You’re right. It’s just this joke, but look at all of the assumptions packed into it about aboriginals, about women, about sex, about relative worth. The joke, and the person who told it, are a perfect encapsulation of where we are right now as a society: struggling with racism and sexism. It was a hateful joke and I am disappointed that he won’t take responsibility for that.
septimus, lemme put it another way.
Is people making nasty, racist jokes something we should care about? Was it a problem when Roseanne did it? Would a mainstream public figure making the old “how do you starve a mexican - hide his food stamps under his work boots” joke be a problem? I think so. Most people think so. This isn’t some fringe idea; most people recognize that jokes like that are pretty awful. Almost all of the left recognizes it. The world is a better place if we don’t constantly have jokes like that.
So. Then the question becomes. how do we respond to a mainstream leftist figure making a joke like that? Maher’s response seems to be “grow a thicker skin, stop giving a shit”. But that means he either thinks these jokes aren’t a big deal, which puts him at odds with mainstream liberal thought (and, I imagine, most people’s ideals); or he thinks being a “liberal” makes one immune to accusations of racism and that we should give people on “our side” a pass. I disagree with both positions. The former is a value judgment. The latter is a matter of realpolitik, where I don’t think it quite shakes out like that. If we ignore the failings of our own, we look like hypocrites and we lose the moral high ground.
So I think his main thrust is wrong. And it’s surrounded by typical Maher - offensively misleading and shitty.
Has anyone here actually watched/listened to the set up of this bit?
First: the Maher clip is over a year old and had nothing to do with Trevor Noah.
Trevor Noah made a disgusting joke five years ago and now won’t apologize. Although he recognizes that the joke was in very bad taste he has reasons, whether wise or not, for avoiding apology.
Should progressives now boycott his show to coerce an apology? Would such a forced apology be very meaningful anyway? I hope Noah takes up the aboriginal woman’s offer and invites her onto his show, but this is a low priority for me.
Earlier you wrote that you can care about multiple things. Yes, but can you expend energy proselytizing multiple causes? Compared with opposing Trump, expounding on Noah’s flaws is a waste of energy. Worse than a waste in fact: America is full of racists who might be convinced to vote against Trump, and it’s important we focus on winning those voters rather than turning them away again.
Trevor Noah is a child of apartheid and knows first hand what it’s like to be trod under racist bootsteps. Also, black comedians put down other blacks pretty frequently in their monologues. I remember Sinbad said in front of a black audience that he would have been on the side of the white people if he were a slave during the Civil War era. He said something like “Oooh, y’all would have hated me. I’d have said ‘Massah, a whole buncha slaves is tryin’ to escape by the water brook!’ <laughter> ‘They ain’t my people! You my people!’” Tragedy is often a good source of comedy.
Just because they’re identified as left politically doesn’t mean they don’t have racist source material. They’re using the shock value of racist attitudes as comedic effect. Chris Rock and Eddie Murphy sure didn’t go broke calling their audiences the N word.
As comedians, they’re going to play to what they think their audience think is funny. What was Trevor’s audience? Did he tell the same joke to other audiences who weren’t <insert race here>? Does he tell the same joke currently? The dominant paradigm shifts and changes frequently. Some humor doesn’t age well. Farts will always be funny, but specific niches of humor die quiet deaths.
So, other than this bad joke, has Noah done anything else to exhibit racist behavior? Does one bad act automatically make him racist on the level of David Duke? I’m sure Noah doesn’t use that type of humor any more, even though I don’t watch his show. He’s no Jon Stewart.
As a white American trying to survive the Trump Age, this outrage matters little to me.
AFAIK, the OP of this thread is Australian. I myself am Canadian. Please excuse the rest of the world for not spending the next two years only worrying about your fucking election.
The person under the microscope is a US resident born and raised in South Africa.
People coming into this thread and declaring “don’t talk about this because TRUMP!” are retarded regardless.
So has anyone actually watched this special? I really think that discussing 30 seconds of an hour long set is a bad idea. We have no idea what kind of atmosphere or tensions he’s set up before the joke. And the fact that he is pretty racially aware and declined to apologize doesn’t make me angry so much as curious.
…talk about peak fucking white privilege.
