Racist Jokes Speak More About the Trump Crowd Than About the Comic
Speaking at last week’s trump Nazi-like rally at Madison Square Garden, the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe did nothing that comedians haven’t been doing for eons, which was making money out of making fun of people.
He was funny because people laughed; they didn’t laugh because he was funny. And he gave the rabble voice to a common belief in racism, sexism, anti-Semitism and the rest. Those who didn’t laugh at the alleged misfortunes of others were easily marked as outsiders who didn’t belong.
It would not have been surprising if Hinchcliffe came out in black face and did a minstrel dance or talked like Amos and Andy. After all, he did joke about watermelons. Humor often is more about social bonding than anything else. No nuanced, double entendres are needed to satiate this group. Just the moral equivalent of fart jokes and what would people like Hinchcliffe do without stereotypes. Comics like Hinchcliffe often speak truths to people who don’t hvae the courage to say it themselves. Jokes poking jabs at the right wing would go over like a lead balloon in the Naziesque atmosphere at the Garden.
Hinchcliffe has come under heavy criticism for his brief routine at the rally because he made racist jokes about Latinos, Black voters and the Middle East conflict. But mostly he came under fire for saying that the middle of Puerto Rico is a “floating island of garbage.”
He was in friendly quarters with a parade of MAGA speakers who had the sense of humor of rocks and who spent hours disparaging Latinos, Black people, Palestinians and Jews; directing misogynistic comments at trump’s presidential opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris; and echoing language used by the Ku Klux Klan.
After hitting on Puerto Rico, Hinchcliffe turned his bad humor to an off-color anti-immigrant remark about Latinos.
“It’s wild,” he said of people crossing the border. “And these Latinos, they love making babies too, just know that. They do. They do. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside, just like they did to our country.”’
He shifted his target to an African American in the audience.
“Cool, Black guy with a thing on his head? What is that, a lampshade? Look at this guy, oh my goodness. Wow. I’m just kidding, that’s one of my buddies. He had a Halloween party last night. We had fun. We carved watermelons together,” Hinchcliffe said, using a racist dog whistle about how Blacks love watermelons.
An equal opportunity racist, Hinchcliffe went on to describe Palestinians as violent and Jews as cheap.
“When it comes to Israel and Palestine, we’re all thinking the same thing. Settle your stuff already,” Hinchcliffe said. “Best out of three. Rock, paper, scissors. You know the Palestinians, they’re going to throw a rock every time. But you also know the Jews have a hard time throwing that paper, if you know what I’m saying.” He made a motion rubbing his fingers to indicate dollar bills.
Funny, but not from where I’m sitting.
Hinchcliffe was one of a menagerie of speakers who used racist language to decry Democrats and who were met with love and affection from the crowd.
One was Sid Rosenberg, a conservative radio host who once called Harris’s Jewish husband, Doug Emhoff, “a crappy Jew.” Rosenberg lashed out at Hillary Clinton for comparing the trump rally to a Nazi rally, which it was.
“She is some sick bastard, that Hillary Clinton, huh?” Rosenberg said. “What a sick son of a bitch. The whole fucking party, a bunch of degenerates, low lives, Jew-haters and low lives. Every one of them. Every one of them.”
Rosenberg has been a class act for a while. He once said on-air that Venus Williams was an “animal,” and that she and Serena Williams would be better suited for National Geographic magazine than for Playboy, that “faggots play tennis” and that the United States women’s national soccer team were “a bunch of juiced up dykes.” Rosenberg was fired from the Imus show after making crude remarks about Australian singer Kylie Minogue’s breast cancer diagnosis.
Grant Cardone, a wealthy businessman and author who believes in scientology, defamed Harris with words used to describe a prostitute.
“Her and her pimp handlers will destroy our country,” said Cardone. “We need to slaughter this other people.”
The embattled, disbarred, laughable former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani had choice words of bigotry for all Palestinians. He said that because some Palestinians had committed violence, no Palestinian should not be allowed into the United States.
“They won’t let a Palestinian in Jordan. They won’t let a Palestinian in Egypt,” Giuliani said, referring to two countries that have sizable Palestinian populations. “And Harris wants to bring them to you. They may have good people. I’m sorry, I don’t take a risk with people that are taught to kill Americans at 2.”
Not funny, Rudy.
