Earlier this week, Morrissey - the man who titled one of his most famous albums Meat Is Murder almost 30 years ago - refused to perform on Jimmy Kimmel Live if castmembers of the cable television hit Duck Dynasty were also guests on the same episode. The AV Club reports:

Morrissey [has taken on a] formidable foe: the entertainment domain controlled by the Duck Dynasty. The no-longer-miserable-in-a-medical-way singer was scheduled to return to live performance with an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel’s show tonight, but he backed out at the last minute with a (since-deleted) Facebook statement, citing his inability to “morally be on a television program where the cast members of Duck Dynasty will also be guests,” demanding that either the stars of the cable hit be asked to leave, or he wouldn’t come by the studio and be Morrissey. Kimmel, perhaps unsurprisingly, chose the guys who show no hesitation in eating raccoon shit.

Morrissey later elaborated on his qualms with the A&E reality series—which concerns Louisiana swamp dwellers who make their fortune by designing devices intended to lure ducks to their deaths—saying, “As far as my reputation is concerned, I can't take the risk of being on a show alongside people who, in effect, amount to animal serial killers.” Indeed, unless Morrissey canceled a performance because of its tangential association with duck murderers, people might no longer take him seriously.

The AV Club followed up later in the week with Kimmel and Morrissey's responses to each other, and Morrissey's uncharacteristically sloppy notions of how human sexuality and gender roles may affect war.

While Morrissey successfully safeguarded his reputation as a very serious man by taking a stand against Duck Dynasty, the cancellation of his Jimmy Kimmel Live appearance because he didn’t want to be seen with “animal serial killers” has somehow only invited ridicule—not least from Kimmel himself, who used last night’s show to mock Morrissey for bailing. In addition to airing a mock Duck Dynasty clip about hunting for vegetables, and joking that the show had sided with the reality series cast “because they have guns,” Kimmel also concluded that Morrissey “keeps finding new ways to depress us,” scurrilously implying that the ex-Smiths singer has something of a reputation for being a sad-sack.

Aiming to combat this attempt to smear him as depressing, Morrissey responded with a statistic-filled statement reminding everyone about America's very serious issues with mental health and the Sandy Hook tragedy:

I was disappointed with last night’s Jimmy Kimmel Show wherein our smiling host managed to ridicule depression (70% of Americans have experienced depression according to the National Institute of Mental Health). He then found time to ridicule healthy eating (the obesity epidemic in the U.S. costs $147 billion per year in medical expenditure), and he also ridiculed the notion that animals should be entitled to the possession of their own lives. Furthermore, he found time to jokingly promote gun-ownership - hugely amusing for the parents at Sandy Hook, no doubt. He also promoted his special guests Duck Dynasty — who kill beings for fun. None of the above issues are, of course, as important as Jimmy Kimmel himself, who has finally revealed his show to have an overwhelming loss of meaning. Tune in and relive the intellectual fog of the 1950s.

Indeed, trivializing gun violence for your own personal agenda—particularly so soon after the murder of many innocent children—is reprehensible, unless it’s being done in the service of disparaging Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Anyway, it’s probable that Jimmy Kimmel wouldn’t have such welcoming attitudes toward violence were he gay, as Morrissey recently posited in an interview by saying, “Homosexual men would never kill other men. If more men were homosexual, there would be no wars, because homosexual men would never kill other men, whereas heterosexual men love killing other men.” Morrissey then paused from ignoring Jeffrey Dahmer, Alexander The Great, and pretty much all the emperors of ancient Rome to do the same for half the world’s soldiers, declaring, “Women don't go to war to kill other women.” Then he wrote a statement belittling Jimmy Kimmel for living in an intellectual fog and being meaningless.

I'll defend Morrissey to the extent that as a fan I understand his sense of humor does, in fact, exist and is very, very dry - but, holy crap, is he coming off as an even more dour, humorless crank than usual. Whose side are you on in this debate? Let us know in the comments.