It’s happened before. The highest-profile occurrence came in 2003 when, during the start of the Iraq War, a member of the country music trio, the Dixie Chicks, on tour in England, remarked that they were ashamed that George W. Bush was their president. This hit the news and stayed there – fuelled by the right, gleefully wielding a patriotism bat in the sensitive post-9/11 years – and the group’s career was waylaid.

More recently, in 2017, Kathy Griffin, a bruising comic and absurdist reality-TV show star, released a picture of herself proudly brandishing a fake severed head of Donald Trump. Griffin was abandoned even by many of her friends on the left, and the move vaporised her career.

However, in time, both got their careers back and even became icons of resistance for the protection of free speech. The Dixie Chicks returned three years later with a song about the controversy, Not Ready To Make Nice. They dominated the Grammys the following year and remain stars – as their rousing arena show in Sydney last spring attested. (They are called simply The Chicks now.) Griffin is back as well, with a comedy special about the controversy, A Hell of a Story.

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In retrospect, we can see that neither deserved the obloquy they got. Why can’t a performer say she was ashamed of the president, particularly since she came from the same state? And as for Griffin, while the tableau was indeed a bit bloody, the pose was a plain reference to a famous painting by Artemisia Gentileschi, a feminist icon, featuring the severed head of John the Baptist. Was it in the best taste? No. Was it anything approaching an actual threat to then-president Trump? Of course not – and yet, Griffin was still investigated by the Secret Service.

The ironic thing, of course, is that Trump and his crusaders on the right have been making statements an order of magnitude worse for years, fetishising all manner of weapons and making violent rhetoric a staple of their campaigns. And that was all before the violence of January 6, 2021, in which the rhetoric became explicit.

Explicit threats and calls to violence aside, all of this – the distasteful jokes, the metaphoric (we hope) calls to arms – is protected First Amendment speech in the US. And folks who don’t like the things others are saying have a right to speak out about it. That’s not cancelling. And in this case, of course, Tenacious D have in effect cancelled themselves already. Still, as I said above, it will be interesting to see whether the stray remark captures the right-wing mediasphere’s attention, apologies or no. Indeed, that’s why, I think, Jack Black – generally a pugnacious sort – distanced himself from his partner’s crack so carefully.

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Black makes a very nice living as the voice of the titular panda in the highly remunerative DreamWorks Animation Kung Fu Panda films and TV series. Black and DreamWorks plainly were worried that even a preoccupied Fox would not be able to resist spending some time trying to tarnish a franchise of one of their enemies in Hollywood.

Soon we’ll know whether Black and Gass become the right’s newest whipping boys – or manage to dodge – you’ll excuse the expression – a bullet.