I’m not very funny. No, no. It’s okay. I realize I have my moments of hilarious repartee. Those are mostly based on my penchant for sarcasm, which sometimes bursts forth, evading my oral governor. But in the main, I am a serious thinker who uses a tell-it-like-it-is approach to conversation.
No one appreciates a good joke more than I do, though. I just can’t tell them well. Someone like Jon Stewart on a great night has me laughing out loud, wishing with all I have that I was capable of writing such satirical junk food.
However…
My sense of humor does not extend to an appreciation of race-based double entendre. Professional comics argue that the line not to be crossed in everyday social discourse is somehow pushed farther out for them. Maybe.
The other night on the NAACP Image Awards telecast, actor Terrence Howard, in a tribute to Hollywood legend George Lucas for fighting valiantly to get the film “Red Tails” to the big screen amidst protests that no one would want to see a movie with an all-black cast, said to Lucas: “Welcome to the dark side.” I laughed. The audience laughed and applauded. A black actor turned comic for the moment was poking droll fun at a characteristic attributed to members of his own race – darkness of skin. Was that okay? I’m not sure, but I thought about it for hours after the fact.
I was sure, however, that I didn’t like a couple of attempts at humor I spotted on Facebook two days ago.
Anyone who hasn’t heard of new pro-basketball phenom Jeremy Lin must have been on a total media fast for the past few weeks. Lin is the Harvard-educated floor-general of the NBA’s New York Knicks who rose from relative obscurity to being the first player of Chinese descent to play in the NBA.
One of my Facebook friends posted about the unforgivable “honest mistake” an ESPN editor made by writing a headline that included the phrase “…chink in the armor” for a story about Lin.
The headline - "Chink in the Armor: Jeremy Lin's 9 Turnovers Cost Knicks in Streak-stopping Loss to Hornets" - appeared on ESPN's mobile website at 2:30 a.m. on Saturday and was removed by 3:05 a.m. The editor, Anthony Federico, was subsequently fired.
What I find unconscionable are the comments that were made on this Facebook post, the author of which described in his introduction as “A really, really, really bad example of not proofreading your headlines.”
One person made the comment of what “a terrible..er…slant to take..” Another wrote that he was “slightly dis-Oriented.” Then one of the same two people went on to describe the ESPN gaffe as “an example of yellow journalism.”
Really?!? These were mistakes, alright, but there was nothing honest about them. Unveiled racism in response to an article bemoaning such cultural insensitivity is about as funny as a coronary infarction. When are we going to learn? We cannot run around quoting Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s I Had a Dream speech, then turn around and “joke” about another person’s racial characteristics.
Maybe I should cut these commenters some slack because they might not have faced personal ethnic slurs of their own, so are not sensitized enough to avoid such mistakes . On the other hand, one or both of their surnames could mean they are of Jewish origins, making them just as susceptible to slurs and stereotypes as anyone else.
It is time for all of us to start paying more attention to “the content of the characters” of others, and less to their physical characteristics. Really.
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