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Do you ever make an “inside joke” to a public audience and accidentally horrify them?
The trick is to not double down. Or triple down.
Someone should maybe tell that to Jenny Mollen.
Her latest effort to explain away her PDA controversy with her tween son has her joking that he is a “predator.” Ma’am.
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On the Tuesday, June 23 episode of the Not Skinny But Not Fat podcast, Mollen responded to the backlash by joking that her 12-year-old son, Sid, is a “predator.”
“If you knew my son, he’s really the predator, not me,” she joked for some reason.
“He’s the one who’s f–king all over me,” she continued while speaking to host Amanda Hirsch.
“I’ve been trying to lock him out of the bathroom for the last 12 years,” Mollen then joked.
She accused, seemingly also in jest: “He just wants my undivided [attention].”
Mollen doubled down on the post that landed her in hot water in the first place — the PDA pic with the caption: “Your eldest son will be the most toxic boyfriend you ever have.”
She also said that Sid is aware that his mom was trending in a bad way because of it.
“He’s like a little spider monkey on me, and I’m in trouble,” she lamented.
Mollen continued: “And now he’s like, ‘Get away from me, you molester,’ just to f–k with me.”
That is a perfectly fine (and healthy) way for a tween to joke. The issue, however, seems to lie with Mollen’s very public joking without backtracking or, you know, just giving the joke a break.
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Mollen suspects that her recent split from longtime husband Jason Biggs is playing a role in the backlash.
“I think if I made this joke a month, or two months ago, it would have played differently,” she suspected.
A few months ago, she “was publicly with a man.” Not so in May when she called her son her toxic boyfriend.
“And I think that there’s something about a woman who is not attached to a man that somehow reads as a threat, dangerous,” she added.
Actually, we cannot rule out that she’s right. But we can say that people who have no idea who she is, and no idea who her ex is, had similar responses to her post to those who do.
Joking that Sid is “toxic” is “the joke I’ve been making forever,” she explained.
“Like, I’m in this dysfunctional relationship with a guy who’s like, ‘Can you hold my head while I vomit into the toilet?’ ‘Can you give me a full body massage before bed?’ ‘Can you be a dear and put more ice in my water bottle?’ Like, this is the treatment,” Mollen listed.
“He’s the dictator,” she joked. “And I live in this autocratic regime where I have to like … it’s like, thumbs up or thumbs down. Off with my head if I f–king serve you sun-butter.”
Lots of people have inside jokes about family members that would be appalling to the outside world who are not “in” on the “inside joke.”
But they don’t post them to several hundred thousand followers who do not share context with the joke.
Jenny Mollen Triples Down on ‘Toxic Boyfriend’ Joke About Tween Son, Jokes … was originally published on The Hollywood Gossip.