Let me take this opportunity to invoke the name of everyone’s favorite law, the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act.
I don’t find Margaret Cho funny, but after reading this thread I do think that Martha Stewart was targetted for some reason, and being a powerful woman was likely part of it.
Personally, my favorite has always been The Hoot-Smalley Tariff
P.S. Dead Alive? Nice name.
Happy Scrappy Hero Pup, you aren’t really trying to say that someone accused you of being a bigot because you don’t like Margaret Cho are you? Or are you just scared that it could happen? How lame is that? I think Margaret Cho ran out of material 5 years ago and I’ve said it many times to many people and everyone either agrees with me or at least sees my point. Nobody has ever accused me of shit. And if they did I’d still keep saying it because I’m entitled to my opinion. Am I just 100 times braver than you?
You mean the law that says that the first person in a thread to…
No, I give up; it’s too hard. You got the first laugh off the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act since Bored of the Rings was published in 1969 and I suspect it’ll be another 36 years before anybody else manages it.
Yes, pokey.
I’m scared.
Scared out of my gourd.
Seriously, the rant is posted here, but is not limited to the flak I catc/expect to catch here. A lot of it has to do with idiots attempting to deflect my contention that she is unfunny by insisting that I’m afraid of her “message.”
The proper response is “different strokes for different folks,” not, “you’re just trying to oppress us.”
Ummm… I’m not sure how you missed that this entire posting was me keeping on saying it. And how brave it is to jump into a thread after it has already become “agree to disagree,” is up for debate.
Why, exactly, are you trying to bait me? If I were “scared,” I wouldn’t have posted in the first place. If I were “scared,” I’d have abandoned the thread where I got called elitist for decrying a rapist in the incorrect manner.
Some of my opinions might be unpopular or ludicrous or both. But I take my lumps, junior.
Better luck next time.
I don’t understand why you seem to be having such a problem with this. Sometimes you seem to agree that the meaning of my post was perfectly clear ( and Happy Scrappy Hero Pup has done a fine job of grasping my meaning ), at others you seem to want to drive a semantical nitpick into the ground. My initial post was not about Cho per se, it was about people who engage in certain behaviors. If Cho panders to her audience’s prejudices for a cheep laugh or applause, then she’s guilty of exactly what I was condemning. However that’s not a condemnation of Cho specifically, rather it’s a condemnation of anyone who uses such poor tactics in general.
So pandering to minorities to feed their persecution complex is not wrong? I couldn’t disagree more strongly, it’s what fuels a lot of the racial and social tensions in the world today. However, I suspect that the difficulty you are having here is that you are assuming that I am claiming that all members of minorities by definition feel persecuted. That is far from the truth. I believe it to be a universal human truth, however, that if there is a minority population-based upon anything, color, sex, sexual identity, whatever- than a subset of that population will play the persecution card about anything and everything, including things which are in no way persecutions at all. ( And please note that I am not saying that minorities are not persecuted, certainly they can be at times. That does not mean that they are always persecuted in every situation) Tell you what. Consider the following three scenarios:
#1. A Muslim man is claiming that “The Jews” were behind the 9/11 attacks.
#2 A black woman is claiming that O.J. was framed by “the man”.
#3 A woman is claiming that the only reason Martha Stewart was arrested is because “they” are afraid of “strong women”.
Can you give me a plausible explanation for these statements that does NOT involve some degree of pandering to the prejudice that the individual or group in question is being persecuted just because of who they are? I sure can’t. When called on this fallacy, it’s practitioners usually pull out the “It’s a ________ thing, you wouldn’t understand” defense that Steve has already mentioned. I refuse to buy this. If people are involved, it’s most likely a human thing, and I am quite capable of understanding assuming that you are willing to make the effort to explain yourself ( It’s important to remember that understanding does not equal agreeing with, however, something else people frequently have a problem with ). “It’s a _______ thing” is intellectual laziness.
Except you didn’t, and you have admitted that you understood what I meant, you’re just nitpicking a semantic point-why, exactly?
