Last night on 30 Rock Jack Donaghy dismissed an old colleague with the words “now he’s a post-op transgender.”
On an earlier episode, Tracy Jordan complained that his wallet was stolen “by a Taiwanese tranny.”
Sure, we could infer that these jokes are more at the expense of Jack and Tracy than of transsexuals, but it seems odd that there would be two such jokes in one season of a television show, when transsexuals are such a small minority.
Furthermore, a while back on Howard Stern, Fey chose to insult Paris Hilton by saying that “in person she looks like a tranny.”
And there were numerous cracks against transsexuals on Saturday Night Live while she was head writer. Immediately coming to mind is a whole sketch with Johnny Knoxville as a transgendered father out with her family for Mother’s Day.
Am I just hypersensitive, or is something going on here?
Transgendered folk are a safe target for humor. So much so that Tina Fey’s jokes against them can’t be singled out as particularly brutal or transphobic. She’s worse than the rest of mainstream US scoiety. Possibly even a bit better, although still not gonna get invited to give the keynote address at whatever society defends transgendered folks.
For an example of anti-transgender humor that does stand out as particularly nasty, see the South Park episode Mr. Garrison’s Shiny New Vagina.
I think it’s more likely that she recognizes it as a cheap laugh. She’s not exactly a pioneer there. Even comedians who I think are pretty clever, like the Christopher Guest group, have gone there.
Fey certainly isn’t the first to notice the potential for a quick cheap laugh. From Lisa’s First Word, 1992:
Marge [pregnant with Lisa]: I’m afraid we’re going to need a bigger house.
Homer: No, we won’t. I’ve got it all figured out. The baby can have Bart’s crib and Bart’ll sleep with us until he’s 21.
Marge: Won’t that warp him?
Homer: My cousin Frank did it.
Marge: You don’t have a cousin Frank.
Homer: He became Francine back in '76. Then he joined that cult. I think her name is Mother Shabubu now.
“Cheap” joke or not (silly me, I’ve never charged), the issue is rarely any more complicated for a comic writer than “Will this get a laugh?” I would say there’s probably a lot more to do with the fact that she’s discovered that the censors will let this topic through. Remember how practically everybody on TV started saying “ass” every chance they got once they found out the censors wouldn’t balk at it?
I’ve noticed over the years that writers, be they novelists, comedians or songwriters, tend to re-use ideas and words. Whatever the appeal may be of their pet phrases, they’re not afraid to use them.
Besides, jokes that mock sexual mores and the (misperceived or not) confusion of others are old standards.
I don’t know that Mr. Garrison is a fair example. In a recent episode, he decided that he is now a lesbian. So he’s gone from being an in-the-closet homosexual, to coming out, to getting a MtF sex change, to coming out as a lesbian. He’s a very, very fucked up person and a complete asshole to boot. He shouldn’t be used as a yard stick for how Trey Parker and Matt Stone feel about gays, transexuals, or anyone else.
As to the OP, I don’t watch much TV and so I’ve never seen that show, but if I did I’d probably be bothered by that, too. Maybe I’m overly sensitive as well, but I really dislike how it seems to be open season on transsexuals. Then again, this “open season” has been going on for a long time. I vaguely remember an episode of Golden Girls I saw that had some politician who was FtM. Not only was it played for laughs, but the main characters were shown as being morally superior by outing the politician and publically mocking him. So, since nobody’s going quite that far on network TV, I guess it’s progress of a sort.
Chances are Tina Fey has no special animosity towards the transgendered. She’s just picking something that, right or wrong, a lot of people laugh at.
Ummm… what? I’ve seen the episode where Mr. Garrison became Mrs. (although they skipped the wedding?) many times, and I’ve never gotten a nasty vibe from it. (Well, except for the live footage they spliced in, but I may just be squeamish. Oh, and the part where Mr. Garrison’s balls/Kyle’s kneecaps explode. That was pretty nasty.) But mean/nasty? Care to explain?
Wow. I just read through that entire five-page (!!) thread. Color me unconvinced. I saw a lot of simple declaring by the “It was so hateful!” crowd, but little reason why they felt it was so hateful. The most succinct summary was Eve saying, “transsexuals = whites who think they’re black = people who think they’re dolphins.” To which, I think SlyFrog had the best response: “…people need to learn to live with who and what they are. That we can carve ourselves up and pretend to be something else, but in the end, it’s a facade. That those who do so are delusional, which may be sad, but does not change the fact that they are delusional in attempting to escape from reality.”
I think the latter statements represent P&S’s view pretty well, and it doesn’t seem hateful. One can certainly disagree with it, and I’m not sure if science has a definitive answer one way or the other yet, but it’s a viewpoint, and I don’t see the hate. Harping, as Eve and others did, that the final words of the episode were Mrs. Garrison’s “It’s better than being a fag!” and therefore P&S hate the transgendered ignore the fact that, as was repeated 5000 times in that thread, that Garrison is just a fucking nutbag. Pun intended.
Not to revive an old thread of discussion or anything I just think making a statement like “For an example of anti-transgender humor that does stand out as particularly nasty, see the South Park episode Mr. Garrison’s Shiny New Vagina” requires something of a cite, even if this is CS and not GD.
‘You’re a deluded, surgically butchered man who will never be a woman any more than Kyle was black or his father a dolphin’ DID strike a lot of people as hateful. It’s probably not worth explaning if you don’t get it. In any case I think it’s easy to see why something like that if nastier than the “trannies are ugly” jokes that Fey and so many other people have written.
Care to try? No obligation, of course, but I’m willing to have my mind changed. Because, from where I’m sitting, the amount of dolphinness in Kyle’s dad is about the same as blackness in Kyle is about the same as woman in Garrison – present only on a superficial level. I wouldn’t use the words “deluded” or “butchered,” because they’re unnecessarily hostile, but thinking that surgery doesn’t make a man or a woman… how is that inherently hateful?
I just think making a statement like “For an example of anti-transgender humor that does stand out as particularly nasty, see the South Park episode Mr. Garrison’s Shiny New Vagina” requires something of a cite, even if this is CS and not GD.