As an indigenous person on the other side of the fucking planet I’m really starting to not give a fuck about white American’s trying to survive the Trump age.
This thread isn’t about you. This isn’t about Trump. This isn’t about white Americans. It was started by a Maori/Samoan person living in New Zealand about a South African comedian who told a racist joke about indigenous Australians.
Why the fuck are you even here? Indigenous Australians are one of the most impoverished, marginalised people on the planet. You don’t have a fucking clue what they have to deal with every fucking day. Of course this doesn’t matter to you. Because no matter how bad you think you’ve got it, you don’t have to deal with this kind of institutionalised racism. Or this. Or this.
Trump is a self-inflicted wound. YOU are responsible for Trump. Trump is your fucking problem and your fucking responsibility. The utter gall of this.
You don’t have a fucking clue what the “outrage” is all about. Trevor Noah is a child of apartheid. He should know exactly the plight of the Australian indigenous people. He should understand how devastating it is to perpetuate a disgusting, racist meme that have blighted the Australian indigenous people from the day their lands were stolen from them right up to today.
You don’t have a fucking clue what this is all about. This is the equivalent of Trevor Noah calling Michelle Obama the N word for a joke. Or calling all black American women “monkey’s”. This wasn’t just a racist-as-fuck joke. Its something that many white Australians actually still believe. Its something that Trevor Noah’s audience clapped and laughed about because they found it funny because as far as they were concerned “it was true.” This is about Trevor Noah, somebody who only a few days ago decided to deliver a sermon to the French Ambassador lecturing him about “colonialism”, yet he refuses to apologise for a racist-as-fuck joke that he only stopped using not because it was racist as fuck but because “somebody was offended.”
The fight against white supremacy didn’t start on the 21st of January 2017. For indigenous Australians it started on the 26th of January 1788. So just fuck off with this bullshit. Not just you. But the rest of you as well. Not everything is about your bullshit election. I’ve been one of the loudest critics of Trump on these boards. But this is getting fucking ridiculous. If Trump gets elected again in 2020 you can’t blame me for that for starting this thread. You can’t blame Summer May Finlay for speaking out.
You guys have got one job and that job is to vote the fuckers out. Not just at the highest level. But everywhere. City councils. School boards. Get out and make some noise. Push the supremacists back into the fringes. If you love your country then fucking fight for it. But stop this fucking nonsense repeated by charlatans like Bill Maher that the next election is going to be swayed because an indigenous Australian penned a polite, respectful open letter to a comedian about a problematic joke. Fuck that. If Trump gets re-elected its because YOU didn’t do your job.
I took it as more of a “Don’t work yourself into so much of a froth over this, as there are other things far, far worse, like, for instance TRUMP.” I didn’t see anyone at all say “don’t talk about this.”
I’m willing to give the benefit of the doubt on this. As he is someone that has certainly experienced his fair share of racism, I feel he is much more qualified to determine where the line is than I am.
I am sure that if I, a white guy from Midwestern US, tried to tell that sort of joke, I’d be rightly excoriated. But, context does matter, as far as the history of the speaker, the audience, and the venue.
Comedians also are held to a different standard. If a politician says something hurtful, then says that he was just joking, that’s not really helpful. You are a politician, charged with holding up the best interests of your constituency, and excusing poor comments as jokes is really an insincere walk-back. If you are comedian, you have no responsibilities except to entertain your audience. Everything you say is of no substance, carries no weight. If you tell a bad joke, then you lose your audience. What is said by a comedian in the course of his set/performance should only be judged on whether people enjoyed the performance enough to come back.
If we police offense from comedy, then really, we’ve just about ended comedy.
If a comedian isn’t funny, then people won’t watch them. If some people don’t find a comedian funny, then they won’t watch them. If a comedian makes enough bad jokes, they will lose their audience.
What I disagree with is that if people find a joke offensive that they did not appreciate from a comedian that they already don’t care for, and so they start making demanding certain actions on the part of the comedian, and they will judge whether those actions were performed well enough, and if not, they will demand that that comedian be shut up.
