For the most part, media uproars over whether a comic's joke/tweet is tasteless or not seem to come down to critics fuming about the comic "hiding behind the guise of art" and "hipster racism/misogyny," which, to their credit, is a worthwhile approach to addressing the very tangible disrespect that only someone who is not a white straight male can experience.
To borrow a trope from Louis CK's bit in his recent HBO special "Oh My God," of course we need to open a dialogue about the way comics/conservatives/liberals/artists/hipsters/the South/the North/feminists/(everyone?) is complicit at one point or another in perpetuating the cultural discourses and lazy stereotypes that marginalize millions of Americans and, as we saw in the case of Trayvon Martin, make it all but impossible to achieve institutional justice.
But maybe some of those comics, like Oswalt, who Salon's self-appointed experts on oppression cast as psychologically stunted closet racists, homophobes, and misogynists have a genuine interest in dismantling some of the toxic ideologies that these digital vigilantes assume stand-up comics must espouse, merely because they are, for the most part, dysfunctional white straight males. (Disclosure: I fall into that category.)
That being said, I think some members of the stand-up community do deserve plenty of ire for their offensive material. A joke can only be as funny as the assumptions that it asks the audience to make, and there is a world of difference between the joke that asks the audience to trivialize someone else's lived experience of sexual violence or racism, and the joke that assumes, to put it bluntly, that its audience is disgusted by how poorly we treat each other as a society. The latter joke is funny because it critiques the absurdity of the way we live, and the laughter of the rest of the audience lets us know that other people feel similarly, which is where I think we might find the transformative potential of comedy. The former joke is unfunny because it asks us to be cruel and dismissive of someone else.
The Daily Beast's Jennifer Ponzer writes of this distinction better than I can in regards to the Daniel Tosh rape joke:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/07/18/daniel-tosh-rape-joke-are-comedy-and-feminism-enemies.html
Before getting back to the Patton Oswalt "controversy," I want to make it clear that I don't want to make it seem as if I'm equating race and gender - I'm only commenting on the potential for comedy to open some really fruitful dialogues on these issues.
SF news station KTVU has announced hiring PR spokesman Wi So Solly to address the Asiana airlines on-air gaffe.
Yes, the tweet uses a hackneyed Asian caricature. What Salon doesn't seem to realize is that Oswalt is drawing attention to the fact that KTVU can't distinguish between caricature and the real names of the pilots. He points out how the misnaming incident makes the news station look as if it is ignorant of Asian cultures and prejudicial, which is why in the joke scenario, KTVU would hire a PR spokesman named Wi So Solly, a name which could only exist in the mind of a news station that is so self-satisfied with the way it casts itself as egalitarian that it is oblivious to the way that it constantly marginalizes particular people. Oswalt's exaggeration is funny, the truth it shows us is not.
Maybe Salon took Oswalt's tweet so hard because it doesn't want to recognize that media outlets like itself and KTVU, who fashion themselves as the organs facilitating our (semi-)functional democracy, participate just as much in the reinforcement of social inequalities as outright bigots. Perhaps it was too difficult for Salon to face the fact that KTVU, who is in the same business of scrambling to publish information as they are, inadvertently promulgated a joke that really was deeply offensive, exposing the fact that perhaps news media shouldn't be the arbiter of how we interact with one another. Maybe we don't need the condescending, knee-jerk, faux outrage of outlets like Salon that mine the Twitter pages of progressive comics like Oswalt for tweets with spellings they can construe as illiberal, when we could instead open an honest conversation of our own about the significance of those spellings.
pixelskylines
izzy806
dededos
snowghoul
theartofmadeline
titsay
