Because I would. Give him a pass, I mean. I would do that because he is a comedian telling jokes, and I think that even jokes about drunk Indians is funny when told by a good comedian. The very fact that it’s a joke means he isn’t serious. Stereotypes don’t materialize out of thin air. They’re based on experiences and perceptions.
I’m not confused. I’m just asking. Because Blowero said, Because, Liberal, a white person, for example, might be amused by calling black people “nigger”, but black people find it very degrading after saying that Mel Brooks can make fun of Jews all he wants and it’s funny. That’s not confusing at all to me. It says plainly that people of like kind can make fun of themselves and one another, but not of people of other kinds. So my question was whether the people of other kinds can laugh right along with people of acceptable kinds. I mean, if the rule is that Chris Rock is allowed to make a joke about blacks but I’m not, then why is it that I’m allowed to laugh at jokes that I am forbidden to tell. You’re saying that I can’t say it, but I can snicker about it when I hear it. From my perspective, you’re the ones who are confused (assuming it’s genuine).
Telling a joke isn’t the same as laughing at one, Liberal. And it seems to me that you still don’t get the way self-deprecating humor works.
Yeah, I know that. But washing clothes isn’t the same as drying them either, but I don’t see why you should be allowed to wash clothes and not dry them.
Well, you know me. Dumb as a stump.
For someone who loves logic so much, you have chosen a doozy of an analogy.
Ever heard of the saying, “We’re laughing with you, not at you”? Laughing with is always allowed. If I jokingly call myself “retarded”, I’m giving you permission to laugh with me. But if someone else calls me retarded, you and they will be laughing at me. I won’t appreciate it so much.
If Chris Rock does a “nigger” joke, non-blacks are given a “pass” to laugh because the target of the joke–black people, including the one on the stage–are laughing as well. But if Jerry Seinfiled does a “nigger” joke, will there be lots of black people in the audience, laughing? Will you be laughing with or laughing at, in a situation like this?
It depends on the comedian and the nature of the joke, Liberal. Jokes don’t work in a vacuum. Chris Rock routinely picks on all races of people, so he can get away with a lot of things. But if Chris Rock only told drunk Indian jokes, even if individually they were the best drunk Indian jokes in the world, his drunk Indian schtick wouldn’t be funny. It would be obvious he had a thing against Indians and that would sour his jokes.
Some stereotypes do materialize out of thin air. Many of them are hurtful and very not-funny. A comedian who bases his comedy on stereotypes that are not true (like black men are rapists, Hispanics are illiterate, Gypsies are con artists, etc.) should not get a pass. But I admit that those stereotypes which are based on reality are usually the funniest ones, and I don’t get offended by humor that exploits this fact.
Of all the stuff you’ve said, Monstro, I do agree unequivocally with one statement: Jokes don’t work in a vacuum.
The problem with the way you’re looking at this, in my opinion, is that a person has to exercise nearly omniscient judgment with respect to the entire context of the joke. It isn’t always even possible to tell whether someone is a given race, especially when we’re talking about Indians, Hispanics, Latinos, Jews, Romas, and so forth. Part of the reason why is that race is not clearly defined outside forensics. And if we have to put a microscope on a joke, it surely can’t end up being funny. You know what I mean — when you have to explain the punch line, there’s no punch anymore.
It is entirely possible for a man to stand up and say he’s Jewish when he isn’t, and start telling Jewish jokes. But since your rules are based on what we know of the man, we have to allow that his jokes are okay unless we bring private investigators with us to the comedy clubs.
Your other rule is equally bizarre, in my opinion. When Chris Rock tells a black joke, we are allowed to laugh only because the black people in the audience are laughing. The implications of this rule are, well, hysterical. For one thing, if there are no black people in the audience, then no one can laugh. And what happens when some laugh and some don’t? Can we at least chortle? For another, laughter isn’t something that (in my experience, at least) takes place by consciously flipping a switch depending on my environment. I mean, to some degree, I might try to sifle laughter at say, a funeral, but even then sometimes something happens that is just too funny. For example, my wife attended a funeral for her aunt (before we met), and she saw a small flower arrangement off to the side of the casket that said, “Get Well Soon”. Obviously, some moron brought the flowers from the hospital room without thinking, but my wife and her friend burst into laughter spontaneously when they saw it.
Finally, you get into the issue of whether Chris Rock’s jokes may then be quoted at the water cooler. I guess that applying your rules system would require that the person quoting also be black. But now it begins to appear that the fetish about race falls not upon the bigots, but upon the rule makers, who dictate that the joke, the subject matter, and even the laughter must be drawn strictly on racial lines, and that others must laugh not at the joke, but at the laughter. Or with the laughter. Whatever. Not only are there strict racial guideliness, but picayune rules of semantics that we must follow as well.
You can poke at me all you want about my sincerity, my abilities with logic, or what have you, but it seems to me that the one lacking a sense of humor is you. I think your rules take all the steam out of Chris Rock’s jokes, and leave him in a racial vacuum playing to other blacks. I don’t think he would like that at all. I like my rule better: if a joke strikes you as funny, laugh.