This has turned into one of those threads where people are carefully explaining why other people shouldn’t be offended. I’ll condense it for you: don’t. You make it worse when you tell us not only to stop being offended, but all the reasons why this incident wasn’t really offensive, and, in fact, why you think we are faking our offense.
Guess what? We’re offended by Trevor Noah, and now we’re offended by you. Yay?
As has already been stated, it’s not like we can’t manage our “offense”. We can be angry at Trevor, and hate Nazis, and vote the bastards out. We can do all those things. One does not preclude the other.
Regarding Trevor’s special comedian hall pass, he doesn’t get one. Roseanne didn’t get one for the monkey “joke”. Trevor doesn’t get one for this.
No, this is one of those threads where you explain why you are offended, and you demand that I should be as well. I did not say anything about you faking offense, nor did I tell you to stop being offended, I only explained why I, personally am not joining in on being offended.
And there we are, because I’ve not followed your demand that I join in the offense, that offends you. That all it takes to offend is to not agree, well, I’m not saying that you can’t be offended by people not agreeing with you, and I’m not saying that you are faking your offense at people not agreeing with you, I am just explaining why I, personally, am not joining in the offense at anyone who disagrees with you.
You can be angry at everyone and anyone, but it seems that you are the very angriest at anyone who does not join in your anger. It is a good way to intimidate your allies into agreeing with you, but it is a terrible way to get allies.
A couple of things. I personally don’t care about Rosanne. I didn’t think she was funny in the first run, I never watched the second. I watched the conniptions over her tweet, and I didn’t really care. I would not have watched a second season of her show had it been produced, as I didn’t watch the first.
But, still context is actually important, and the context of these jokes is entirely different. In one, you had a comedian performing his act, on stage in a different country, the country he was born and raised in. The other, you had someone sending out a tweet.
Really, the only thing that either of these have in common is that they are both things that I, as a white guy, should certainly avoid saying. But, just because I should avoid saying such things, does not mean that if anyone at all ever utters something that I would be in trouble for saying, that that person is to be condemned with no possibility of ever being forgiven.
Do you consider any and all comedians who have ever said anything that offended anyone to be in the same catagory? If so, then we’ve pretty much condemned every single comedian who ever performed or will perform. If not, where do you draw the line?
Well said, Banquet Bear. The parochialism in this thread is eye-opening.
Not sure if it’s been mentioned, but Trevor Noah is about to tour Australia. If someone made racist jokes about your friends or family, and refused to apologise, how welcoming would you be? You might even bring it up with them, and say ‘hey, not cool’.
Now we’re talking past each other. I don’t care if you’re mad or not, just stop telling me that I shouldn’t be. I’m not telling anyone to boycott the guy. I’m not saying that comics can’t tell edgy jokes. I’m saying that Trevor Noah fucked up in my opinion, and I’m tired of people telling me that I’m over-reacting or that I’m engaging in faux liberal outrage (which is ironic, considering this board).
Fuck me, this thread has seen more relative privation fallacy then I can believe.
So now the left in the US shouldn’t care what standard they should people to on issues like racism, as long as Trump loses the next election. That level of tribalism is how you guys got into this shit in the first place. Try to hold yourself to a higher standard than the people you revile.
He stated that the vast majority of aboriginal women are unattractive (but there might be some pretty ones no-one in the audience had ever seen) but hey, they must suck dick damned fine.
There is no context, speaker history, audience or venue where that is not a racist remark, and a fucking childish one at that.
Then answer my questions. Does Noah’s bad joke from 5 years ago automatically make him a horrible racist incapable of positive contribution to society? Does the fact that comedians dare to insult ethnic groups as part of their routines offend you?
Sorry about your native versus white devil invader issues. Yes, I have no idea what you have to go through in your world of suck, so I cannot possibly identify with you. That’s why I’m going to be frank and honest with my opinion about how much I don’t give a shit about Trevor Fucking Noah. I’m not going to offer to comfort you with “aw, poor minority person. We whites really are assholes, aren’t we?”
I don’t see Noah as society poison like you do. That’s because I have much bigger problems with my corrupt as fuck president, and I’m channeling absolutely no direction of blame of his election to your part of the planet. I don’t give a shit about something stupid Trevor Noah said 5 fucking years ago and it has fuck-all to do with white privilege, so take that straw man and shove it up your anal passage.
