Thursday, September 06, 2007
Language Disclaimer
81 year old comedian Jerry Lewis & 39 year old comedian Eddie Griffin got in trouble for their language on stage this past week. Lewis slipped up on the schtick he's been using since 1945. Griffin was performing his standard routine.
A few weeks ago I was reading the newspaper & not watching something on HBO when Def Comedy Jam came on. This is what I heard over about ten minutes of standup comedy:
Welome to Def Comedy Jam blah blah blah nigga blah blah muthafuckin shit blah blah nigga blah blah shit blah blah nigga blah blah shit blah blah muthafuckin nigga blah blah bitch blah blah etc.
I put down the newspaper when the comic, a black guy, insulted a black woman in the audience for having a close-cropped haircut, a style I happen to like. She was quite attractive. Maybe my appreciation of beauty is faulty. The African-American audience, which looked far more upscale (& even pimpified) than a Showtime At the Apollo crowd, reacted with hilarity. I turned it off. Clearly, this narrow ethnic dialect humor was not for me any more than the Yiddish punchlines of Myron Cohen working an adult crowd in the Catskills circa 1955. Why should I complain? It did bother me when I passed a young father in my neighborhood showing off his baby daughter, about a year old, to a couple of his pals, & one of them was tickling the little girl in pink & saying over & over, "You're such a cute little nigger." But I must be wrong to take offense. I'm a white poet who rarely finds any need for "bad" words in speaking or writing. What do I know about acceptable usage in black vernacular?
A few weeks ago I was reading the newspaper & not watching something on HBO when Def Comedy Jam came on. This is what I heard over about ten minutes of standup comedy:
Welome to Def Comedy Jam blah blah blah nigga blah blah muthafuckin shit blah blah nigga blah blah shit blah blah nigga blah blah shit blah blah muthafuckin nigga blah blah bitch blah blah etc.
I put down the newspaper when the comic, a black guy, insulted a black woman in the audience for having a close-cropped haircut, a style I happen to like. She was quite attractive. Maybe my appreciation of beauty is faulty. The African-American audience, which looked far more upscale (& even pimpified) than a Showtime At the Apollo crowd, reacted with hilarity. I turned it off. Clearly, this narrow ethnic dialect humor was not for me any more than the Yiddish punchlines of Myron Cohen working an adult crowd in the Catskills circa 1955. Why should I complain? It did bother me when I passed a young father in my neighborhood showing off his baby daughter, about a year old, to a couple of his pals, & one of them was tickling the little girl in pink & saying over & over, "You're such a cute little nigger." But I must be wrong to take offense. I'm a white poet who rarely finds any need for "bad" words in speaking or writing. What do I know about acceptable usage in black vernacular?
Labels: about writing, culture
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"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
I caught all of 90 seconds of the MDA telethon, and this was it. When I saw Jerry do that, it reminded me of Milton Berle in his last years, sitting in the front row of the Oscars, straining to keep the spotlight by standing up and walking on the sides of his shoes. An automatic fall-back to the old schtik.
At 81, at least Jerry Lewis knows what happened & why language has changed. If Eddie Griffin decides to waste his time defending his stage language rather than accomodating his act to his audiences, he's a fool. Professional standup is not "free" speech, unless he hires & pays himself.
What is it exactly that Lewis said? I heard about it, but not the specifics and I'm too lazy to Google right now. Regardless, obviously the company you keep means everything:(
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