George Bush fils once called Nelson Mandela a “great African American.”
I have seen 2BG only once. DH and I watched because the ads said something about them trying to make their bakery kosher, and dealing with Orthodox Jews, so we thought “what the heck.” It was so awful, I don’t know where to begin. Really. So I won’t. I’ll just leave it at “It was so awful, I’m never going to watch it again, not even the episode with Valerie Harper, and I’ve had a crush on her since I was four; I even watched an episode of that show about the Christian family living in the RV because Valerie Harper was on it.”
But that’s not the joke. The joke is, when asked about someone, “She has a great personality” and you’re supposed to infer that she’s fat/redhead/ugly/whatever the plot requires. If you just come out and say she’s fat, but has a great personality, what the hell is that?
That’s pretty much par for the course for 2 Broke Girls.
In fact, one of the characters on the show is Polish and they pretty regularly make tasteless jokes about that.
They pretty relentless make jokes about characters who are Asians, Italians, Hispanics, and gay for shock value and the humor often seems to be of the Chelsea Handler “Hey, we’re cute girls talking dirty! Aren’t we being edgy!” variety.
That said, the main target of the show’s ire seems to be hipsters.
I’ve only ever seen a few minutes of Two Broke Girls, but hearing that there was an offensive joke at the expense of an ethnic group on the show is about as surprising to me as hearing that an episode of Law & Order: SVU centered around a rape investigation or that an episode of Glee featured singing. What little I’ve seen of the show indicated that it’s not only full of stupid, tasteless jokes but that there are at least two regular characters who are basically just walking ethnic stereotypes. As noted by others in the thread, Two Broke Girls has also been called out repeatedly by American TV critics for racist and otherwise offensive jokes for as long as it’s been on the air. The AV Club’s brief piece on the recent controversy is titled “2 Broke Girls manages to offend another racial group, wins racist bingo”.
I’d assume that anyone in the US who watches this show isn’t bothered by this sort of thing. Did Australian viewers really fail to notice all the tasteless ethnic “humor” until Two Broke Girls finally got around to making a joke at the expense of an Australian group?
That would I assume have more to do with sexism than race. Calling women bossy when they are being assertive is a hot topic right now (or at least was a few months ago). “Bossy” is said more about women than men, studies show, despite their actions being about the same.