A good comedian–whether he’s a pro or an amatuer at the water cooler–knows how and when to tell a joke. He knows his audience and knows how far he can push the envelop without offending others.
It’s not just race-based comedy that works like this. So does gallows humor. A comedian who has a 9/11 joke in his routine would probably choose to leave it out in a performance in New York City. But it would probably be alright to tell such a joke (depending on it’s nature) somewhere else.
Most jokes have the potential to offend. Chris Rock does a bit about strippers and how if you’re daughter becomes one, you can be confident that you failed as a parent. It’s hella funny, but it would not be funny if my daughter truly was a stripper. Fortunately for Chris Rock, most parents don’t have stripper daughters, and strippers aren’t “protected” like a racial or ethnic group. If being a stripper suddenly became the top profession for young women, though, he would no longer be able to do that joke because he’d be booed off the stage.
This is just…bizarre.
Of all the comedians that regularly do racial jokes of a self-denigrating sort (Woody Allen, Chris Rock, Margaret Cho, Mel Brooks, Richard Pryor just to name a few), their ethnicity is VERY apparent. In fact, their ethnicity is a major part of their act. In a bizarro world where Chris Rock is actually a very light-skinned man who could pass as white, I would argue that he would not get much mileage from “black” humor (his audience would be too busy questioning his authenticity to laugh) so he would stick to less racial stuff.
Now I admit that a comedian could very well try to exploit racial humor by pretending to be something he’s not, but as long as he’s convincing and tells funny jokes, his humor would be “allowed”. But a good comedian who does racial humor does not have to preface each joke with “I’m Jewish/black/Korean/white”. Their racial/ethnic identity is usually very apparent to the audience and would be taken at face value.
I am bothered by your continual use of the word “rule”. A rule, to me, is something that prohibits behavior and is attached to some kind of punishment. You could tell a “black people versus nigger” joke, Liberal, and not face any negative consequence. You might actually get laughs. But chances are if I did the same joke, I’d get MORE laughs. This isn’t a rule. This is an inference drawn from years of observations.
You can laugh at whatever the hell you want. If a white guy comes up to you and does a “black people versus nigger” joke, you are free to laugh so hard that you piss your pants. But if he tells the same joke to me, I’m as equally free to call him a racist and storm away. I’m also equally free to think you’re laughing at me instead of laughing with me, since it’s clear I’m the lone butt of the joke. I’m not saying it’s logical. Rarely is human nature logical.
And that’s why I don’t group laughing and telling a joke together, as you were trying to do earlier. Even racists telling racist jokes can make me laugh. However, not all laughing is the same. I might merely chortle at Jerry Seinfield doing a “black people versus nigger”, because underlying it will be a certain discomfort. I might let myself laugh out loud at Chris Rock doing the same routine because the discomfort won’t be there.
Do you even understand why I might feel discomfort in the first place? Or is even this a bizarre idea to you as well?
Again with the stupid “rule” stuff. I have said nothing about this being a rule. For your information, I have laughed at racial jokes told by non-blacks. I have even willingly been the butt of racial jokes, made all the more poignant by being the lone black person in the environment (How can you not like watermelon, monstro?!) So when you continually use the word “rule”, I think you’re deliberating setting up a strawman.
I am talking about probabilities here. What are the chances that White Guy at the Water Cooler will get the same mileage with a “black people versus nigger” joke that Black Guy at the Water Cooler will? Is it the same? Will people laugh more at Black Guy? Will people be more likely to think bad things about White Guy? Does it help to apply logic to this scenario? Or does the answer lie with our knowledge about human nature and their complex interactions?
How does it feel way up there on your high horse of self-righteousness, Liberal? Is the air thin up there? It must be.
Not only do I not lack a sense of humor, but I have a great deal of understanding of how it works (unlike you, my friend). I’m not a professional comedian, but I have great confidence in my ability to make people laugh. It is how I keep from going crazy in a world that has tried to tear me to pieces. I can’t do a lot of things, Liberal, but I know I can make people laugh. Without exaggeration, it’s what I live for.
So you can kiss my black ass.
If you want to do the “black people versus nigger” routine, Liberal, GO RIGHT AHEAD. No one is stopping you or any other white jokester who is itching to “go there”. But you are nuts (nuts, I tell you!) if you believe that you won’t have to work harder than Chris Rock to get laughs from it. I repeat, this is not a rule. It’s an inference drawn from a life-time of observation.
I am supported by the fact that virtually all of the comedians who do “black people” jokes are (dramatic pause) black! And all the comedians who do “Jew” jokes are (dramatic pause) Jewish! I admit that I don’t know every comedian, though. If you can generate a list of, say, white comedians who regularly do black people jokes and who are successful (a list that matches the number of black comics who do the same thing), then I will admit that you are right and I am wrong about everything I’ve posted on this thread.
I await the results.