The best way to stop comics from being offensive and hurtful is to turn off the channel on the remote or walk out on the performance. Those at the rally were glued to their seats as Hinchcliffe’s racism was met with thunderous applause and maybe one or two people who silently, furtively cringed. The problem wasn’t with Hinchcliffe saying that there is “a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.” The problems were that the soundtrack to the rally was “Dixie,” known as the “Confederate Anthem” and the right wing audience of racist, xenophobic trump-lickers thought Hinchcliffe’s jokes were hilarious because they think Puerto Rico is “a floating island of garbage.”
The problem went way beyond the Garden. Hinchcliffe’s podcast, “Kill Tony,” has almost 1.9 million YouTube subscribers, making the comedian incredibly wealthy. Those who want to stop a comic like Hinchcliffe should stop doing exactly what the comic craves: attention because attention and popularity make money.
Like with so much that is wrong in the U.S., all roads lead back to the maestro, trump, who leads his army of lemmings to the cliff and has proven that the fish rots from the head down. Hinchcliffe should hardly be pilloried when the guest of honor talks about the size of Arnold Palmer’s private parts and calls the vice president of the United States a whore. And how can anyone forget trump’s lewd “pussy” comments on the Access Hollywood tape, which led more than one trump apologist to exclaim that all those hypocritical critics were at their homes watching porn on TV. And there was the shameful comments about “very fine people on both sides” at the deadly neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Va.
Why think the crowd would reject racist humor when their leader seasons his speeches and abominable social network messages with all sorts of juvenile curses and racist attacks while he invites white power, anti-Semites to his Mar-a-Lago circus, calls Klan and Nazi supporters .
To win back civility to America, the toothpaste of incivility must be put back in the tube and the genie of offensiveness must be convinced to return to his lamp. It will not happen.
Not to make false equivalents but honestly, wouldn’t a rabidly anti-MAGA crowd cackle and scream over jokes about trump’s weight or the size of his brain. It seems the difference between MAGA and the rest of us is that we have a sense of humor. The MAGA crowd is incredibly thin-skinned and fails miserably at being able to laugh at their own foibles.
They would not find it funny if a crowd of thousands wearing bandages on their ears were called weird.
Or take this joke:
Us: You guys are white nationalists.
Republicans: So what?
Us: You guys are responsible for countless gun deaths.
Republicans: Whatever.
Us: You guys are weird.
Republicans: STOP CALLING US THAT!
or:
Pope Francis, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and a little boy are crossing the Atlantic on an airplane when the engines fail. They find three parachutes.
Donald Trump grabs the first parachute and jumps out of the plane saying, “The world needs a great person like me!”
Joe Biden grabs a parachute and says, “I need to help make choices for our world”, so he jumps off the plane.
At this point, the Pope and the little boy are on the plane.
The Pope says to the boy, “take the last parachute, I am too old and I’m going to die soon one day.”
“Actually there are two left. Donald Trump took my backpack.”
Or:
How many Trump supporters does it take to change a lightbulb?
None. Trump says it’s done and they all cheer in the dark.
In breaking news, Trump’s personal library has burned down.
The fire consumed both books and in a tragic twist, he hadn’t even finished coloring the second one.
At a Democratic convention, the jokes are met with roars of hysteria. At a trump rally, only stone silence and a few calls of kill the Democrats.
Racist jokes of course didn’t start with trump. They have been popular throughout history. They make people feel connected to their own social group and jokes made at the expense of others creates a sense of belonging. Jokes can reinforce power structures by demeaning minority groups, making dominant group members feel stronger.
People may be exposed to racist or sexist jokes at a young age when they are unaware of the harm they can cause. As adults, the same people continue to use the hurtful words.
There is no justification for racist jokes. Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy used their jokes to provoke discussions on race, prejudice and discrimination or to expose bigotry. The difference between a Hinchcliffe and Bruce and Carlin is that Hinchcliffe is pandering while Bruce and Carlin were brilliant satirists who made fun of the audience without them quite knowing it.
As comedians throughout history have shown, there is no accounting for poor taste and that a joke is funny if people laugh at it. The Hinchcliffes of the world make tons of money off their version of humor.
Jokes about Jews are not funny to Jews; jokes about girth are not funny to overweight people; jokes about disabilities are not funny to the disabled; and jokes about immigrants are not funny to immigrants. The people who laugh are usually finding an acceptable way to vent their own bigotry.
