rolling "Is This Racist?" thread

"i am a decent person. i don't do drugs or sleep around. i wear normal boring clothes, like normal boring stuff and get to bed at a decent hour (and secretly think poor people are kind of gross and trashy hee)."

Liz totally sleeps around, her fashion choices are routinely ridiculed, she does not go to bed at a decent hour she stays up all night watching reality TV and having weird sex etc.

i dunno. the way i see it, lemon considers herself a smart, educated, moral, socially-conscious person. she constantly falls short of her self-image or gets pushed off her high horse. for me, that's funny, not because "ha, dumb liberals can't live up to their ideals," but because "ha, that's me."

also does the author of that article consider 'an activia microwaveable panini' to be gourmet food y/n

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.

I can't believe someone came up with the concept of "blackface calibration" and didn't think "this may be taking ironic distance a step too far, posting this on the 'is this racist?' thread"

if the show is horribly prejudiced against any group in particular it's probably people from the south

Liz totally sleeps around, her fashion choices are routinely ridiculed, she does not go to bed at a decent hour she stays up all night watching reality TV and having weird sex etc.

no way does liz sleep around. she's a serial monogamist. he fashion choices are ridiculed as dowdy (i.e. conservative, boring, lazy, old-fashioned). she may stay up late watching bad TV on occasion, but we know she isn't clubbing or anything too wild. she's at home being normal. she's conservative. she values dependable, responsible decency more than wildly impulsive extroversion. jenna is the one mocked for sleeping around, and the show expresses real disgust at her behavior and morality.

if the show is horribly prejudiced against any group in particular it's probably people from the south

and comedy writers

if the show is horribly prejudiced against any group in particular it's probably people from the south

^^^this

My people have been so persecuted.

by Yankee comedy writers. *smh*

that possum's what been up 'n bit my momma's neck brace

i don't think anything in the whole of 30 rock was as harsh as conan was to the kenneth actor in that documentary. was that a bit (i hope)?

Yeah most people in NYC think if you are from the south you are from the land of Kenneth.

tbf...

keep forgetting this is not actually the 30 Rock thread

Xposts, but what would Liz Lemon need to do in order not to be considered conservative? Party all night and do drugs? Wear flamboyant clothing? Are these the hallmarks of forward-thinking and progressive people?

i tried to draw a clear distinction btwn political conservatism and what i was calling liz/tina's "personal conservatism"

also, i get the nagging feeling that this discussion really should move to the 30 rock thread at this point

once i saw some show like right before 30 Rock that was some asian dude going CHANG CHANG CHANG CHANG to the tune of 'Carol of the Bells.' Is that racist?

okay i am going to rudely interject without having completely caught up on the thread--30 rock doesn't strike me as conservative necessarily (although i guess that word could have a lot of meanings; sometimes i think comedy is inherently conservative), but it does strike me as particularly ruthlessly deflating of beliefs tina fey herself might be suspected of having--feminism, "bourgeois liberalism" as someone put it upthread. also that second season episode that carrie fisher guest-starred in still sticks in my craw because there's something so upsetting about how it disposes of her and liz's relief to be on the winning side at the end. generally, i think tina fey's humor is kind of ruthless, particularly towards herself.

for that reason, though, i think it's pretty good on race generally because it deflates a bourgeois liberal type who wants to believe she's a beacon of racial tolerance but reveals herself to be not so much a lot of the time. to be fair, i missed most of the third and fourth seasons. definitely think this discussion of race is interesting; will now catch up on thread.

i have a lot of *feelings* about the sensibility of the show, for sure. it's so funny and so clever but sometimes the politics bother me. i might be a little too earnest to really handle tina fey.

i also defer to al; feel like he's the privileged critic of 30 rock on ilx.

well said

xpost awwwww

if anything i'm too much of a stan of the show to cede ground to criticism, which is part of why i was relieved to have to dip out of this thread a few hours ago

it does strike me as particularly ruthlessly deflating of beliefs tina fey herself might be suspected of having--feminism, "bourgeois liberalism" as someone put it upthread. also that second season episode that carrie fisher guest-starred in still sticks in my craw because there's something so upsetting about how it disposes of her and liz's relief to be on the winning side at the end. generally, i think tina fey's humor is kind of ruthless, particularly towards herself.

for that reason, though, i think it's pretty good on race generally because it deflates a bourgeois liberal type who wants to believe she's a beacon of racial tolerance but reveals herself to be not so much a lot of the time.

