You know journalism is dead when a reporter asks the prime minister if it’s okay for a comedian to make a joke at a press conference about COVID-19. Without being a mind reader, which most modern journalists have become, it’s as if this person thought for a moment that the prime minister’s skin colour with all its supremacy and implicit bias might mean that she thought it was funny. Applying progressive logic, is this journalist complicit in racism because they caused hundreds, perhaps thousands of people to look up the joke and Allah forbid, possibly laugh?
The Prime Minister has said that the stereotype the comedian used is racist. Am I wrong to assume the average person knows that a stereotype is simply pattern recognition and no way implies that all X are Y? If you treat people as individuals instead of a collective, oh wait, sorry, that’s not something comrades do. They view things constantly through categories of race and ethnicity, gender and sex, oppressor versus oppressed. They are so black/white in their thinking that they can not see any grey. This joke isn’t about demeaning any cabbie who died, it really says a lot more about “white privilege”. You think a media that is obsessed with white privilege would understand this.
It’s an unwritten rule that if you have to explain a joke then it’s not a good joke. It’s also 2020 and the rules have changed. The reason this joke works, assuming the stereotype is correct, and that in this imaginary situation there were less cabbies out that evening, is that somewhere a white hipster was probably tweeting #kiakaha #chchnz #sosad while simultaneously being annoyed they couldn’t get a cab ride home.
The utter brilliance of cancelled comedian Chris Lilley (Summer Heights High, We Can Be Heroes) and his character J’amie is how he uses her to mock the white saviour complex so many liberals have. Perhaps this is why progressives hate comedy, it points out their performative do-gooder natures as exploitative and self-indulgent. It mocks that they have to so loudly proclaim their anti-racism while the rest of us just get along with the individuals we encounter daily.
If the comedy is well crafted then there’s no subject you can’t touch. I have children and find paedophilia abhorrent, but love a good Epstein joke. Unless you are listening to Mormon comedy or live under a rock, many people enjoy watching and performing boundary pushing comedy and they have the right to do so without being called racists. So my fellow “racist” comedy fans, laugh. Laugh at the white guy being the stale/pale/racist male the media thinks he is by way of birth. Laugh because if you can’t laugh you’ll cry…or turn into a social justice warrior.
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