I have no doubt that someone was laughing at them for being “low class” victims of whatever.
But I know why I was laughing. Their answers speak to the homegrown wisdom and verbal expressions I grew up with.
I cracked up when Leslie said “Mmm…I don’t know. It got teeth, don’t it?” because that’s some the kind of funny-ass shit my sister would say. And my very middle-class parents love them some Madea, and I’m always teasing them for that.
Yep. My reaction to it was “I know Doug! I know a hundred Dougs!”
Basically the entire neighborhood I grew up in, and most of my family. IIRC you grew up in the Midwest (Ohio?) and I grew up in rural Michigan.
Yeah, we are all stereotypes, except in the ways we are not.
I think it’s interesting I was a little uncomfortable with the stereotyping of black people, even knowing black people probably wrote the skit, but Doug didn’t bother me so much. Maybe because I know all of the complexity behind the caricature of Doug and white culture, but not so much with black culture. It’s easier to laugh at something you completely understand.
I’m from Appalachian Ohio.
I’ve been holding off commenting on this, but alas I must.
I don’t find it funny. I didn’t even smirk once. I’m completely in tune with American politics, but as a Canadian, I just don’t see the humour. Sorry.
It could be because my name is Doug though: not sure. 
I found it more interesting than hilarious, but I can’t help but point out you often don’t find things funny that are objectively hilarious. I can’t remember the thing right now, but I distinctly remember thinking your lack of amusement was absurd. My post is my cite. 
I do wonder if it’s funnier the more you know more about black culture. I also wonder if the same is true of stuff like Madea because Tyler Perry flies right over my head.
I thought the one with Louis CK was pretty good too. “Well, I heard about the show, and since I’m a professor of African American Studies at Brigham Young University, I thought I’d give it a shot!”
And I know them all, having lived with and worked with them. It’d almost be presumptuous for this suburban white boy to say it, but they are all friends of mine, and I get all of the jokes. “What can a skinny girl do for you?” “What is, ‘not a damn thing?’” Not necessarily my answer, but I’m openminded.
“Mom, was dad’s ex-girlfriend fat?”
“Yes.”
“Well, she looked good to me.”
Wife talks a good, white, suburbanite game when her fellow Lutherans talk, but tonight I bought her the first bottle of Mumbo* I’ve seen out here for 30 years. “Ooh! I like that on coleslaw.”
All I could say was, “You can take the girl out of Gage Park, but you can’t take the Gage Park out of the girl. How deep do I have to scratch to find your inner hillbilly?”
FTR, Welsh, Polak, and, fundementally, Hillbilly, based on what she eats. Note that all three are insults, depending on who you are. And a one-D Adams (MIL looks like John Quincy), showing what mutts** people who claim pedigree here are. In a doctor’s waiting room she struck up a conversation with a black woman with her grandmother’s name. Four generations separated them.
** - In the US we are all mutts, by European standards, and getting muttier all the time. I prefer “hybrid vigor,” because, as an Anthropologist trained in the center of corn hybridization, I know the need to inject new genes into the genome. Oldest is doing her part by getting engaged to a Japanese warlord’s distant relation.
I didn’t think it was meant as affectionate exactly. My take on it was that this is a context I have seen before on SNL. Black Jeopardy is impenetrable for white contestants, even “experts” who very smugly come in and think they will dominate. So the audience is primed for the white character to be shown up again. Then they introduce Doug, and Doug is a perfect exemplar for the audience of someone who will fail at anything resembling empathy for the black experience. He will be so out of his element that it’s obvious (or “obvious”) that he will make a fool of himself.
And then Doug is not this incompetent fool at all. The impenetrable questions that foil the audience and the audience proxy white contestants are clear to this one guy we would not expect to be the expert. It is the audience’s prejudice, the audience’s idea of who is both respectable and respectful, who is in the group and who is out of the group, that is being exposed.
The characters are each being wacky and that makes the individual questions and answers funny. But the point of the skit, to me, was not “look at the wacky hijinks of these wacky but lovable scamps!” but “What else as an audience are we not getting? What other conclusions are we leaping to?”
