Google meme of the day: funny or racist?

Originally Posted by Tati

Is that a google thing?
I thought that video popped up a few weeks ago.

Originally Posted by Diva

I have no idea if Google created it. But it requires Google's search function, hence I put it in the title. And if this has been out several weeks, I'm glad my friends are smart enough to either not be in circles that know about this or are smart enough not to pass it around. I saw it on a Chewers Facebook page this morning and was shocked.

Mattioli, of course he likes fried chicken. All Black people do! It's in our genes.

Originally Posted by Jake

wtf

Also I'm white and I love fried chicken and watermelon so there

Originally Posted by Chris Miller

Oh God me too.

Originally Posted by Jake

Also my dick is gigantic

Originally Posted by Uth Vaspetad

What old ass Nintendo game is that theme from?

Originally Posted by Phil

(Not my) theory: Dave Chappelle's "The Niggars" sketch isn't racist; white people laughing at it and showing it to one another is.

Originally Posted by Diva

The person who posted it and their friends thought it was pure "awesomeness".

Originally Posted by Phil

One version Chappelle gave for walking away from his show was that "the wrong people were laughing."

Originally Posted by seeingblack.com

At one point during his appearance on Oprah, Chappelle...spoke of a White man laughing in a way that made him uncomfortable with the direction that his career had taken. That hazy explanation sounds like a lame evasion of his own fears until you reflect upon the events that prefaced his frantic flight to Cape Town.

In the first skit from the "Lost Episodes," -- the pieces that Chappelle completed before leaving the show in the third season -- a character confesses that no matter how funny the show is people will say that it wasn't as good as last year. Chappelle's character is silent for a moment and then says confessionally "Yeah, I already know that." And what the viewer already knows is that the brother ain't entirely acting when he makes that statement. But the irony – in a situation that is soaked with it – is that the material from the Lost Episodes is easily on par with the work he did in the show's first two seasons.

The problem was not so much the work as it was who was viewing it. It is clear at this point that Chappelle is the inheritor of the mantle held by the late Richard Pryor (and if ever there was occasion to lament his passing it is now when there is so much for him to say about this situation.) Chappelle mentioned later that he left because he felt that he'd been irresponsible with his art. But his work had not changed; the news of his massive contract and his status as the reigning it kid of American pop culture had vastly changed the audience he was performing it for. And that is what Chappelle meant by "everything that came with the money."

In his brilliant sketch "Bicentennial Nigger" Pryor starts out by informing his audience that Black humor started in slave ships. (In that same tradition, Chappelle's logo features the comic wearing a set of broken shackles and holding two fistfuls of cash.) If Pryor was exaggerating it wasn't by much. Black humor out of necessity began as a series of inside jokes. Early records of slavery in the United States are filled with accounts of paranoid slave masters who hear slaves laughing and believe that they must be the subject of the joke – a fear that works in the same way that a person in a room with two others who are speaking a foreign language becomes convinced that they must be talking about him. But as the saying goes, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean you're crazy. All the weapons, laws and shackles in the world couldn't save White people from playing the often unwitting straight man in a satire told just out of earshot of the big house. In the case of Chappelle, you confront the one question at the
heart of his dilemma: what happens to an inside joke once the whole world is in on it?

An inside joke is inside for a reason – usually because only a select few people share the references necessary to decipher it or the background to appreciate where the actual comedy is. In the wrong hands the joke will inevitably be misinterpreted. A profound sense of insider irony allowed Black folks to fling the word nigger around with no – or at least very few – explanations necessary. And nigger was the most inside, the most ironic and complexly encrypted element of both Pryor and Chappelle's humor. But it's virtually impossible for a White person in America to use the word nigger ironically. It would be the equivalent of having an interracial slave revolt – the point being that once White folk get an invitation, well, it ain't really a slave revolt no more. It's no coincidence that both Pryor and Chappelle met career crossroads that entailed traveling to Africa and refusing to use the word nigger in their routines when they returned.

