Modified On August 8, 2012
Not on your life.
In an opinion piece on takimag.com written by conservative Canadian blogger Kathy Shaidle, in which Shaidle comments on the recent Katt Williams, we were lumped in with a bunch of other comedy websites who offered rather weak commentary on Williams’ tirade and the subsequent fallout. Titled “Stand Up and Say You’re Sorry,” Shaidle is none too happy about Williams, Tracy Morgan and other comedians caving into pressure groups when they should be unapologetic, “fearless truth-tellers, saying out loud what we’re all secretly thinking and getting away with it.
“Comedians used to make jokes,” Shaidle says. “Now they make amends.”
Ouch. And we agree.
Imagine our surprise, however, when we read this graf:
Laughspin asked whether Williams had acted “patriotic or just racist” with the cloying concern-troll earnestness that’s standard issue at (of all places) websites run by and for comedians. Every week, these sites cover some controversy involving a stand-up and an aggrieved (insert minority group) audience member. I need to remind myself I’m reading Splitsider instead of a Seven Sisters student paper, what with all the hand-wringing about “homophobia,” “misogyny,” “date rape,” and whether or not certain jokes are “appropriate” or “go too far.”
And the word “homophobia” was a link to our recent post about the shabby treatment of Bobby Slayton. In that post, we display nothing resembling hand-wringing. (In fact, the title of the post is “We Won’t Even Bother Commenting!”)
Shaidle must have made a mistake. We’re not purveyors of “cloying, concern-troll earnestness” here at SHECKYmagazine.com. In fact, we’ve been doing exactly the opposite for 12 years– which is one of the things that separates us from the other sites, and which earns us the enmity of some of our readers. (Perhaps Shaidle has mistaken SHECKYmagazine’s reader comments with our commentary. There is quite often no shortage of cloying, concern-troll earnestness from certain of them. But that’s highly unlikely, as Shaidle runs her own blog and has even commented on ours on two or three occasions.)
We dropped a comment on Shaidle’s Takimag.com piece and we’re not expecting any sort of retraction or clarification.
We will say that we left the Katt Williams controversy alone because we knew it would play out in a rather predictable manner and we can only repeat the same things over and over about these incidents so many times.
Were to compose such a posting, however, it would pretty much echo what Shaidle says in Takimag.com. And, except for the indirect slam at us, it’s worth your time to read it. (And, in case you haven’t gotten your fill of insipid nonsense, check out some of the comments below it– 32 and counting, including ours. That sort of reaction is also predictable.)
Actually, Shaidle echoes what we’ve been saying for 12 years or so.
Shaidle sent along an email in which she apologized for the apparent diss. The scare quotes around “homophobia” were meant to indicate that the concern-troll earnestness came not from us but from the people in the Bobby Slayton story that we commented on. We didn’t pick up on that, but we (and she) can see how there might be a bit of confusion. Apology accepted.