We have seen the trope quite often, where an insular group thaws to an outsider who proves his mettle in some unexpected way. But in this situation, the outsider is not the hero as he usually is. In this situation, the outsider is not just outside of the insular group we are seeing portrayed, but to the group made up of the black characters and the audience. The inner group is the black characters, the outer group is the audience, and outside the group is Doug.
But by the end of the skit, the audience is the one solely on the utter outside. We then see that final jeopardy question and think “Uh oh, this is where Doug is going to step in it!” but the skit ends there. We again assume we know where Doug is heading. We again assume we know Doug. The point is, I think, that Doug is both lady and tiger.
I haven’t read anything about the skit but this thread and I’ve only watched it once, but that’s my take. Apologies if it’s already been thoroughly covered in the various links.
Wow. So rare to see a Gage Park reference anywhere. 
Not even sure most Chicagoans know where the hell it is. My next-door neighborhood. (Though I have a vague recollection we may have discussed this before.)
Anyhow, the interesting thing about Mumbo sauce is that it’s well-known in DC, and more commonly associated with that. See here. Or here, It looks like the DC version is probably a transplanted version of the Chicago sauce. I had actually never noticed or heard of it until about a decade or so ago when I was going through the local Pete’s Market and saw this mysterious homegrown sauce on the shelves. Growing up, it was Open Pit for the most part, but I grew up in a Polish/Bohemian neighborhood with a smattering of Western European mutts and Mexicans, so we probably weren’t hip to that.
Pete’s Market? Excuse me, bro, but just how [del]white[/del] non-ethnic are you? (Mods, note the . We are playing a Chicago game here, where we demand each other’s ethnic props. Which neither of us possess to any great extent once you get past the culinary value of dill.)
Nearest Pete’s is in Oakbrook Terrace, FFS, where it is Honky Central and where people consider Mariano’s de classe because it is reasonably priced and more “ethnic.”
BTW, a point the show tried to note, in six minutes, how happily people, viewers or my friend Puly and I, can find differences and similarities in what seems to outsiders to be trivialities.
Dunno what your Pete’s is like, but the ones here (where they started–I go to the one on 43rd and Pulaski, and originally went to the one at 47th and Kedzie back in the late 90s after they took over the Dominick’s that used to be there) are very much ethnically Mexican, from the produce to the prepared dishes. I’ve always thought of it as a Mexican supermarket (with a Greek owner). If I want something more from “my people,” I have to head down to the Shop & Save, where they have an excellent Polish deli with about 20 types of homemade sausages and dozens of homemade lunch meats.
Gotta see what this Oak Brook Terrace Pete’s is like. Mariano’s is too expensive for my tastes. It’s definitely more upscale than Pete’s, or at least the Pete’s I’m familiar with. Pete’s is on par with places like Cermak Produce. I’d put it as a Mexican version of what Dominick’s used to be. So a little bit nicer than El Guero, most comparable to a slightly more upscale Cermak Produce.
Perhaps.
My interpretation is that even if groups of people are different and have different cultures that spending a bit of time and interacting with others might just reveal some shared humanity. And there is nothing wrong with being able to laugh at yourself.
I grew up surrounded by Dougs and plenty of Shanices. If anything the stereotypes are toned down for tv.
Sorry for the triple post but this is intriguing. I grew up in the Deep South and I didn’t know there was different types of white people until I moved to the Chicago suburbs. It was perplexing to see the ethnic awareness to that degree intra-Caucasianally.
And it wasn’t all fun and games either. Some of these groups took these ethnic differences seriously.
But that would imply that SNL was punching down. It makes as much sense as those people who thought Archie Bunker was right in all his interactions.
You really think SNL is being racist and classist? In this age where you guys think that we’re too PC?
The thing about humor is that intention doesn’t matter. The audience can interpret something anyway they want, regardless of how the artist feels about it.
So no, I ain’t implying anything about SNL, and it pisses me off that you’d say such a thing. (And I don’t think we’re too PC either. WTF, BigT?) To clarify as simply as possible: I’m sure SOMEONE laughed for the reasons that puddlegum mentioned. And that’s their right. But that doesn’t mean that SNL was intentionally appealing to that kind of humor. And it doesn’t mean that no one can find the jokes funny for other reasons.
Yes. I agree with this.