…how is Trump a “far, far worse thing” for the average indigenous Australian? Its “America…FUCK YEAH!” to the max. It isn’t all about you for fucks sakes.
And “don’t talk about this” is subjective. Because when I read posts like this:
Then yeah, I’m reading that as “don’t post about this.” Its a bullshit take. The idea that the best course of action for one of the most impoverished people on the planet is to “let the dollar talk” is just fucking laughable. “Don’t go to his show?” What a fucking joke. “REAL enemies?” Don’t fucking lecture me on who the “REAL enemies” are. I have to live in my skin. I have to deal with my REAL enemies every single fucking day.
There is no secret that many women have left the boards over the years because of problems with misogyny (and to the credit of the powers-that-be here they have worked hard to try and clean a lot of that up) . And there are many posters who have been fighting the good battle against racism on these boards as well.
But there are practically no indigenous posters here on these boards. And ignorance of indigenous issues is pretty big here. And the casual dismissal of indigenous concerns on these boards is symptomatic of a wider problem in society. I’ve had some pretty horrible experiences here. I’m lucky I have the ability to fight back. But its tiring. And I normally moderate myself to avoid getting into those kind of discussions. Which doesn’t help the fight against ignorance.
I didn’t call this out at the time, but this particular exchange says everything.
I’ve snipped the bit where pool attempts to add nuance to their answer. Because the nuance comes too late.
“Whats the joke?”
“Google picture of aborigines and you’ll get the joke.”
This is what you get when you google pictures of aborigines.
Look at those pictures.
Do you get it? They are ugly. They. Are. All. Ugly.
That’s the joke. Just google it and see.
Mijin decides not to be outraged.
But I’m fucking furious. This was so casual and nobody noticed except me and that the reality of living in the world today. We stand quietly and try to do the best that we can. And when we speak up: when I start a thread like this or when indigenous Australians speak out directly to Trevor Noah the instant response is to shut us down.
I know that pool didn’t intend to be hurtful and I understand what pool was trying to say. But you guys really have to try and do fucking better than this.
Peak. Fucking. White. Privilege.
Do you feel he is more qualified to determine where the line is than Summer May Finlay? What qualifications does Trevor Noah have on the plight of the indigenous Australian? He didn’t even realize the joke was offensive until somebody explained it to him for fucks sakes.
Of course context matters. And considering the history of the speaker, the audience and the venue it makes everything just that fucking worse. At least you can claim ignorance. Trevor Noah doesn’t have that luxury.
Can I suggest you take the time to watch the comedy show Nanette, by Hannah Gadsby, available on Netflix, that tackles your take on the “role of the comedian” head on with a sledgehammer.
Fuck that bullshit. We’ve “policed offense” out of plenty of comedy and comedy hasn’t ended. You can’t end the funny. It is never going to happen.
…why the fuck should I answer your question?
I started the fucking thread. I have never claimed that Noah’s bad joke from 5 years ago automatically make him a horrible racist incapable of positive contribution to society. So take your fucking strawman and shove it up your fucking arse.
You are not sorry at all you fucking condescending asshole.
If you don’t give a shit about Trevor Fucking Noah why the fuck are you posting in a thread about Trevor Fucking Noah?
You accusing me of strawmen. Thats fucking rich.
I guess we are talking past each other, as I’ve not said in the slightest that you shouldn’t be. I have not said that you are overreacting, nor that you are engaging in faux outrage of any kind over his comments. All I have said is that I do not feel the same offense, and that was enough for you to be offended, so it really does seem as though you care whether or not I am mad, as I assume you would not have had the same offense if I had joined in your anger.
In the end, what matters to me in an apology is not when they say, “I’m sorry.” It is when they acknowledged the harm that their actions have caused, and show a willingness to not repeat that harm. He didn’t say “I’m sorry” but he did acknowledge the harm his jokes could cuase, and did say that he he no longer uses them. That’s pretty much the most I could ask for, and I see no benefit in demanding any more than that. What level of groveling for forgiveness is necessary to appease you? I assume it is short of ritual suicide, but it does seem as though career suicide is absolutely on the table as a requirement.