Oddly, I’m usually a bit touchy about gay rights issues, but I have trouble getting worked up about this one. I think there’s a few reasons.
Tracy Morgan is an idiot. Something of a likeable idiot with a pretty dark story to his life, but an idiot. Hearing him say something idiotic is a bit…well, expected.
I can’t even get as far as the gay issue to be outraged. No man should be willing to even joke about killing his child. Hell, no man should be willing to tolerate anyone else joking about doing violence to his kid, for that matter.
Missed that the first time, but can’t stop laughing since I read it a few minutes ago.
This doesn’t seem to be entirely relevant to this thread, since most of the complaints, including many of the initial reports from the show, are coming from gay people. Are we patronizing ourselves?
So this is what? A big sneak brag about how cool you are with disabled people? That’s really awesome for you, I’m sure, but it’s not exactly relevant, is it? Now, if Jane herself had been complaining about people making fun of her, this analogy might fit the situation a bit better. But I somehow suspect that if that were the case, your story wouldn’t end with you telling Jane, “Shut the fuck up, you don’t know shit.”
No one is arguing that gays are a “sacred cow.” We’re as fair a target for humor as anyone. But just because something is a joke, it doesn’t automatically mean that there’s no ill will behind it. Tracy Morgan said something that was spectacularly cruel and mean-spirited, and (worst of all) not particularly funny. If Morgan’s “jokes” had been remotely clever or witty, we probably wouldn’t be discussing this now. But he didn’t come across as funny, he came across as angry and hateful.
Well of course. No one is saying gays should never be joked about. I just had brunch this morning with 4 gay men and they told some raunchy gay jokes. But I am having trouble seeing what Morgan’s actual *joke *was. The one line about taking a dick up the ass, yeah that was a joke. Crude sure, maybe offensive, but a joke. But where’s the joke part of saying he’d kill his son if he sounded gay, or that Obama should not speak out about gay youth suicide, or that being gay is a choice? What’s the punchline that would make such statements funny?
I have to agree with this. I think Jim Davidson is vile, and his vileness is reflected in his comedy.
Yeah, I seldom have a problem with offensive humour, as long as it’s considerably funnier than it is offensive. I think there’s some kind of subconscious ratio in my head: if your offensiveness level is at 10 out of 100, then your funny level needs to be at least 15 out of 100. If your offensiveness level is at 80/100, and you can’t manage a funny level of 120/100, then maybe this would be a good moment to shut up.
It sounds like the funniness level on this was, at best, very low.
What Sacha Baron Cohen does is really nothing like stand-up. He’s basically a situational performance artist whose artwork is the whole scene that develops, not just his own character or the things that character says.
Colbert is a little closer, but I’d say that his satire is so broad that it’s not really expressing a right-wing viewpoint. Even with no prior knowledge, I’d think one would have to be pretty dim to take Colbert seriously for longer than a brief segment of his show.
Daniel Tosh is a different matter. He may think he’s not “really” racist. He certainly has some fans on this board and elsewhere who would argue that he’s not (and by extension, that they’re not). You say he “probably” isn’t a racist shitstain; is that not just what we’d like to believe? Has he ever actually said anything in any non-performing context that makes this clear? Colbert’s joke is that he is (roughly) pretending to be serious. We’re supposed to think that Tosh’s metajoke is that he’s not serious about his overt jokes–the ones that he and his audiences are, in fact, laughing at?
As I said in one of the Tosh threads last year,
Sarah Silverman I am less familiar with, but taking your word that she shows similarities to Tosh, I’ll say the same for her–barring evidence, of course.
I haven’t watched SNL regularly for a long, long time, so I haven’t seen too much of their current stuff. It wouldn’t be whether the writers and actors think he’s accurate, but whether the depiction is representative of a bias against gay men. Not all stereotypes are hateful, of course. I certainly don’t think that members of minority groups are incapable of producing material which supports discriminatory attitudes against their own groups. With a quick glance at a random vid, Stefon seems to me like he was conceived without real malice, but is still rather dehumanizing, and not funny. I don’t think the attitude towards gay men exemplified there is even distantly comparable to Morgan’s, though.
Again, not a stand-up comedian. Sometimes an actor, sometimes a performance artist–indisputably realms of fiction.
I may be wrong, but my impression of Dangerfield’s “wife” jokes wasn’t that they were to be understood as references to his actual wife; did he name her?
I found a reference (the People piece that followed Edgar’s suicide) that claimed, “Joan was always careful that she, not he, was the butt of her jokes.”
In any case, I’m asking for evidence that the tone of such a routine is at odds with the comedian’s genuine beliefs. If there is no evidence, further assumptions about what the real feelings “must” have been are not illuminating.
