2006-11-20
Sienfield's Kramer A Racist?
It's not clear if this really is Michael Richards of Sienfield, but *some* honkey comedian in LA at a honkey comedy club made racist remarks at some black hecklers. And... the white audience reacted to the white comedian with such disdain that they walked out. I wonder what a black audience at a black comedy club would have done had a black comedian started calling some white hecklers honkies?
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3 comments:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15816126/
This article is certain that it was Michael Richards. But it doesn't report that most of the audience left, and does report that a few audience members laughed at the racist remarks.
I do wonder what would happen to white audience members at a black club who shout, "You're not funny!", to a black performer.
As we've discussed before, black people's use of racist words to white people never carries the sting of a white person's racism because there is no history of black oppression of white folks. This is why there is almost no reaction when a black person calls a white person "honkey" or "cracker". It's almost meaningless.
Perhaps there were some gasps the first time Richard Pryor made jokes about white people, but those jokes were funny and made whites (and blacks) laugh at themselves. Richards' rant wasn't funny at all. If he was trying to be funny (as you claim in the other post), he failed. Conjuring up images of lynching and Jim Crow is not funny.
The closest comparison would be a black comedian saying "I'm gonna smash a brick on your head like they did to that white dude during the LA Riots." Then it changes from a joke to a threat.
The exact compassionate wouldn't be, "I'm going to smash you with a brick" (Richards didn't say he was going to lynch anybody), but "Ten years ago in South Central we'd've had your head smashed with a brick." I do agree that if some honkies had heckled a poor-performing comedian at a black club that the race-based counter attack would not take the nasty turn that Richards' did. But then again, a month ago I would have insisted that no white comedian at a white club would answer black hecklers with shouts of Nigger, though I would have accurately predicted that such an outburst would trigger uniform backlash.
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