From the back of the audience, lost beneath angled lights and slightly shifting bodies, I listened to the comedian without laughing. A band was on the stage beside him and he referenced each member individually. That’s Hector Castro on the keyboard; he says he’s from Miami but everyone knows your last name, Hector, and everyone knows that 20 years ago you were on a Goodyear tire in the middle of the Caribbean, praying not to float to Cancun. The comedian did a pantomime of Hector praying on his defection raft. Our front man, Willy Jones; Willy is African American; move into the light Willy, no one can see you. Willy convulsed silently with laughter, his huge mouth opened and huge teeth glimmered. I expected the comedian to comment on the apparition-like appearance of Willy’s smile – but he moves on. And way back there on the drums and saxophone, we got Joe Miller and Tommy Hatsfield, the white guys. This band is like a dyslexic bus in 1961 Alabama.
I sat silently because everyone else was laughing. And not the uncomfortable, I-can’t-believe-he-said-that laughter, but genuine laughter. I wasn’t laughing because I was paying attention to why these jokes were funny and how they worked with this audience. (The comedian was astute, to be sure, but I think it’s worth mentioning, for my own critical reputation if for no other reason, that this guy wasn’t that funny or edgy; the jokes he had were, comparatively, incredibly tame.) Racism has been something of a style or a device of comedy forever, seen in two forms: the actual racism of blackface and minstrel shows and rants of Michael Richards that serves only hatred; and the friendly, ironic racism that serves equally to point out differences as it does to edify that those differences are petty.
One of the clearest and most recent examples of this took place during the appearance of the cast of the film "Grown Ups" on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Kimmel adroitly takes a racial thought and flips it soundly on its ear around the 1:30 mark of this clip:
In the last ten years, the friendly, ironic form of racism in comedy has lead the way in cautiously brining us closer together while undermining the litigious decades of political correctness that began sometime around "where's the beef?" At a delicate pace, even the backlash against political correctness has become passé – try creating a show called "Politically Incorrect" today and you’ll be met with, "Yes, but what makes it different?"
This begs the question: What is next for political correctness?, which I’ve wondered, inappropriately and aloud at times. While Kimmel and Chris Rock seem to be able to banter comfortably about black and white, Jon Stewart can take the same dry tone with Judaism, Ellen DeGeneres with homosexuality, Ricky Gervais with obesity and the mentally handicapped, and Sarah Silverman with just about anything she can get her greedy, JAP-y, whore-ish mouth on when it isn't replete with Asian cock, none of them seem capable of defining what the next step is in the fight against fear and political correctness.
At times answers sail from the oddest windows and mug you around the most surprising corners. This one came from Thomas "The Moustache" Friedman in today’s New York Times. The Moustache’s column was on the firing of CNN senior editor of Middle East affairs, Octavia Nasr after she Tweeted her condolences for the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, a Shiite spiritual leader involved in the founding of Hezbollah.
"Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah," Nasr wrote. She was subsequently dismissed from CNN, a move that proves only that CNN is racist.
Freidman’s moustache noted, and rightly so, that a journalist should lose her job for "misreporting, for misquoting, for fabricating, for plagiarizing, for systemic bias," not for an innocuous text barely mourning the passing of a man whose life was complex enough to warrant defense by numerous American journalists for his stance on women’s rights and his repudiation of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Friedman continued:
"What signal are we sending young people? Trim your sails, be politically correct, don’t say anything that will get you flamed by one constituency or another. And if you ever want a job in government, national journalism or as president of Harvard, play it safe and don’t take any intellectual chances that might offend someone. In the age of Google, when everything you say is forever searchable, the future belongs to those who leave no footprints."
The Moustache’s words (whether or not he meant them in this way) suggest that political correctness is not just passé, it is detrimental to our society. If we hide behind good manners, pretending there is nothing odd or different or interesting about each other, we run the risk of vitriolic internal attrition that will wear away at the guts of our culture until it implodes, probably violently.
The next step is an active fight against political correctness, while keeping up the conscious fight against prejudice, racism and all things Gibsonian. The next step is not trusting people who have no dissenting opinions nor appreciation for the comedic. The next step, my American friends, is boarding the dyslexic bus.
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The Moustache’s column was on the firing of CNN senior editor of Middle East affairs, Octavia Nasr after she Tweeted her condolences for the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, a Shiite spiritual leader involved in the founding of Hezbollah.