# Is pretending to be stupid in film, etc kinda like Blackface? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [February 5, 2023, 8:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-pretending-to-be-stupid-in-film-etc-kinda-like-blackface/979351 "2023-02-05T20:51:23Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 8
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [February 5, 2023, 11:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-pretending-to-be-stupid-in-film-etc-kinda-like-blackface/979351/8 "2023-02-05T23:47:31Z")
I don’t know if it’s a kind of blackface, but recently I listened to some old time radio episodes (Duffy’s Tavern) and the way one character is portrayed made me cringe a bit - it’s not that he says stupid things (though he does); he seems to be deliberately playing a mentally-handicapped character (Clifton Finnegan) for laughs, like a middle-school student might have done to mock other students when I was a kid. Distasteful. I posted about this a little while back in fact > [@They wouldn't fly now](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/they-wouldnt-fly-now/962825/196): > > Mentally handicapped people used to be comedy fodder - people who weren’t just foolish like Homer Simpson, but rather people who were clearly disabled. For example, in the radio show [Duffy’s Tavern](https://nostalgiacentral.com/television/tv-by-decade/tv-shows-1950s/duffys-tavern/) there’s a character described by the lead character, this way a subnormal chowder head . . . a dope . . . a low-grade moron. You have to forgive him. When he was born, the baby doctor was a little nearsighted and Finnegan got slapped on the head. That has dropped off considerably. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-pretending-to-be-stupid-in-film-etc-kinda-like-blackface/979351)._