Upon further reflection, I was a bit too specific in my above post. The persecution complex is not limited to minorities, it holds true for any group of people, witness how often we have heard a white person claiming the same thing; for example, a white male saying that he didn’t get a promotion because he was white and a member of a minority was promoted over him because that person was a minority.
A few months ago, I saw George Carlin in person and he was absolutely awful. The no-name who came out to warm us up ahead of time was way better. It made me wonder whether famous comics use non-televised gigs to try out crap in the hopes of finding something new and good for the more widely-viewed television specials.
Or maybe he just didn’t care? Shrug.
Not in all instances, no. Political leaders and their ilk shouldn’t do it. Comedians and their ilk can have the fuck at it, though. When done right–comically speaking, it can be pretty damn funny. I submit Chappelle’s celebrity trial jury selection bit as my evidence. Funny, funny stuff. I couldn’t have disagreed with the material any more if you paid me to, though.
Thanks very much for going back and clearing that up.
Wow. You are describing the Religious Right to a T.
If Bush hadn’t pandered to the Religious Right by using lanuage focusing on how their were an ignored “minority” and using gay people and same sex marriage as a way to foment their biogotry and mobilize them to the polls based on their desire to force their “culture of life” among other supposed “cutural values”, I doubt he’d have been reelected.
So, he pandered to the Religious Right’s persecution complex and then fueled social tensions, increasing the persecution and open bigotry around the country.
Meanwhile many republicans and members of the Religous Right will play the persecution card about everything and anything, including things which are in no way persecutions at all.
Certainly: the idea that, yes, even Muslims, black people, and women can reason for themselves and come to conclusions based on what they perceive in the world around them.
You’re trying to pejorate this by saying “pandering to the prejudice that” x, y, and z. However, in the first example you give, it has nothing to do with the belief of the Muslim making the argument that Muslims are often persecuted; it has to do with his or her prejudice against the Jews. In the second example, it is an exaggeration of something we know to have taken place (Fuhrman, etc.) In the third example, it is an unprovable but defensible contention about the motives for a particular decision.
The point is just because a member of X minority says that specific case involving that minority was tainted by prejudice against that minority, they may not, in fact, be cynically “pandering” to any “prejudice” that the minority is persecuted. They may be interpreting the event in light of the prejudice they know, from personal experience, to exist. Whether their contention ends up being right or not, they may not be doing it for kicks or to give themselves a reason to complain: it may well be how they understand the world to operate.
I saw Cho in college when she visited the campus. Everyone said she was the Next Big Thing.
She did a wickedly funny impersonation of some older female relative (her mother or grandmother, perhaps). So, yeah, insulting-yet-PC (because she’s Korean) Korean comedy seemed fairly novel as a phenomenon, but the particulars were pure schtick, while the general principle of old country vs. new about as well-worn as any comedic theme since the golden age of the Borscht Belt. Once you got over the whole Asian-chick-with-the-pottymouth thing (not much of an against-type stretch anyway, even in 1991), the ethnic angle was completely exhausted of laugh potential.
The rest was sexual politics, and it was indeed impressively unfunny after about five minutes. She seemed to run on pure belligerent attitude, and was apparently fairly unsympathetic to the audience’s reaction one way or the other. I think some people laughed because they were afraid of getting yelled at directly. All the intimidation of Sam Kinnison with none of the humor. There’s just little humor to be had in pure polemics, I don’t care who is doing it. You gotta pepper the rage with a few Universal Nuggets of Truth now and then to dilute the one-sidedness if you’re going to rant on certain subject like that. Hell, George Carlin can be about as scabrous a social critic as anyone, but in his prime he still made everyone laugh like hell, in no small part because he could skewer any “special interest” if he felt like it, and did, lest anybody’s self-assessment get too inflated. He also knew how to talk about Other Things, like icebox etiquette, aquisitiveness, whatever.
I completely lost interest in her after one act. I never once watched her show, nor saw her again live. It astonishes me that she still can make a career of her brand of comedy, because it’s clear she’s stuck to the same bland formula.
And so is being funny - something Ms. Cho doesn’t seem to grasp (IMHO).