Suddenly the joke wasn t funny anymore. It was as if one of those semi-staged fights on the Springer show had broken out, but one of the guests was wielding a knife and the audience weren t chanting Jerry s name anymore but baying for blood.

Eminem s wife Kim Mathers attempted to commit suicide at her Detroit home on Friday July 7th while her husband was performing a concert. Just that morning, a letter from Mrs Mathers had been published in the Detroit Free Press, in which she defended herself against Eminem s accusations that she had been unfaithful. She also attacked him for the alleged pistol whipping of one John Guerra, a barman Mathers accused of kissing his wife outside Detroit s Hot Rocks nightclub on June 4. The rapper is also facing allegations of having waved a gun at Douglas Dail of Insane Clown Posse.
At the time of writing, Eminem s second album The Marshall Mathers LP has spent its seventh week at the Billboard top slot, having racked up sales of 7.6 million worldwide, making him the most successful rap act of all time. Yet, the 27-year-old has admitted that since the release of his debut album The Slim Shady LP, his life has become the trailer trash nightmare he sends up so wickedly in his lyrics. In addition to the assault charges, Eminem s mother Deborah Mathers-Briggs is famously suing him for $10 million over repeated allegations on his first record and in US magazines that she was an unfit mother and drug abuser.
Certainly, Kimberly Mathers suicide attempt could ve come direct from one of her husband s songs. On the infamous 97 Bonnie And Clyde off the Slim Shady LP, over a tune which mercilessly spoofs Will Smith s paean to father-son bonding Just The Two Of Us , Mathers assumes the character of a guy taking his young daughter on a drive to the coast in order to dump her dead mother s body in the water ( Where s Mama?/She just taking a little nap in the trunk/That smell?/Dada must ve runned over a skunk ). On the song s sequel What s The Difference from Dr. Dre s last album 2001, the pair joke about putting sunglasses on the corpse and driving it around LA. This stuff is funny in so far as it s fantastical. Less so is Kim off the second album, which depicts a terrifying row in front of the couple s five year old daughter Hailey, over an alleged infidelity, a scenario too close to reality for all involved parties.

So then, with a family background like Mathers , it s no wonder he sometimes comes on like Norman Bates with beats. All over both his albums, he channel hops from vignette to vignette like a hyperactive kid stricken with Attention Deficit Disorder. Maybe a dozen times on the new record Mathers lets rip with statements he knows will be deemed controversial, mimics a possible response, then rebuts that response, all within the space of three lines. His routines aren t so much self-conscious as hyper-over-aware. He s constantly wisecracking then gauging the moral temperature of the joke to see if he s Gone Too Far This Time.
And although occasionally, on tunes like It s My Fault , he comes close to being the Weird Al Yankovich of rap, Eminem is serious as cancer. Soak in his grooves for long enough and you ll sense a kind of damned sadness, a melancholic hate like an e-mail from hell, written in fastidiously rhyming couplets.
But for all his sordid genius, Marshall Mathers has a lot to answer for. An immensely gifted rapper, misogyny and homophobia are his Achilles heel if he really wanted to jolt America s funnybone, he d take on the cops, the gun lobby and the church. In his constant abusing of ho s and homos, Eminem merely reinforces the white trash and black gangsta cliches he might claim to lampoon.
Nobody s advocating censorship here, but if the guy wants to invoke the free speech clause, then the press must reserve the same right to tell him when he s talking shit. In tunes such as Kim , Mathers might get a trans-aggressive thrill out of hollering Bleed bitch, bleed! , but it s merely the same puerile thrill a nine-year-old gets from using the word fuck for the first time.
Meanwhile rap advocates are incensed that the mainstream magazines, Spin and Rolling Stone, have handled him with the kind of kid glove treatment never accorded NWA or 2 Live Crew, hailing him as a modern day Lenny Bruce.

For the record, this writer s main objection to Eminem is a musical rather than moral one. His verbal dexterity is a given, so hearing him resort to tired old slurs on the fairer sexes is like witnessing Coletrane playing Kenny G riffs, or Hendrix aping Steve Vai.
Eminem s better than all that and he knows it. Yet even in celebrity circles, he reserves his ire for predictable pinatas like Vanilla Ice, Puffy, N Sync, Christina Aguilera, Britney et al (although, to his credit, in Guilty Conscience he has the cojones to needle his mentor, Dre, over allegations that the latter threw female VJ Dee Barnes against the wall of a Hollywood nightclub in 1991).
At his best, Eminem s a gas, albeit the kind emitted by corpses in a morgue after God has delivered His ultimate punchline. But he needs to ditch the gaybashing and bitch-dissing and spend those royalty cheques on some good shrink-work and marriage counselling.
Eminem. Not so much funny Ha-Ha as funny Oh-No. The boy needs help.