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On TDS with Trevor Noah (belatedly)
Classic our society! These gendered items make me sad.
Also, here, have some Jeopardy skeeziness.
I read (part of) an interesting article about people attacking comedians for non-PC jokes, like what happened with Trevor Noah, soon-to-be host of the Daily Show. I personally didn't find his jokes funny, but I was more disappointed than offended. I was originally very pleased that he was chosen to be host, even though I don't know a lot about his sense of humor... Jokes that pander to very low common denominator humor like "haw haw if I hit a Jew with a German car it's like the Holocaust get it??" is less anti-Semitic/racist/fatphobic/whatever than it is just plain tasteless -- trying too hard and coming not nearly close to the mark. I think I'm more disappointed that (the last time I checked) he had responded to the criticism with a passive-aggressive comment about how people are unfairly judging his present comedy based on old material instead of... any sort of apology or regret or even real admission that the jokes weren't funny.
But I have every intention of waiting to see how he is when he's hosting instead of quitting in advance right now. As Jon (apparently) encouraged, Trevor Noah's The Daily Show will win or fail with me on its own merits.
(These parentheses are here because as it turns out, I have no life anymore without access to a computer at work.)
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Honestly, if the worst they can dig up on a comedian is five or six blatantly offensive jokes out of about five years of tweets -- with only one in the last two years -- I'm comfortable saying that he's not a raving misogynist or racist.
Sadly, there's already a lot of fatphobia and body policing on The Daily Show, so I don't expect that to change.
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Like I said, I wasn't offended by the jokes -- "Ha ha a fat girl will get laid if her partner is drunk enough" isn't funny or necessary but it just isn't mean-spirited enough to get me up in arms. I always intended to watch and see how he does. The jokes were neither funny nor classy, but I'm confident that he told many of them as weak attempts to make people laugh rather than out of any meanness. I'm just disappointed that he heard their criticism and chose defensiveness instead of taking the high road.
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Oh my god I saw the Jeopardy clip on The Soup and cringe-laughed. That was... quite the answer.
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Ugh, fucking stereotypes. I WILL KICK THEM ALL IN THE FACELESS FACE. I seriously just had a debate with a child in second grade today about generalizations and her dislike of princesses just because they were princesses and then her dislike of female warriors because "all female warriors are ugly" and I'm just like Oh my god, children. Where are you getting all this generalization nonsense I will burn down your assumptions so fast.
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I thought these licensed DC t-shirts were bad, but at least they are for people who know what the words mean and consent to wearing them:
Grey t-shirt with pink letters that say "Training to be Batman's wife"
(Because Batman would totally be the best spouse ever, right? Totally. Yes. Mentally stable and attentive. Best. #manythoughts)
As for Trevor Noah...I mean, yes the jokes were horrid, and I feel like if someone I already disliked said them -- John Travolta or Dick Cheney come to mind -- I would be incensed. So, there is definitely a bias here which I am owning.
In college I spent a year or more of my life studying South Africa, particularly at the end of Apartheid, and let me just say the comments that I as a white college student got about my studies are really fucking ridiculous. Ranging from people who see "Africa" as a singular concept that has something to do with the Lion King to people who don't read "world news" because they don't see how it's relevant to them (but they do read national and local news) to people who've worked in Africa and blame all the problems "over there" on "tribalism" (but like totally not colonialism okay you guys) is enough to make fire come out of my eyes and my nose and my ears.
I'm not even *from South Africa*, nor have I ever had the privilege to go there, nor am I a person of color. So I super admire Trevor Noah for the way the stand-up he's done is able to take many of the above attitudes, make bits of them funny *to the very people who have them* and also make the audience reexamine some of their attitudes *while they are laughing*. Hopefully.
Because you know that when he makes those jokes, he's making them from a place of pain and that takes mad skills: to share laughter instead of lashing out. Okay, so some of his other jokes have poked at other peoples' pain. My hope is that with some coaching (maybe from Stewart or others at Comedy Central), he'll be able to take those skills and use them on topics like fat-shaming in a positive way.
If you've seen the documentary about him, it's not like there's really a long-standing comedy scene in South Africa. He's made a lot of this stuff up as he's gone along. Yes, he made mistakes. Show me someone who hasn't.
We all need to be able to laugh at ourselves, and to laugh at our mistakes, and in doing so learn compassion. Otherwise we'll just end up having ragequits all the time is not going to change anything. We'll all end up holed up in bunkers squeezing stress balls or something.