But it seems to me that comedians like Chris Rock, and a multitude of others, often base their humor on inaccurate stereotypes, and that they do so deliberately in an attempt to show how stupid the stereotypes are in the first place. By making jokes based on wildly exaggerated stereotypes, they actually bring the issue to the forefront and can sometimes even cause people to question their previously-unquestioned assumptions.
I’m not trying to make an overblown claim for comedians as social and cultural reformers, but the fact is that a lot of the humor in comedy is accompanied by a significant amount of social commentary, and in the case of a smart comedian that social commentary can draw on inappropriate stereotypes in order to undermine or disempower them.
Actually, i’m willing to bet that a comedian could much more easily get away with a 9/11 joke in New York than in many other towns and cities in the nation.
I wanted to go back to this quote, because i believe that it’s correct, but that it also misses a few things.
The problem with it is, i think, that while racism might come from the heart and not the mouth, it is very difficult for us always to know what’s in a person’s heart. In the absence of that knowledge, we can really only rely on what comes from their mouth, and when what comes from their mouth is racist or other denigrating terms, the understandable tendency can be to assume the worst.
Despite not being gay, i use sometimes use words like “queen” and “fag” around my gay friends. I do this because they know me, they know what’s in my heart, and they know that i’m using the words in the same way that they are using them—in a rather ironic way, in a manner that implicitly tries to drain them of their power to hurt and offend. We are all speaking in the same way.
But in company that includes a bunch of gay people that i haven’t met before, i tend not to become so involved in this sort of banter. Not because i’m a different person, but because the people in the conversation don’t know anything about me, and might be uncomfortable or offended by my familiar use of these terms.
I guess, as much as anything else, the reason i do this is for social harmony. If i did start using those words, and some new acquaintance got offended, i know that one of my friends would jump to my defence and explain that my heart was in the right place. But i don’t want to put people in such a position. I guess it’s the same sort of self-control that stops me from saying “fuck” in front of my friend’s clergyman father. I know i don’t have to restrain myself, but i have no desire to offend people needlessly.
The question of racial epithets is, to me, even more fraught than all this. I could not thing of a single occasion where i might use a word like “nigger” in front of a black person, except like i have in this very sentence, or in some sort of historical context. I mean, in the class i’m teaching right now we are currently dealing with the period before the Civil War, and i have the students reading both aboltionist works and pro-slavery literature from the period. The word “nigger” comes up, and i actually feel rather self-conscious about using it in the class, not least because there are two African American students present. But i firmly believe that talking about the use of this word in its historical context is not only acceptable, but necessary in a history class.
But this is rather different from making jokes about watermelon or fried chicken or large penises or whatever other stereoype you care to name. Whether the joke is based on a stereotype with some basis in reality, or a stereotype with virtually no basis in reality, and even if i tell it without any racist intentionat all, the very fact that such jokes have been told by racists for so long means that my own telling of them doesn’t come in a vacuum. We can’t escape the historical baggage that comes with all of this, and we have to accept that other people carry that baggage with them and use it to filter what they hear.
And, really, i’m not sure i think that jokes have a level of humor completely independent of the person telling them. A joke about black people coming from Chris Rock has quite a different impact and valence than the same joke coming from some racist cracker.
Look, you probably know that i’m something of a free speech absolutist. I don’t agree with things like hate speech laws, and i don’t agree with any sort of legislative or judicial curb on people’s speech. But i also think that we need to accept that there are issues of intent and of understanding and of history that stand between our utterances and other people’s reception of them. The history of various prejudices is so great and, in many cases, so recent (and still ongoing) that we can’t expect people to assume that our hearts are free of malice when we say certain things. Even if our hearts are, in fact, free of malice.
I can only speak about Chris Rock because he’s my favorite comedian, and I’ve just watched his latest HBO show on DVD. But it seems to me that for him, most of the things he picks up on a true. He’s popular because he talks about things that we all know are true, but that we’re too afraid to talk about.
He doesn’t do a lot of the stereotype-based humor that most black comics rely on, and this is what makes Rock special. He does a little of the “black people are different from white people” stuff, but it’s always on a poignant note. For instance, he talks about black people’s lack of wealth. There are rich black people, but no wealthy black people. He attributes part of this to the piss-poor decisions that many of us. To make his point, he talks about the stereotypical “bling bling”, spinning rim-buyin’ black dude. It’s funny, but this isn’t a wildy exaggerated stereotype, and most of us know it. That’s why Rock is famous.
In Rock’s case, I think he holds up the stereotypes that are the most truthful and makes them funny. The commentary comes in because he often picks up on the worst ones of that lot. Thus, he pokes fun at people who display a certain behavior and allows the rest of us to join in.
For instance, he talks about how scary the country has become post-9/11, in regards to nationalism and patriotism. The stereotype he holds up for us to see is the God-fearin’, flag-wavin’, xenophobic American who feels compelled to cheer for America no matter what’s going down. Like all stereotypes, it’s exaggerated for most us. But are there Americans who act like this? A bunch of them? Yes! And that’s why it’s funny.
You’re probably right.