How about Joe Jackson in “Real Men” singing
“You don’t want to sound dumb, don’t want to offend
So don’t call me a faggot, not unless you are a friend”
?
Joe himself is bisexual.
I worked on a game once that was trying to cash in on the popularity of GTA: San Andreas, except instead of a sprawling open world game, they just decided to have the characters say the n-word as much as possible while you ground your way through an utterly uninspired corridor shooter.
We licensed some hip-hop songs for the game. One of them had a lyric that referred to “niggers and faggots.” And we bleeped “niggers” in the song, despite it being every third word in the game’s dialogue, but left “faggots” alone.
Absolutely, no doubt.
Here’s my real life “n” word story.
When I lived in NYC, I was friendly with a local disabled veteran, Michael. A fairly young guy, racially mixed, one of those guys that ran out and enlisted after 9/11. While in Iraq, he lost a leg in a roadside explosion. He also suffered a serious head injury which resulted in other issues such as emotional lability.
Michael lived in a “wounded warrior” housing unit near where I lived. He would hang out on the street in his wheelchair, talking to his friends and, yes, bumming money for food - the local merchants liked him and gave him large amounts of food for small amounts of money.
We talked about a lot of things, including the mixed attitudes of people towards veterans in general and Michael in particular. One day he was talking about his relationship with some of the other veterans in the neighborhood, the older white “greatest generation” WW2 vets. He was telling me that they were generally really good to him and they would take him to the local bar and buy him drinks. But then his emotional issues would surface and he’d start crying or ranting. And then, in his words, it was “time to go, n****r”.
Michael started using that phrase as sort of a punchline. We’d be hanging out talking and one of the older veterans would join us and he’d grin and whisper “time to go, n****r”, in my ear. And I did smile when he did that.
And the last thing in the world that I would have done was chastise this guy for his language. I think he felt that phrase succinctly described his mixed feelings about that group of older veterans, and I sort of agreed. And it bonded us, largely because of the inappropriateness of the word. But is was still weird for me, because “n-word”. And I NEVER would repeat that punchline myself, even though Michael tried to get me to a few times.
I’m content with the current social etiquette that reserves the word for use by black people and Quentin Tarantino, but I think we can be mature enough to leave past utterances in Art and History unedited. It’s a shame that one of the most brilliant (and funny) commentaries on the power of that word has been all but scrubbed from TV History. I’m referring to the SNL sketch featuring Chevy Chase and Richard Pryor.
Because some people are so busy being offended, that they don’t have any time for common sense.
When we proscribe or censor words like “nigger” or “faggot,” we weaponize those words, and we weaken the groups described by them.
There is no more potent way to keep “nigger” a powerful weapon for a malignant user than to ban it. Banning “nigger” turns its use into An Event. It creates a contest for the Most Offended to step up and be recognized as champions of the downtrodden; protecting blacks who are so weak that even words are enough to beat them down.
Censor it in a movie or a book, and instead of cleaning up an insult, you allow the word to retain all of the evil that ever went into it.
We do well to let the audience of language form their own opinions for any word use.
Sticks and stones is a far more powerful approach than is giving those with malicious intent words capable of inflicting maximum pain because the words are so powerful they need to be censored, and the targets of the malice so weak they need White Knights to keep them from being hurt.
This is absurd and shows a complete lack of what TCM is all about. TCM is about fighting for the preservation and airing of film. Not about censorship. TCM is showing a John Waters/Divine double feature this evening: Female Trouble and Multiple Maniacs. The contents of early Waters film makes Blazing Saddles look like a mainstream comedy. If TCM edits these films, I will never watch them again; if they dont they are absolute hypocrites for editing BS.
I’ve never seen it air on TCM but it runs a lot on AMC, which bleeps things.
Colibri sure didn’t like it when I used the word “faggots” (without quotes) in a parody-quote of Alice’s Restaurant a few years ago.
