Agreed. (This was in reference to the Chevy Chase/Richard Pryor SNL sketch).
Today I’d expect they’d be more explicit about why the Chase character is so willing to raise the salary of the Pryor character (fear of a Twitterized reprisal?).
Mad TV’s Ms Swan (“annoying little old foreign lady”) wouldn’t fly today, I think (but I could be wrong). A slightly more recent iteration is the Hispanic cleaning lady in Seth McFarlane’s Calvacade of Comedy (web-based animated shorts).
I must have led a sheltered experience back in the day—rarely saw N bombs on TV.
Back as a teen I loved to read joke books. That meant Bennett Cerf’s Bumper Crops and such. I looked at one of them last year and was appalled. Not only were the jokes sexist and racist, they weren’t even funny. The section of jokes about Driving was nothing but ones of the “Women are bad drivers, and that’s so funny that they even try” variety. And so on.
The entire plot of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective is driven by a transgender woman who “tricks” men. When Ace discovers Einhorn was Finkle he reacts by having a puke session, burning the clothes he was wearing when they kissed, using a toilet plunger on his own face, and crying in the shower while “The Crying Game” by Boy George plays. That scene was pretty unremarkable in 1994 but it wouldn’t go over nearly so well today.
And I won’t lie. I enjoyed both The Mask and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective when they came out. I thought they were hilarious. But I haven’t watched either one since I saw them in the theater and I can’t imagine they’ve aged well.
We were having a book sale at the library and I found book on meeting women that was obviously meant to be humorous. Right before chapter one there was a little line that read, “A real he-man eschews seduction and goes straight for rape.” The book was published sometime in the late 1930s and wasn’t meant to be taken seriously. But, wow. Did not age well.
I know you mean the routine didn’t age well becuase of the ethnic stereotyping, but on top of that, it just was never funny. I enjoyed Mad TV back when it first aired, but I always groaned when a Ms. Swan skit came on. So stupid and repetitive. “What did the suspect look like?” “He look like a man.”. Was not funny once, let alone however many iterations they did.
Finkel/Einhorn wasn’t transgender, though. Finkel was just a man using “Einhorn” as a disguise to drop out of sight and execute his convoluted revenge plot against Dan Marino.
Quite frankly, I still love the original Ace Ventura and think it holds up pretty well. Carrey’s character is thought of by everyone as an idiot because of the way he acts, but under his ridiculousness is a great detecting mind.
Honestly, no part of that explanation makes the scenes unoffensive, but I also don’t think it’s correct. Been a long time since I’ve seen the movie, but I don’t recall any indication that Einhorn wasn’t sincere in her identity, but rather, that being trans was part of the general mental illness she acquired after blowing the super bowl kick. But either way, “The entire Florida swat team spontaneously puking when they learn Einhorn used to be Finkel,” still doesn’t play well, regardless of whether the character is supposed to be trans or just a guy in a dress.
I, for one, have for the most part despised him from In Living Color onwards.
I recently saw The Mask and thought it aged well, since the entire point was that he’s a real life cartoon character so all his jokes about him doing cartoon character stuff in real life was still funny. Jokes about the main character being an idiot tend to never go out of style.
One of the funniest things MadTV did: they had a recurring skit with “The Depressed Persian Tow Truck Man”, who was disgruntled and always complaining about everything. Then 9/11 happened. So how do they handle this potentially problematic character when the show comes back for the next season? Drop him entirely? Nope, they did this:
Um … Wasn’t that from the very beginning of his career?
Yes. His “career.”
He’d made a handful of movies before that. Before the relatively lofty heights of playing an Axl Rose knockoff in the last Dirty Harry movie and something in Peggy Sue Got Married, I think, he’d done at least one Canadian flick and the very unwatchable teen vampire comedy Once Bitten.
How soon they forget.
Jim Carrey starred in the sitcom The Duck Factory, a primetime series on NBC, six years before he appeared on In Living Color.
I thought his first role was in the last Dirty Harry film The Dead Pool.
You know whose humor hasn’t aged well? That of mine and my cohort.
I came across my high school yearbook not long ago and couldn’t believe what was written in it; homophobic, misogynistic, ignorant, puerile (and I’m not even sure what that word means) crap!
ETA: 1976
I don’t find Bill Hicks funny, whenever I watch him I just get that sense of “…perhaps you had to be there”.
When I was about 8 years old I absolutely loved Russ Abbott (British comedian), but watching his show nowadays I can’t derive any humour from it.
I still love Red Dwarf and I find it very wtacahble, but the actual humour will raise a smile at best
Yeah–often transphobic humor gets as a defense “but that’s not an accurate portrayal of a transwoman,” and I always think, no shit.