The “vile” Neil Patrick Harris joke about the death of Amy Winehouse
As director Sam Taylor-Johnson is having to fend off claims that her new biopic of Amy Winehouse is “exploitative”, conversations of unquestionably bad taste are in full swing. Two years ago, actor Neil Patrick Harris was at the centre of a social media storm as a picture of his Halloween cake from 2011 resurfaced.
Harris and now-husband David Burtka, who is a professional chef, had chosen to create an Amy Winehouse-themed cake for the Halloween party they were hosting. This was just over three months after Winehouse had tragically suffered a fatal overdose.
The cake was in fact a meat platter designed to look like Winehouse’s dead body. It featured a bloodied empty eye socket and facial skin peeling off, accompanied by her trademark bee hive. The platter was accompanied by a sign reading: “The Corpse of Amy Winehouse (Beef ribs, pulled pork, chicken sausage, in a spicy BBQ sauce.”
It’s hard to imagine anything less appropriate or more offensive to the ‘Rehab’ singer’s memory.
Yet, at the time, one of the couple’s friends apparently found the joke amusing. He posted a picture of the platter on Twitter the following day, writing: “Look who showed up at [Harris and Burtka’s] party last night. Looking good.” This Twitter post has since been screenshotted, leading to the image resurfacing online in 2022.
Cue an online pile-on, as the story spread across social media, with various people labelling the meat platter as “sick” and “absolutely vile”. The consensus was that the joke itself was out of line, but there was also shock and disgust at just how graphic and morbid the depiction of Winehouse appeared to be.
Neil Patrick Harris was forced to make a public apology for the meat platter. “A photo recently resurfaced from a Halloween-themed party my husband and I hosted 11 years ago,” his statement to Entertainment Weekly read. “It was regrettable then, and it remains regrettable now.” Some fans were left wondering why no regret had been shown for the act during the previous 11 years.
Harris continued: “Amy Winehouse was a once-in-a-generation talent, and I’m sorry for any hurt this image caused.”
An online comment responded that people were upset and disappointed by the “tastelessness and inappropriateness of the cake” itself, not the image of it. In any case, the storm eventually blew over.
Taylor-Johnson’s film Back to Black, released in UK cinemas on 12th April, is facing a backlash for very different reasons. But again, there is concern that Winehouse’s tragic demise is being used to entertain people. This concern falls in line with the general accusation on both sides of the argument that the soul singer is being held up as some kind of tragic archetype to be gawped at.
Meanwhile, during her all-too-short lifetime, Winehouse was a media pariah simply for struggling with addiction in the public eye. She was considered ‘fair game’ to malign or lampoon about on any level. She was crowned BBC Three’s ‘Most Annoying Person’ for 2007 and was the butt of an award-winning one-liner about self-harm at the Edinburgh Fringe a year later.
If the discussion about the Amy Winehouse biopic is anything to go by, we can say that, at least in this respect, times have changed.