See this thread, Posts #29 and #31.
I sense that the mods, not all, but a few, don’t quite get the concept of parody, games, and satire.
Which begs the question, did they censor Slim Pickens “Kansas City faggots” a song or two after “nigger work songs” or Dom Delouise’s “Watch me faggots” in the ‘French Mistake’ scene? What about “docking the napping chinks” pay? Scoff at slippery slopes all you want, but with offense levels so prevalent and disparate, you almost could imagine a point the audio track starts to resemble and old Emergency Broadcast System test tone.
:dubious: What a convenient hypothesis, for people who aren’t in those groups and who don’t want to be inconvenienced by having to pay attention to whether the language used in their social circles is offensive.
Hmmm. By that reasoning, you’d think that all those decades during which that particular racial slur was accepted in in widespread use would have succeeded in de-powering and de-potenting it as a verbal weapon.
But surprise surprise, turns out that black people still strongly objected to being called “nigger” even when it was no big deal to most white people. How peculiar.
The malignant use of that word was always An Event for the people targeted by it. Just because most white people back in the day didn’t much mind hearing it doesn’t mean it was genuinely a trivial thing or no big deal.
Hmmm. Funny how I never hear that insinuation of “weakness” used to deplore, say, prohibitions of slurs like “kike” or “yid” or antisemitic graffiti targeting Jews.
If public rejection of hate speech really had such deleterious “weakening” effects on minorities, you’d think that the anti-“weakness” advocates would be all up in arms about it when some nazi paints a swastika near the local shul.
“What do you mean, it’s an intolerable and unacceptable hate crime? Are you trying to turn that congregation into a despised bunch of fragile sissypants by suggesting that they’re so weak that even a bit of paint on the sidewalk is enough to beat them down? Why, if you really cared about the Jews, you’d be out there painting more swastikas yourself, just to help them become tough enough to handle it! :mad:”
But no, oddly enough, it’s only blacks and gays who seem to attract these helpful folks selflessly trying to strengthen their emotional immune systems by warning that they aren’t getting sufficient exposure to hateful slurs.
Let’s not get into this hijack.
This thread is in no way shape or form about calling black people by that term.
It’s all about what is acceptable* in works of art. *
It’s tangentially related, and not really a hijack. Still out of place, but let’s not call it what it isn’t.
And beyond that, the absurd and gratuitous use of the word was part and parcel of that message- it pointed up the racists and their attitudes.
Censoring it is a sort of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, at least in terms of Blazing Saddles in particular.
Something similar happened with Blazing Saddles:
The whole thing about why that word isn’t used is because black people have told us that it is offensive. Lately, black people have been saying that they don’t like even the mentioning of the word because it feels like white people just want to find an excuse to say it. After that guy lost his job at Netflix, and I didn’t see any black people arguing in his defense, I decided that things had moved on and I needed to stop saying it.
I am not black. I don’t get to choose to say a word that is offensive to black people on my own. They tell me when it is acceptable. This is so I can also tell people what things are too offensive to say about my minority. And also because I’m against causing unnecessary offense. If I am offensive, it should be intentional. Otherwise it gets in the way.
I concur that nothing is actually lost from Blazing Saddles with the word bleeped. We know what word it is. And the transgressive element of attacking the Innocent Western has passed, so the shock that they would dare say it is unnecessary.
My only requirement is that the original remain available. But if anyone wants to air it without that word, that is fine with me. TV stations censor far less offensive words. People don’t complain that “fuck” or “shit” was absolutely necessary.
Yeah, I get that feeling too from some white people very carefully not using the word but apparently seizing on any excuse to mention it. Like the kid with his/her finger half an inch away from your face saying “I’m not touching yoooouuuu!”
Yup. We are in no danger of actually losing the unredacted original versions of such artworks with the original slurs included, and people can seek out those original versions if they want to.
Did TMC at least have the artistic sense to bleep it out using a church bell?