By now, this is close to old news, but it’s worth a watch anyway: Detroit News columnist Rob Parker, in what he called “an attempt at humor,” asked this of Rod Marinelli yesterday (video of which you can see at Deadspin):

During Sunday’s postgame news conference — the Lions lost game No. 15, this one a 42-7 loss to the Saints — I attempted to lighten the moment in a tense situation and asked Marinelli if he wished his daughter had married a better defensive coordinator.

Oh, slam! See, Joe Barry, the Detroit Lions defensive coordinator, is married to Rod Marinelli’s daughter.  See what he was going for there? A little humor, a little dose of levity in an 0-15 season, because if there’s one thing I know about overserious football coaches, it’s that they love to joke around after they’ve lost their 15th game in a row.

Of course, Terry Bradshaw and the Fox crew were livid at Parker. Rick Chandler is seeing a deeper motive to Parker’s jab; that he is angling for a new job as a controversial talk-jock on ESPN, that he was actually being career-savvy and attention-minded when he inquired as to Marinelli’s paterfamilia. Maybe so.

In either case, the one rule here, any time someone says something borderline “insensitive” is this: Was that actually funny? The Atlantic political blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates calls the rule: “Motherf–ker, be funny.” Rob Parker was not that, and so people are mad at him. Had he cracked up Marinelli and the whole media room, that clip still would have made the air, but Bradshaw would have been doing his big Southern chuckle act instead. It’s a fair punishment for a bad joke … or whatever that was. Better luck on talk radio, Rob.