Comedian banned in Boston!
There’s an article from the Washington Post, authored by Neely Tucker, which appeared in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer that talks about blackface. (And, oddly, doesn’t mention Sarah Silverman!)
We’re not sure it’s worth reading the whole thing, as it contains sentences like this:
Since we’re all supposedly postracial, some white comedians think it’s allowable to use makeup to portray black characters with empathy or just for laughs.
Allowable? We wonder to whom comedians are expected to apply for permission to do certain things. Is there an official Board of Questionable Taste?
Though the burnt cork and garish lipstick seem consigned to the bin of bad taste, there are different levels of subtlety in whites playing black dress-up. Maybe it’s becoming possible in an era when interracial friendships and romance exist much more freely for whites to do impersonations of black characters well and affectionately, and vice versa. Billy Crystal’s take on Sammy Davis Jr. on Saturday Night Live several years ago was spot on, but Crystal was gifted enough to make it more about celebrity and friendship than about race. It had the critical assets of being (a) funny and (b) not at all caustic.
Ah! We’re getting a clearer picture now. It must be funny! That clears things up. And it must be below a certain level on the “caustic” scale. Perhaps the Board of Questionable Taste will set aside Mondays to Relative Funniness and Causticity Determination Day. Submit your sketch scripts early, as there may be some suggested changes.
Sentences such as this:
Goofy can work, although it’s tricky. The rule is that the joke has to be on the white character, not the black one.
Rules? It gives us the heebie jeebies. The article’s full of such ridiculous pronouncements.
There’s a reference early on in the piece to “Chuck Knipp (who) does drag as a black Southern woman, Shirley Q. Liquor, the “Queen of Ignunce,” in clubs and on video-sharing sites.” Then later, there’s this:
The new spin: White actors play characters so hip they can say whatever black people do, and it’s OK because nobody would ever think they’re racist, get it? This is apparently what Knipp is trying to get at in his portrayals of Shirley Q. Liquor. His character has 19 “chirrun” and is on welfare and talks about “labesians” and “homosexicals.” It’s like Daddy Rice and Jim Crow brought back from the grave. Rolling Stone called Knipp “America’s most appalling comedian” last year.
Jabari Asim, author of “The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t, and Why,” says comedians like Knipp prove society is just not that far along.
“We all wonder what it would be like to walk in someone else’s skin,” says Asim (a former Washington Post editor now at Crisis magazine). “But to put it out there in public, or in a feature film, is a combination of [boldness] and stupidity.”
Don’t you just love the title of Asim’s book? We’re certain that it’s supposed to merely provocative (we hope!), but it’s still rather… authoritarian.
We were utterly unfamiliar with Knipp, we decided to Google him to see what all the fuss was about. From what we can tell, he’s some sort of a performance artist who does several characters, the most popular of which is Shirley Q. Liquor, “a cariacature of a black southern woman” featuring Knipp in blackface.
His Wikipedia entry says Knipp is “a citizen of both the United States and Canada, active in the ACLU and Libertarian Party and was nominated as their candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000.”
It gets better: Knipp, it seems, performs mostly for gay male audiences.
Performances by Knipp have been canceled in West Hollywood and in Hartford, CT. And, “an appearance in Boston which was scheduled for October 18 was cancelled by order of Jerome Smith, acting as agent for Boston mayor Tom Menino.” He was actually banned in Boston! In this century!
He is often greeted by protestors and, just last year, he was the object of at least one campaign by a “gay rights activist” named Jasmyne Cannick, the goal of which was “encouraging nightclub owners to cancel Knipp’s act.”
Of course, as so often happens with such efforts, it brought even more notoriety to Knipp and his alter ego Liquor.
His characters, his performances are wildly popular with gay, male (and, we assume, gay, male, black) audiences. But his notoriety (indeed, his very existence) has engendered much intense criticism, pitting gay rights activists against Pulitzer Prize-winning authors, drawing the ire of BET commentators and gay non-profits whille gaining effusive support from Ru Paul. He’s been defended by the Southern Poverty Law Center but condemned by GLAAD.
The tempest surrounding Knipp illsutrates one thing: Comics can and should do pretty much whatever they want.
And the amount of support Knipp has (and the diverse crew that lends such support in the face of the vehement criticism he’s received) should render the above cited article by Neely Tucker (and the bleating from assorted academics and busybodies) totally impotent and ultimately irrelevant.
Tip of the hat to sharp-eyed reader Terry Reilly!
3 Responses
Reply to: Comedian banned in Boston!
“Comics can and should do pretty much whatever they want.”I disagree with the “should” portion of this statement, depending on your definition of “should.”Comics CAN tell jokes that are racist, sexist, and homophobic. If they want to. Many do.Whether they “should” is certainly debatable.Not debatable as far as whether they should be PREVENTED from so doing, or whether they should be denied the right to say whatever they do want to say.But it doesn’t seem unreasonable for someone to hold the position that if someone’s comedy is racist AND not funny, then that’s bad in a way that is worse than comedy that is simply not funny but not inflammatory. (Leaving aside the other logical alternation of “racist and funny”.)And of course, not everyone finds the same things funny. Humor has some subjectivity to it, and there is no and can be no and should be no official humor police.Obviously context is important.And I’m speaking in generalities here–I don’t know Knipp’s work, and I don’t think anyone should (or legally can?) be banned from saying whatever they want to say.And this article certainly has used words like “rules” and “allowable” in ways that seem more authoritarian than I believe they mean… but I think there is something to the point…If you’re going to use something like blackface or the n-word anything as potentially racially inflammatory as they can be (when taken out of context), it might be a good idea to have a justifiable context to begin with.(And again, legally anyone should be able to say whatever they want, even if it’s literally just a series of racial epithets. But just because there are people who might want to do that, does it mean they should because they can?)Saying the same thing over and over in a too lengthy fashion (maybe because it’s been too long since I’ve commented here),Myq Kaplan
I think it’s funny that anyone associated with BET protested this guy. BET does more to hurt the “black community” than a marginally famous comic in black face ever could. Perhaps one should turn on BET to see the charactures of black people they present on a national medium. As least people know that Knipp is joking (Although I personally don’t think his caharacter of Ms. Liquor is funny, it’s not my job to censor the man. If you don’t like him don’t go to his shows or buy his merchandise)
I feel like Knipp watched the first half of Spike Lee’s < HREF="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0215545/" REL="nofollow">Bamboozled<> and then changed the channel to catch the end of Man On the Moon. If I see someone using every negative sterotype in the book, I hope s/he has a good reason for it. Otherwise it’s no better than a gossip magazine is for your intellect/ junk food is for your body / toxic waste is for your backyard. Pollution packaged with originality and humor is still pollution.It would take more research to understand if he is a man on a mission, or just using shock value to pay the rent.