Unless somebody can provide one clear cite to the contrary, I’m going to stick with tim314 here.
How was Andy Kaufman not a stand-up comic? He’d go to comedy clubs, stand behind a microphone, and tell jokes to an audience. Sounds like a stand-up to me.
I think it was about a year or so ago - Tracy Morgan appeared at a comedy club in NYC and it was sold out. A friend of mine went and said within 15 minutes, people were walking out and by about 30 minutes they were leaving in droves.
Not because it was offensive, but he was absolutely not funny at all.
She said he had no timing of humor, and his “jokes” were either really lame or simply unfunny.
That said, it is no secret that black urban communities are generally very much anti-Gay, and Tracy is one more dumbass in a steaming pile of ignorant, homophobic dumbasses.
As a Gay dude who marched for civil rights and integration in the 60’s, this bigoted homophobia in black communities pisses me off to no end. It ain’t funny and a royal FUCK YOU Tracy and your ilk.
Did he ever do a straight routine, though? Anything that could plausibly be interpreted afterwards as having been a straight routine? He claimed not to. My understanding is that Andy Kaufman was a performance artist who sometimes took stand-up as his subject.
I think the saddest part of this whole thing is that Morgan has to steal lines from Carlos Mencia.* How pathetic is that?
What the heck is a straight routine in comedy? Sounds kinda boring.
Sarah Silverman and Ricky Gervaise (just off the top of my head) do stand-up as self-absorbed, insensitive, and rather dim characters that in no way could survive in the real world entertainment industry. I’m not saying this is necessarily also the case with Tracy Morgan, but it’s totally ridiculous to say that all (or even most)stand-ups reflect their true character on stage.
I think what spark420 means is that he didn’t play it like most stand-ups who either have a narrative or a set list of stories and jokes. The little I saw of Kaufman’s stage work was that it was more free-form, and he’d sometimes incorporate stuff like alternate characters or personalities (one of which was pretty much Latka Gravas from Taxi.) What was funny wasn’t the stuff he said, but the way he acted.
I didn’t mean to get caught sneak bragging. I actually was going for a blatant brag. I am proud of myself for not patronizing her, because it was hard for me not to. We built a pretty cool relationship, and I think it is because we both put some work in. I think my work was involved in making a concious effort not to patronize. I do think I am kind of cool with disabled people. I have been known to be cool with them when it’s time for that, or get in the trenches and fight with them when it’s time for that. So, yeah, I’ll toot my horn on that one.
I used to think I could toot my horn about my relationship with gay people too, but I am getting schooled in this thread, big time. I honestly thought this would be one of those things where others come rushing in to ‘save’ the gay people from something that would make most gay people think, ‘fuck off…you don’t know shit’. I should have known better than to make assumptions. I am sorry that I made that assumption at all.
I would do well to remember that what I think is ok isn’t ok with everyone else. Posters in this thread are talking about how joking about killing your kid is never funny. My kid and I do this all the time. Seriously. Gruesome humor is her specialty.
But I digress. My overall point is that I admire you as a poster a great deal Miller. You usually drop posts that blow my mind with how well thought out and stated they are. If you say I’m barking up the wrong tree on this one, and you are speaking from the perspective of a gay man, I will take that opinion and bow out of the thread.
I know I said I would bow out of the thread, but I just wanted to point out that I broke both Tracy’s and Chris’s record for an apology.
One could make the argument that he wasn’t “doing standup,” he was “doing performance art” in front of a mic. Much of his standup comedy was explicitly intended to be unfunny and annoy the audience.
I’m pretty sure he’s quoted as saying he didn’t want to be thought of as a comic but as an entertainer. Kaufman’s goal wasn’t to get laughs – his goal, I think, was to make sure people left remembering the show and, on some level, glad they were there.
That said, I don’t actually agree. At least a chunk of his career was spent as a stand-up comic, just…a weird one.
Not so much pathetic as mysterious – now I want to know who actually said it first!
THAT’s where I’d heard it before! Thanks.
Yeah it wasn’t funny back then and not funny now. Maybe it will be funny some time in the far distant future?
The fact that some racists like Tosh’s racial material doesn’t mean he’s a racist. Racists LOVE Chris Rock’s racial material, too.
Calling him racist, unless you’re using a definition of racism I’m not familiar with, would imply that he actually thinks races should be treated differently. I just don’t hear that – his jokes are generally about the uncomfortable fact that racism exists, de facto cultural segregation still happens, and that many people hold stereotypes despite denying it. The only time he sounds racist, in my experience, is when he points out his own “white privilege”; but that’s, well, kinda the joke.