- Sep 28, 2010
- 56,041
- 16,267
- 2,180
PC dweebs don t get Amy Schumer s jokes New York Post
It reached a fever pitch Tuesday. In The Washington Post, Stacey Patton and David Leonard called Schumer a racist on par with Donald Trump. They closed with this haymaker:
“While black families are burying their dead, churches are burning, black women church pastors are receiving death threats and the KKK is planning rallies in South Carolina, Schumer is ‘playing’ with race. While Latinos are being deported in record numbers, while ‘80 percent of Central American girls and women crossing Mexico en route to the United States are raped,’ while children are languishing in camps in the Southwest, Schumer has got jokes, and only white America is laughing.”
Isn’t that just a bit . . . dramatic?
Schumer’s comedy can hardly be called conservative.
Her on-stage persona is decidedly New York urban: F-bombs are dropped on a regular basis; she happily extols — often in graphic detail — the highlights of her sex life.
Like her generational cohort Lena Dunham, Schumer is edgy, sometimes just to be edgy — but also to make serious points.
Indeed, even the Washington Post writers admit that her sketches skewering “rape culture” or “fat shaming” are excellent examples of social satire.
Patton and Leonard have their own handy rule: “[T]he motivation of the joke-teller and what compels laughter is not at issue. What matters is the costs and consequences of these ‘jokes’ to those being objectified.”
Call this the “disparate impact” theory of joke-writing. Intent doesn’t matter, only effect.
It reached a fever pitch Tuesday. In The Washington Post, Stacey Patton and David Leonard called Schumer a racist on par with Donald Trump. They closed with this haymaker:
“While black families are burying their dead, churches are burning, black women church pastors are receiving death threats and the KKK is planning rallies in South Carolina, Schumer is ‘playing’ with race. While Latinos are being deported in record numbers, while ‘80 percent of Central American girls and women crossing Mexico en route to the United States are raped,’ while children are languishing in camps in the Southwest, Schumer has got jokes, and only white America is laughing.”
Isn’t that just a bit . . . dramatic?
Schumer’s comedy can hardly be called conservative.
Her on-stage persona is decidedly New York urban: F-bombs are dropped on a regular basis; she happily extols — often in graphic detail — the highlights of her sex life.
Like her generational cohort Lena Dunham, Schumer is edgy, sometimes just to be edgy — but also to make serious points.
Indeed, even the Washington Post writers admit that her sketches skewering “rape culture” or “fat shaming” are excellent examples of social satire.
Patton and Leonard have their own handy rule: “[T]he motivation of the joke-teller and what compels laughter is not at issue. What matters is the costs and consequences of these ‘jokes’ to those being objectified.”
Call this the “disparate impact” theory of joke-writing. Intent doesn’t matter, only effect.
