All creative folks who get fired from their day jobs should relate to this, especially if you do try to keep your personal stuff separate from the day gig. Darn social media. This guy got fired in January last year and has been reinstated.
Jad Sleiman, who was represented by SAG-AFTRA grievance lawyers, argued that he had been terminated without due process. Lawyers from Duane Morris LLP, including the firm’s vice chairman Thomas Servodidio, argued that Sleiman’s “inflammatory” comedy constituted a violation of WHYY’s code of conduct and social media policy, which states that “employees must take care that their postings cannot be interpreted as inflammatory, unethical or illegal, since such posts may have an adverse effect on WHYY.”
The arbitrator said that he read this policy as not incorporating a “reasonable person” standard, meaning that workers “must be vigilant not to post anything on social media that could conceivably be interpreted as inflammatory even by highly sensitive and thin-skinned individuals without an appreciation for irony or satire.”
“That’s nuts, right?” Sleiman said.
The arbitrator performed an in-depth analysis of the nine comedy samples to determine whether they were in violation of this reading of the policy. Though parts of some jokes were deemed potentially inflammatory, many were found to be either funny or an astute critique of some institution of power.
Of “Kind of Racist,” the arbitrator wrote that it was “a powerful condemnation, in a funny way, of what [Sleiman] calls corporatized racial consciousness.” About “Trump vs Muslims vs Jews,” he wrote that “much of the clip is somewhat amusing.” Another joke was “simply funny.”
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“I work at one of these places that’s so woke it’s kinda racist,” the joke reads in part. “Like this lady asked my boss, she’s like ‘Yo, does Jad consider himself a person of color?’ because she was making a list of us. Fucking hell? Sick, alright. I get to be in this lady’s brown dude Pokédex.”
It seems like most of the time when comedians make the news these days, it’s because they’ve said something offensive, or at least something that somebody somewhere decided was offensive. Such was the case with Jad Sleiman, a Philadelphia stand-up comedian most of us outside of stand-up comedy circles had never heard of until public broadcaster WHYY fired him last January.
Sleiman was a producer on The Pulse, the weekly health-and-science show hosted by Maiken Scott. By all accounts, he did an excellent job. Indeed, as recently November 2022, just two months before his termination, Scott herself conducted a performance review of Sleiman, describing him as “Fully Successful” in his role and giving him high marks all around, according to court documents.
But trouble had already been brewing at WHYY for Sleiman. As most stand-up comedians do these days, Sleiman shared reels of his jokes on social media. Somebody at WHYY took notice that Sleiman was moonlighting as a stand-up comic in comedy clubs even though he had a doctor’s note that allowed him to work from home for WHYY thanks to his diagnosis with multiple sclerosis. Sleiman explained to management that doing stand-up comedy simply didn’t affect him in the same way that working from the office did.
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