his posting a picture of himself holding a gun to his puppy's head on Twitter, I thought there had to be more to the story.  He had always come off as an animal lover.

There is more to the story.  It was a joke.  Perhaps a joke that is not found to be funny, perhaps a joke that went too far.  But nevertheless, a joke.  Bam Tweeted "Penny pooped in my bed. Not too fond of that. If it happens again, Penny goes Bye Byes."  With the Tweet he posted this picture:



What Bam did not make clear is that it is a fake gun.  I'm sure the frustration of the Penny, his Pitbull puppy pooping in his bed was real, but the "threat" to her life was fake.

After the picture was posted and received by his 820,000 followers, there was an immediate outcry.  According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, "SPCA spokesman Rich Britton called the picture 'not funny' and said that, even for a shock comedian, Margera 'missed the mark on this one.'"

Bam understood how silly this all was and started quickly apologizing for the bad joke and stated:

"I think those people need to go down," he said of the abusers. "Just hurting another animal is rude, crude, and more."

 

In an interview with Fox 29, Bam said, "Sorry if I offended anybody. But I'm an animal lover and I'd never hurt this dog in a million years, and the gun is a fake gun."

"I didn't want to offend anybody. I just wanted to make people laugh," he said. "I just like to joke around. I would never ever in a million years hurt a dog or a cat or any animal." 

In addition to the puppy, Bam has six cats -- Eric the Cat, Trouble, Mischief, Wall Crawl, Peaches, and Twanda Newton Harris.

So my question to you, the reading audience is, have we become a society that can't take a joke or was this just a really bad joke?