Pryor told The New York Times Magazine in 1975 "I think there's a thin line between being a Tom and [depicting] human beings. When I do the people I have to do it true. If I can't do it, I'll stop right in the middle rather than pervert it and turn it into Tomism. There's a thin line between to laugh with and to laugh at." That line was at the forefront of Pryor's mind when he returned from Africa in 1979. He renounced his use of the word nigger, later saying it was "a wretched word. Its connotations weren't funny even when people laughed… It was misunderstood by people. They didn't get what I was talking about. Neither did I."

But for all this, race lines weren't even the primary breaking point in Chappelle's crisis. In an era defined by simpleton celebrity gloss, where the lowest denominator is also the primary target audience, Chappelle's real fault line was comedic IQ. His core audience, the people who were drawn to the first two seasons of Chappelle's Show, is multi-hued, geographically diverse and spread across a wide swath of Generations X and Y. They found a common ground in all being smart enough to catch the irony – even if only part of that audience could participate in it.

The work he created during those seasons is brilliant precisely because it is so unfiltered and true. His famous skit with Clayton Bigsby, the blind Black Klansman was a sublime dissection of the absurdity of racism. His "Race Draft" allowed ethnic groups to trade for people of other races that they'd always wanted to adopt (Black folks draft Eminem and trade Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice; Asians walk off with the Wu-Tang Clan). Those eight minutes of comedy did more to explain the state of American culture than the last dozen academic conferences on "hybridity" and "cultural miscegenation." The
series "When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong" ridiculed the street ethics that have metastasized throughout Black culture. In other instances, he composed riffs like the insanely comical Rick James skit that proved that he could strip away politics and still leaving you on the floor gasping for air.

By season three, though, Chappelle's Show had officially crossed over, meaning that he was virtually assured of an audience too big to really dig what exactly he was laughing at. Jimi Hendrix encountered that same paradox when he became big enough to attract an audience that couldn't grasp his guitar genius but did manage to get hung up on their image of him as a Black Dionysus who burned guitars on stage.

And this is where the demons come in.

Despite his later concerns, Pryor could get away with a skit like ”Bicentennial Nigger,” in which a slave laughs about two centuries of bondage, rape and lynching because his 1976 audience understood the bitter indictment he was actually articulating. It would've been disastrous for the crossover Pryor of the 1980s to undertake that kind
of sophisticated irony. The last skit Chappelle did before leaving the show (and which is featured as part of “The Lost Episodes”) features a mini-devil that perches on people's shoulders and encourages them to behave in stereotypical ways. In his case, the devil – who appears in Blackface -- convinces Chappelle that he'll be fulfilling a stereotype by ordering chicken on a flight. He dodges that trap by ordering fish,but the minstrel rejoices when he learns it is catfish. The moral of the story is clear: he lives in a Catch-22 where anything he does fulfills some trait on an infinite checklist of stereotypes. It is a riff on the racial gymnastics required to negotiate the most routine of daily scenarios. Or, it is a hilarious bit about a jigaboo dancing on an airplane. It depends on who you're talking to.

In retrospect, it made perfect sense that this sketch would strike too close to home for Chappelle. A case of art imitating life. Or vice versa. A man who has demons depicting a man who literally has demons. An effort to deflate a stereotype that instead affirms one. A comedian brought down by a single snicker from a single White man he realizes is laughing with the Blackface devil, and not at him.

Originally Posted by Phil

Long but SO WELL SPOKEN!

Originally Posted by Phil

Long but SO WELL SPOKEN!

Originally Posted by Phil

Hijack? I think I was speaking directly to the titular question at hand...

Here's that whole article if you want to read it all.

Originally Posted by Evi

I'm not really sure what's racist about it. Is black people liking chicken really a thing?

Originally Posted by Diva

Phil is articulating why the link could be construed as racist, even if the initial intent wasn't meant to be.

Thanks for the article, Phil. It really is a great read.



None taken, but the point of the thread was to discuss whether you thought it was funny or racist. Jokes about happy dancing when Mattioli eats chicken aside, that's pretty much what happened.

Originally Posted by Fat Elvis

I'm honestly curious: you live in South Africa, right? With such a history and tradition of racism, I would think you would be curious to learn about negative stereotypes of our culture.