Pop Culture Turns Tables on Racists

Chris Vognar - Dallas Morning News

Jan 28, 2008

New wave of pop culture humor turns tables on racists; New wave of pop culture humor turns the tables on slurs

Racial humor has long been the electric fence of the comedy world, a topic you touch at your own risk. America the melting pot has a way of boiling over when one of its components gets dissed in public.

But what happens when the target of jest is not the race, but the racist? We're finding out with a surge of ironic pop culture race humor that runs the gamut from television's 30 Rock and the Harold & Kumar movies to a handy little book bearing the loaded title A Practical Guide to Racism.

A Practical Guide to Racism? Please, curb those boycott plans and allow us to explain.

The 19th century was fertile ground for pseudo-scientific racists who did their best to justify bigotry with academic jargon (primitive predecessors to 1994's hotly debated social study The Bell Curve, if you will). Now, in the watch-what-you-say 21st century, these tweed-coat charlatans get hoisted on their own petard in the Guide. Written by Daily Show writer Sam Means in the character of a quack ethnography professor named C.H. Dalton, the book mocks racism by adopting the more ridiculous qualities of its voice.

"The idea at the heart of this book is that racism is absurd, that hating another ethnic group as a whole, or believing in these insane stereotypes, just doesn't make any sense," says Mr. Means by e-mail. "The character of C.H. Dalton draws those beliefs out to their illogical conclusions in order to reveal their absurdity. No one actually thinks that Laotians are all rapists, or that all Hispanics are tiny, rodent banditos, but believing that makes just as much sense as thinking that all Jews are greedy, or all black people are lazy."

Mr. Means' key concept here is irony. How else could he write this: "There is a long history of cinema, books, and music that deal with the black man's sexual fears and neuroses. His worst nightmare is played to great effect in the movie Traffic, when a large black man is preyed upon by a comatose, drug-addled white teenager."

Or this: "Not all Jews have curly hair and big noses, like Howard Dean's wife, Judith, but as Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said of hard-core pornography, 'I know it when I see it.' "

Irony rules

Racial humor is obviously nothing new. "As we are a nation of immigrants and a polyglot of races, racial humor is as old as the performing arts in the U.S.," says Dennis M. Maher, associate professor and dramaturge at the University of Texas at Arlington.

And the idea of turning the racist into the butt of the joke has been around just as long. Slaves and then ex-slaves used clandestine humor to mock a white power structure that couldn't be openly lampooned. Trickster stories in African-American culture were created largely for the purpose of vicariously putting one over on the oppressor.

More recently, in the post-integration era, socially progressive pop culture posited the white man as his own foil. Archie Bunker raised hackles as a bigotry-spouting parody of the blue-collar, Nixon-era "silent majority" on All in the Family, much to the chagrin of his jesting partner George Jefferson.

Now we live in an age when content barriers crumble by the day and irony rules the roost. On series like 30 Rock, The Office and Curb Your Enthusiasm, clueless, racially insensitive characters regularly open mouth and insert foot in a constant struggle to navigate the new world. On Curb, for instance, Larry David takes in an African-American family displaced by Hurricane Katrina and finds humor in the fact that their last name is Black. Characters like Mr. David's are buffoons, but not overt racists, and we somehow feel for them as they battle political correctness.

'A very thin line'

The mocking racism game is fraught with peril and can be misappropriated. Take Chappelle's Show, the brilliantly incendiary Comedy Central series in which Dave Chappelle played characters including a blind, black white supremacist and the milkman for the all-white Niggar family. The intent was to turn racism on its ear. Then white viewers who took such skits at face value began to approach Mr. Chappelle on the street and congratulate him on his backward racial views. Such misinterpretations troubled Mr. Chappelle, and he ended up pulling the plug on his own show and leaving millions of dollars on the table.

"In this day and age, it's a very thin line," says Cedric the Entertainer, the popular comedian and actor who cut his teeth on It's Showtime at the Apollo and HBO's Def Comedy Jam and will appear next month in Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins. "If you're doing it in a sense of trying to be ironic, and trying to see the flip side, you just have to be careful about it. In this time you should probably be even more careful than in the past, because it is a very racially charged world right now."

On the other hand, he adds, "Sometimes funny is funny."

At the movies, the most subversive racism-busters may be the deceptively smart Harold & Kumar movies. The first, Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, works on two levels, as a dopey stoner comedy and a stereotype detonator. Our two heroes, one Korean-American (John Cho) and one Indian-American (Kal Penn), deal with moronic skateboarders, racist cops and pass-the-buck bosses ("those Asians love crunching numbers") in an odyssey to reach their favorite hamburgers. Then there's the black inmate who sits in his cell reading a book on civil disobedience -- which the cops somehow mistake for a gun.

The sequel, Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay (which will play the South by Southwest Film Festival in March), moves the formula into the post-9/11 world of racial profiling. Traveling to Amsterdam, Harold and Kumar are pegged as terrorists when their bong is mistaken for an explosive device. Surveying the suspects in an interrogation room, an FBI agent (former Daily Show player Rob Corddry) sums up the situation: "North Korea and al-Qaeda working together. This is gonna be bigger than I thought."

The joke, of course, is on him.

So why the recent popularity of pin-the-tail-on-the-racist? It might have something to do with increased cries of reverse racism and political correctness, modern concepts that assume racial hatred exists in an historical vacuum. Such arguments are easy outs, rhetorical loopholes for an era when it's no longer socially acceptable to be a public racist (just ask Don Imus).

A more covert form of racial humor is a natural response: Here's a cracked mirror to hold up to your cracked arguments. Here's a Practical Guide to depict the roots of your beliefs.

One only hopes everyone gets the joke. "That's a danger, I suppose," says Mr. Means. "But I hope I went far enough to remove any doubt that it's not to be taken seriously. I think most people understand that it's a book about racism, not just a book of racist jokes."

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