To good people, hearing “Dixie” brings up painful thoughts about enslavement. Playing “Dixie” at the garden rally was so entertaining and was clearly included to appeal to the white racists who populate the MAGA world. The song is known as the unofficial national anthem of the Confederate States of America. It is considered a celebration of American enslavement and it was played at least twice at the trump rally, once as Steve Witkoff, a billionaire New York real estate investor, entered and left the stage. Witkoff has donated more than $2 million to Trump’s political action groups.
“I know this man very well,” Witkoff said previously. “President Trump is as kind and compassionate a man as I’ve ever met in my lifetime.” Now, that is funny.
“Dixie” was played during South Carolina’s secession convention and later it was played at the inauguration of Jefferson Davis as the Confederacy’s first and only president. “Dixie” was also part of the score of “The Birth of a Nation,” the movie that was steeped in racism and triggered a revival of the Ku Klux Klan in 1915.
Playing “Dixie” publicly has been banned by a number of institutions, including the University of Mississippi because of its history as the unofficial national anthem of the Confederate States of America. New Orleans’s Dixie Brewery changed its name to Faubourg Brewing Co. and Dixie State University became Utah Tech University.
Comic Lenny Bruce or George Carlin could use offensive language and mock various racial and ethnic groups. But they were making a statement about the evils of racism.
For all the woke, liberals out there, you claim to be anti-racists or anti anti-Semitism but you find it difficult to reject racist, sexist or anti-Semitic humor because they jokes are funny, allowing you to laugh and not feel the guilty need to apologize.
Racist jokes are sometimes very liberating and oddly give a sense of community.
“Black American humor began as a wrested freedom, the freedom to laugh at that which was unjust and cruel in order to create distance from what would otherwise obliterate a sense of self and community,” said Glenda R. Carpio, a professor of African and African American Studies and English at Harvard University who wrote “Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery.”
Here are a few of the funnier and most offensive quips that get laughs depending on the audience.
Q: Why do Jewish men get circumcised? A: Because Jewish women won’t touch anything unless it’s 20 percent off.
Q: Why are all black people fast? A: The slow ones are in jail.
Q: Why can’t Mexicans play Uno? A: They always steal the green cards.
Q: How can you tell a black guy has been on your computer?
A: It’s not there.
An Asian, American, and a Mexican are on a hot air balloon trying to get back home. Something punctured the hot air balloon and it’s going down really fast. The three guys decided to throw stuff that they don’t need away so the balloon to ease the descent. The Asian threw away rice and said, “I have a lot of this in my country.” The Mexican threw away beans and said, “I have a lot of this in my country.” The American threw over the Mexican. The Asian asked, “Why did you do that for?” The American said, “We have a lot of these in my country.”
Hitler calls a meeting of his best soldiers and commanders and tells them “Alright I want to order the assassination of one thousand jews and four hedgehogs.” One general stands and says, “But… Mein furhur why four hedgehogs?” Hitler then smiles and says, “See? No one gives a f*ck about the jews.”
Carlin once said, it was “the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately.” Hinchcliffe didn’t find that line but comics have crossed the arbitrary boundary of acceptable taste and pay the price.
In May 2015, Louis C.K. hosted “Saturday Night Live” and joked about child molestation in his opening monologue, saying a pedophile lived in his neighborhood growing up. “He didn’t like me — I felt a little bad,” C.K. said.
Amy Schumer had to apologize in April 2015 for a joke she wrote in 2010 about dating Hispanic men.
“I used to date Hispanic guys, but now I prefer consensual,” Schumer quipped.
Trevor Noah, the former host of “The Daily Show” was stung in 2015 for a joke he wrote in 2010.
“A hot white woman with ass is like a unicorn. Even if you do see one you’ll probably never get to ride it,” Noah said.
The late Joan Rivers made a career out of being offensive., The Anti-Defamation league was not amused in 2013, when Rivers commented on German model Heidi Klum’s Oscar dress. “The last time a German looked this hot was when they were pushing Jews into the ovens,” Rivers said.
Roseanne Barr’s career came to a screecking halt when she tweeted that Valerie Jarrett — a former adviser to President Barack Obama — was what would happen if “the Muslim Brotherhood and the Planet of the Apes had a baby.” Jarrett is an African American and ABC quickly cancelled Barr’s show.