So, after having the hottest show on ♍🧸Comedy Central, a much-buzzed-about movie opening next week and Chris Rock directing her upcoming HBO special, Amy Schumer has fallen afoul of the modern-day Calvinists.
You know, those PC-loving censors 🍨who are furious that someone somewhere is laughing at something they deem inappropriate.
I’༒d hoped there might be some other Catholic, West Indi💎an, black Republican editorial writer who moonlights as a comic rushing to Schumer’s aid. But, no, it looks like it’s going to be me.
The backlash has been growing for some time.
The UK Guardian went after the native New Yorker’s “blind spot on race” last month, citing standup jokes like, “Nothing works 100 percent of the time, except Mexicans,” and “I used to date Hispanic guys, but now I prefer consensual🎃.”
It reached a fever pitch Tuesday. In The Wa꧂shington Post, Stacey Patton and David Leonard . They closed with this haymaker:
“While black families are burying their dead, churches are burning, black women church pastors are receiving death threats and the KKK is planning rallies in South Carolina, Schumer is ‘playing’ with race. While Latinos are being deported in record numbers, while ‘80 percent of Central American girls and women crossing Mexic♈o en route to the United States are raped,’ while children are languishing in camps in the Southwest, Schumer has got jokes, and only white America is laughing.”
Isn’t that just a bit . . . dramatic?
Schumer’s comedy can hardly be called conservative.
Her on-stage persona is decidedly New York urban: F-bombs are dropped on a regular basis; she happily extols — oft𝄹e🌱n in graphic detail — the highlights of her sex life.
Like her geꦗnerational cohort Lena Dunham, Schumer is edgy, sometimes just to be edgy — but also to make serious points.
Indeed, even the Washington Post writers admit that her sketches skewering “rape cultཧure” or “fat shaming” are excellent ex𓆏amples of social satire.
Patton and Leonard have their own handy rule: “[T]he motivation of the joke-teller and what compels laughter is not at issue. What matt𒊎ers is the costs and consequences of these ‘jokes’ to those being objectified.”
Ca꧟ll this the “disparate impact” theory of joke-writing. Intent doesn’t matter, only effect.
Aside from demanding ideological intent in humor, this completely ignores a major point — h⛄ow jokes are actually written: They’re perpetual♍ works-in-progress.
Classic bits like George Carlin’s “Seven Dirty Words” or Chris Rock’s “N***as vs. Black People” di🌜dn’t just pop up out of thin air. They were the end point of years of working and refining.
An awkward “offensive” joke Amy Schumer delivers onsta🧔ge today might be part of an extended, stunning, satirical monologue or sketch next week, next month or next year.
So, liberal Comedy Censors: Wha♌t are the rules? Using the WaPo authors’ own examples about the troubles Latinos currently face, is it OK for a white comic to note the absurd irony of a black president (whose polyglot background has been the target of political and comedic musings) holding the “record” for deporting the most illegal immigrants — er, “undocumented work𒐪ers”?
Possible non-PC punchline: “Damn! 🌃We should have elected one of them a long time ago!”
What observations are people of color “allowed” to make? Can black comics make jokes🦹 about Hispanics taking jobs? Can Latino comics joke about blacks being on welfare — while they’re wo🐻rking “100 percent”? Are such comics borderline racist (so to speak) if white people happen to tune in and start laughing?
Comedy Censors want separate (but unequal?) silos where only blacks can mock blacks (and whites and Latinos), only women can mockಌ women (and men), but not the other way around.
Now that gays have “won” on marriage — is it OK to make jokes about ꦰthem, since they’re slightl♓y less “oppressed”?
Or do we still have to wait until the Employment Non-Discrimination Act becomes law? (Apparently, there’s no ENDA thi෴s navel-gazing!)
Memo to the censors: If you believe there shouldn’t be jokes as long as there’s something bad happening to someone somewhere, well, e🎃njoy your mirthless existence. Just don’t steal everyone else’s joy in the process.
Robert A. George performs with the Electoral Dysfunction troupe every Saturday night at the People’s Improv Theater.