As a rule, I cut comedians more slack than than I do other folk, as being somewhat offensive is part of their job description. It wasn’t a good moment for Trevor though.
In other news, there has been a rash of tasteless jokes resurfaced from years ago. Kevin Drum explains why: [INDENT] These kinds of tweets don’t just “resurface.” Some actual person with an axe to grind spends hours or weeks plowing through old archives in order to find ancient material like this. Even when it’s obviously a joke—tasteless but still a joke—they know that it might damage the target’s career.
Why bother? Not because anyone cares about these specific people. They’re discovered at random, after all. The reason is so that genuinely hateful tweets and social media posts from neo-Nazis and white nationalists can be played down when they’re discovered. After all, “everyone does it,” right? [/INDENT] With that in mind, I’d advise my readers to distinguish between patterns and isolated incidents, and between misfired comedic routines and weaponized humor as a method of pushing vile ideas.
The irony of people saying “Noah doesn’t get it” …is that of all fucking people, Trevor Noah gets it.
Sorry Banquet Bitch, but you don’t understand what racism is and what racism isn’t. Trevor Noah can’t be a racist, because he is not in a position to be a racist. It’s white majorities in “Western” countries that created political, economic, and social systems of race-based hierarchy.
You just don’t get it. You never will. Shut your ass up.
Paraphrase:
No one is attracted to aboriginals. They must do something amazing sexually to make up for how hideous they are.
It was a stupid and offensive joke. The issue is that, like others before him, he’s digging in. Instead of just apologizing and moving on, he tried to say it was funny somewhere and we just don’t get it.
Did it even once dawn upon you that the “racist” things he supposedly said and meant about Aboriginals might have been things he has heard said about Africans? Therein lies the joke. White people don’t get it because they’ve never been in a position to, which is just Trevor Noah trolling his audience.
You’re just using a particular definition of racism. It doesn’t need to mean the same for everybody else. Being prejudiced towards somebody because of their racial features would be mine.
By the way, I’m fine with Noah using racist, sexist and homophobic jokes. Comedy ain’t pretty and it shouldn’t be.
When his reaction for the tweets thing was “sorry if anybody was offended by my words” and blaming it all on PC culture, that was disappointing. A Daily Show host is supposed to see through crap like fake apologies and blame shifting, not be part of it.
Do I think it was especially wise for Noah to make such remarks? No.
But let’s straighten the fuck up: everything he just said about aboriginals have been said about African women. Don’t fucking tell me otherwise --you’re living in a goddamn bubble if you say anything to the contrary. There was irony in his humor – like a shit ton. He trolled white America because he knew they’d get on their goddamn high horse about “racism”.
I don’t expect anyone to understand or get it. It doesn’t mean a shit to me. I’m white, I get why white do-gooders are outraged, but I get why Noah felt comfortable telling a “joke” that he’s probably been the butt of many times over.
We should all guide ourselves in the path of wholesome humor, harmless joshing and avoid the perils of sarcasm, of tearing down without building up! Some of us are corrupted beyond redemption, we cherish jokes we would never tell in polite company, only amongst ourselves, jokes based on beliefs we don’t have and would not approve.
I don’t, not unless I totally trust my audience, and not for the delicacy of their feelings, but because being the target of self-righteous ire makes me all stabby.
Here is the thing about comedians, their job before anything else is to make people laugh. A pilot flies a plane, a mechanic fixes your car, and a comedian is supposed to make you laugh, everything else, a social message, politics, ethics, pointing out hypocrisy, whatever is of a secondary importance if the comedian can’t deliver the material in a way that makes you laugh.
If a comedian ever apologizes it should be for not being funny, not because their material is offensive, you don’t have the right to not be offended. Louis CK is probably my favorite comedian of all time, I never liked his bits about child molestation, but I recognize that in the context of comedy, that’s my own personal hangup and it doesn’t reflect badly on him as a comedian, If I want to laugh I have to risk being offended, that’s part of the trade-off.
I think Patrice O’Neal, now dead was also one of the funniest comedic geniuses, in this clip of him on a news program he debates a panelist about a controversial rape joke, he argues from within the context of his worldview as a comedian and this is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about.
Oh. Right. Right. Of course. The joke was a complex, multi-layered 4D chess jab aimed ultimately at people hundreds of miles away. Not some juvenile commentary on sex and appearances. I wish I was woke enough to get these things.
He didn’t say they were hideous, he said you may not have found one you were attracted to yet. And as someone who travels a lot, that’s really how attraction works for us; drop your average American into a Mongolian village and maybe she/he doesn’t find *anyone *attractive at first.
The bit about “maybe they’ll jump on you” is…not funny, which is the cardinal rule if you’re going to be offensive.
But all told, it’s pretty weak sauce. I like to think if I had access to the twitter history of anyone who has been posting for a while, I could find things easier to twist into an outrage than this.
My dad was Samoan. His dad was a member of the Mau, a group that protested New Zealand colonial rule. My granddad died at the hands of New Zealand police. I never got the chance to meet him, to know him. My mum is Maori. Ngāpuhi. I’m not white. I was born into the legacy of white colonialism and capitalist racism. I’m not expressing “white outrage.” Don’t lecture me on what racism is and what it isn’t. You don’t have a fucking clue you ignorant arrogant twonk.
I am privileged to live in New Zealand. Where indigenous rights are recognized by treaty. Where Maori have guaranteed representation in parliament. New Zealand is still racist as fuck. But it is still nowhere near as racist as Australia is.
The indigenous people of Australia are treated like shit. Children aged under 4 are twice as likely to die than non-indigenous children and in the Northern Territory infant mortality is 4 times the non-indigenous rate. They earn half as much. They represent 27% of all adult full-time prisoners (but are only 2% of the population.) The detention rate for indigenous children (aged between 10 and 17) is 26 times the non-indigenous rate. Indigenous Australians are the “most incarcerated people on the planet Earth.”
And it is this ugly backdrop of the disgraceful treatment of Indigenous Australians gives Noah’s joke context. For those who don’t know about the history of “the ugly aboriginie” this article gives context.
There is a long history of this. It has never gone away. And in 2013 Trevor Noah made a joke that called directly to this stereotype. And when called on it in 2018 Trevor Noah chose not to apologise for it. He states quite clearly he stopped using the joke not because it was racist, but because he learned that some Australians might have taken offense to it. As far as he’s concerned the joke was told in a “different cultural context”.
But here’s the context. We marched in this country to end apartheid. We protested, we stopped playing rugby (virtually a religion here), and for a very short period in our history the protests tore our country apart. The context is that Trevor Noah should fucking know better. Trevor Noah **doesn’t ** get it. He told a racist-as-fuck joke a few years ago and refuses to own the fact that he told a racist-as-fuck joke. That’s what this thread and all the “outrage” is all about.