rolling "Is This Racist?" thread

your tv is a who?

DJP's "I read that modifier intentionally wrong" punchlines aren't for everyone

TVs aren't who.

tv never her

"Is This Racist?" Chronicle of Higher Ed blog bullshit update!

http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/a-note-to-readers/46608

hack overboard!

http://media.zenfs.com/en/blogs/sptusnhlexperts/ArrchVZCIAIJOjX.jpg

Godzilla vs. Rodan Rodannadanna vs. The Black Guy vs. The Yellow Kid

tv never her
--l0u1s j0rdan (upper mississippi sh@kedown)

Ty

Also whiney otm re djp

"Is This Racist?" Chronicle of Higher Ed blog bullshit update!

http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/a-note-to-readers/46608

hack overboard!

― goole, Tuesday, May 8, 2012 12:50 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Kind of vindicates whoever said (iatee?) that posting this stuff can help serve as a suggest-ban engine.

national review and nypost are all crying martyr as we speak

of course they are. nypost especially are the ultimate troll.

http://www.cryptomundo.com/wp-content/uploads/The-Troll-Hunter-feature-massive-trolls-in-Norway.jpeg

^^^nypost

is that from trollhunter?

oh man that just made me think about abiyoyo, which I haven't thought about since approx 4th grade

totally troll hunter

The headline for the nypost is an attempt at being more inflamatory than whatsherface's blog entry on brainstorm.com.whatever. But that's the whole idea. They're like a two-year-old banging pots together.

So I have actually been meaning to ask this on ILX for a while, and I think it makes a genuinely good discussion topic, not just "ew look at these racists" -- Is 30 Rock racist? Has their been discussion of this in 30 Rock threads?

idk. Donald Glover called Tina Fey "the most not-racist person ever" on WTF.

Liz Lemon as a character is pretty racist, yes

30 Rock has probably amassed the smartest collection of racial humor in the past 10 years besides like The Chappelle's Show, they've pretty much zinged everyone including themselves/their network already on any angle you could come at them with

A few things that spring to mind:

1) Running jokes about Twofer's Harvard ed and implied AA (both, iirc, in Harvard acceptance AND his job. "It's a joke" seems to mask the fact that the implication is, in fact, that there would be no black writers on the staff but for AA (although I guess you could argue that this is a critique of the system and not of black people?). It's not as though he's presented as less intelligent than the rest of the staff, but I also get a faint whiff of "uppity" in his characterization maybe?

2) Tracy Morgan -- I mean there's just a pretty fine line to walk with a character like this and I think maybe it crosses into minstrelsy sometimes, especially in the context of no other black performers on TGS

3) Dotcom -- I'm on the fence about this. The show definitely plays the "turns out to be smart" for humor, but the humor may stem from him being the big tough entourage bouncer type who turns out to be articulate and sensitive moreso than just his being black I guess?

I also feel like I catch other somewhat racially off jokes on the show a lot but nothing springs to mind atm.

i dunno where to even begin with that kind of selective memory and spectacular point-missing and humorlessness

i believe Hurting is sincere but honestly questioning if 30 Rock is racist is kinda quintessentially what is fucked up about ilx in 2012

i think twofer is based on an actual white guy writer.

mordy otm

Hurting 2 otm. Tho yeah you could say Tracy is a meta example of the role of black comedians in modern American media.

"you could say"? the character has been used exactly that way, explicity and implicity, a hundred times over the course of the show.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2VG53RIJ50

xpost, Of course he is. But sometimes I think the laughs push past the boundaries of "meta" and into just laugh at the crazy dumb black guy territory.

Sort of in the same way that "I'm Rick James bitch!" became the hallmark of the Chappelle show for a lot of the white audience (not that I think this is Chappelle's fault).

but what does that make Tracy Morgan? complicit tool of The Man making jokes about his race, or too dumb to even get that the joke is on him?