this is really, really otm by the way and i wish i'd been able to express it remotely as well upthread. i think one of the defining traits of Fey's sensibility is an antipathy toward patting yourself on the back for having the 'right' beliefs, especially as a form of comedy (she used the term "clapter" to deride the way The Daily Show would whip up audience reaction in a "you said it! preach on!" kind of way as opposed to pure laughter).

no, you are v insightful about it; also stans are the best people

xp see! otm

hahaha i agree with horseshoe too despite having fought about this w/ al upthread

maybe the episode where Liz gets obsessed with Designing Women is evidence of how TF might be wary of making a kind of tritely 'empowering' woman-centered sitcom. like, if she thought being a role model or setting a brassy strong liberal woman example was more important than being funny the show would probably be more like Murphy Brown.

i should prob just read Bossypants already.

i can see that perspective, but to me the show feels sometimes like it's really hard on women as an epiphenomenon of tina fey being really hard on herself. which can make it hard/frustrating to watch sometimes. and i would trace that to her work on Saturday Night Live before, too.

i also feel like i expect impossible things from her because she means a lot to me, so smart, so successful against ridic odds. i unfairly want to accuse her of having become male-identified out of necessity considering the world she has successfully infiltrated. i am a little overly invested in tina fey.

anyway, racism

yeah i kinda wonder if that's the place that a lot of these over-the-top thinkpieces about TF are coming from. but at least from my perspective, she seems no less committed to feminism or her idea of womanhood than, say, Janeane Garofalo, but a lot more committed to that not making her increasingly strident and humorless. which i respect a lot just on an artistic/comedic level, although maybe it requires some male privilege to view it from that distance.

xpost haha

think tina fey's in that weird unsustainable position where everything she does causes people to raise their standards for her, but then i like tina fey a lot too

oh horseshoe just said that

naw you said it better. it's what happens when you break a ceiling all by yourself. a nation of weirdo women turns its lonely eyes to you.

the high standard tina fey sets doesn't make me judge her harshly, it makes me judge lena dunham harshly tbh

there are more ways to be funny than the tina fey way! thank god! (let's not do this itt)

haha sorry i couldn't resist

horseshoe start a thread on how comedy is inherently conservative

what if i lazily search ilx to see if i have expounded on that topic before? (i don't have anything that interesting to say about it tbh.)

idc

some dude and horseshoe otm, esp the part of shoe's post SD quoted

i can see that perspective, but to me the show feels sometimes like it's really hard on women as an epiphenomenon of tina fey being really hard on herself.

i think there's maybe a sense that she has to be tough enough, ruthless enough for comedy, especially as a woman, and that makes her extra harsh towards her own feminist/liberal pieties

threads started at 10 pm on a monday night est are the most-responded-to-threads iirc:

is comedy inherently conservative?

Tracy: Affirmative action was designed to keep women and minorities in competition with each other to distract us while white dudes inject AIDS into our chicken nuggets. That's a metaphor.

― judas, a homo (elmo argonaut), Monday, May 14, 2012 8:14 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i remember the moment i saw this line delivered thinking "this is gonna be an awesome fucking show"

ps if u accuse me of otming a tracy jordan line i will play basketball with your ribcage

I actually agree that 30 Rock is unfair in its treatment of Kenneth and possibly even Twofer. However, what attitude does anyone think the show should take towards a character like Jenna? I never thought that she is ridiculed for sleeping around per se. She is ridiculed for her extreme narcissism and gold-digging. I never even thought her relationship with Paul was portrayed completely unsympathetically.

sympathetic grotesquerie, a hard line to walk but they pull it off okay. mostly due to the shows very careful sympathy for paul. i don't know that the show ridicules jenna for sleeping around, exactly, but it does seem to view her sexual behavior (as well as her entire character) as gross and pathetic. makes sense, because she's narcissistic neediness incarnate. same could be said of tracy, though, and the show isn't anywhere near as outright repulsed by him.

^ contains errors, fuggit

Her sexual behaviour (as well as her entire character) are often gross and pathetic! But not because they're 'deviant'!

Tracy is more just childish and self-indulgent, not a sociopathic narcissist.

That seems kinda harsh to me: I don't watch 30 Rock enough to be able to speak authoritatively about it, but I feel the show is less about making Jenna the butt of a bunch of 'old w****' jokes and more about using her as a vehicle of satire against the unrepentant shallowness of showbiz

But, I mean, I barely watch the show, so...