Um, why would it have to be either? I'm not alleging that 30 Rock is some kind of evil plot to make black people look bad, I'm just saying that underneath all the "racial commentary" I sometimes get a sense of actual subtly racist attitudes.

well the show is exec produced by Lorne Michaels, who doesn't have an especially great track record with black comedy/comedians on SNL, so it's not like the show is impervious to criticism. i just think of most of 30 Rock's race humor as more suggesting a dialogue or an awareness of those issues than simply playing them for laughs or being unaware of them entirely.

can you give a specific examples? awful lot of generalities here

the recent live episode, which featured a whole insane flashback to '50s TV with Jon Hamm in blackface, explained by Kenneth: "NBC felt it would be too alarming to the audience to have more than one black man appear on the show at a time, a policy they continue to use today!"

granted, four black male cast members were in this segment so it can be seen as a bit of patting-themselves-on-the-back move, but it was still a pretty brutally hilarious moment imo

Hurting 2 otm. Tho yeah you could say Tracy is a meta example of the role of black comedians in modern American media.

― Emperor Cos Dashit (Adam Bruneau), Monday, May 14, 2012 12:05 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"you could say"? the character has been used exactly that way, explicity and implicity, a hundred times over the course of the show.

― kitty shayme (some dude), Monday, May 14, 2012 12:07 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

using racist humor ostensibly to critique racism isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card though, right? family guy couches its blatant racism & misogyny in mockery of the idiocy of its characters, american culture and the human race in general. nevertheless, it's use of satire often comes off more as a cheap excuse than a legitimate justification. it often seems to use the protective cover afforded by "satirical intent" to get away with "lol dumb lazy mexicans" jokes.

not saying that 30 rock doing anything similar, but it seems like a fair question to ask. personally, i see tracy's buffoonishness as more absurd than mocking, and the ways they've addressed race wr2 twofer's character are so many-edged as resist any easy reduction to "racism".

but this is The Thread In Which I Am Often Wrong, so...

I think most of the jokes around the Tracey Jordan character have to do with the fact that he is a crazy megalomaniac than with being black.

i dunno i just feel like i'm the only person in this convo who has seen more than a handful of episodes of the show and can recall many scenes in detail, pardon me if that makes me act a little overly confident in my side of the argument

xpost well ok at least AP is here now

missing a "more" in that sentence

middle easterners seem to figure on 30 rock mostly as "sheiks" from whose sexual slavery jenna has escaped

^ trolling

they did calibrate the hamm blackface to be suggestive rather than over-the-top like they did with the jenna blackface episode, which puts forth the idea that there is a tasteful amount of blackface, which I don't agree with. this really ties into a larger complaint about 30 rock that they've settled into a comfort zone.

fwiw, i had questions about the episode in which it was at least implied that twofer was too "white" to get away with using the n-word. the idea that goofy "whiteness" might be the product of education and class seemed more a straight-up punchline in that episode than something that was being critiqued.

which puts forth the idea that there is a tasteful amount of blackface

xp to my last: not that it wasn't funny. part of the joke was that twofer was trapped and damned by the unfair expectations and prejudices around him.

yeah i mean that episode to me is a classic example of the show demonstrating an awareness of the dialogue surrounding that kind of plot rather than just tossing it out there for the crudest possible joke

if anything it suggested that the writing staff of 30 Rock had already had the kind of conversations back then that most of ilx is still going "what? really? i had no idea" at.

i dunno i just feel like i'm the only person in this convo who has seen more than a handful of episodes of the show and can recall many scenes in detail, pardon me if that makes me act a little overly confident in my side of the argument

― kitty shayme (some dude), Monday, May 14, 2012 3:34 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Um, I've watched every episode through ep. 4 of season 5?

I think most of the jokes around the Tracey Jordan character have to do with the fact that he is a crazy megalomaniac than with being black.

Yeah. Some times they cross that line but not often. I think it was alot more iffy in this case during the first episode of the show.