Before you spit your coffee out, read what I have to say. If you still hate me after, so be it. I'm white. Yikes, I know. A white person should never put "race" and "funny" in the same sentence. I however, am in the school of believing anything could be funny. I find it calming to laugh at the things that make us nervous. Fucked up jokes, to me, demolish a wall that we're all trembling behind. Joking about different races, especially one that you aren't a part of, can go sideways quick. Or it can be fucking hilarious. If it's a carefully crafted and thought out joke, it shouldn't be written off immediately and filed away in things you're not allowed to laugh at. Laughing isn't illegal, do it whenever you damn well please.
I'm going to be referencing Patrice O'Neal A LOT. If you don't know who Patrice O'Neal is, then you don't know what funny is and you're going to hate this blog any way I slice it so just X it out now. Patrice O'Neal for me, is the funniest person to ever live. He's dead now. All of his jokes were born across boundaries and were remorselessly funny. I would say the jokes he made were courageous, but that's not quite it. He genuinely just did not give a fuck. Patrice displayed the truth of the world as he saw it and mushed your face in it. He knew without a shadow of a doubt that what he was saying was funny, and thus didn't need your opinion. Sorry, this is turning into a Patrice O'Neal appreciation blog, back to the matter at hand.
I'm going to paraphrase a couple of Patrice race jokes now, if you want to see him perform them himself I'll put the links at the bottom. Patrice opens up 'Elephant In The Room' with congratulating a black man on bringing hot white woman to his show. He tells the audience that black women get mad at that but this particular white girl is top-shelf white woman. Patrice then goes on to say you can measure how hot a white woman is by how long they would look for her if she went missing. Joran van der Sloot is brought up and Patrice opens up to the crowd asking who's that girl they're suspecting him of killing in Aruba. Someone in the crowd shouts out "Natalee Holloway" who at the time of her disappearance, was a nineteen year old white girl from Mississippi. Joran van der Sloot was already convicted of killing a Peruvian woman in Lima, months before Patrice's special. When he asked what's the name of that girl he killed in Peru? The crowd went silent and he yelled "EXACTLY". Ok that one was pretty long. I'll do a few more in only three sentences or less, promise. I'll do it in bullet points too so this paragraph doesn't look so intimidating:
-One joke he says he's mad at Obama because he thought he'd have a family of white people for slaves by now. That he'd thought he'd be outside deciding to kill the father or not while telling him that his wife was upstairs warming up his bed.
-Patrice says that black women scream like "AAAHHHH" at their man at that's what keeps them safe. He explains to white women that they keep getting killed because they just whisper mean shit that only their husband can hear like, "Your mother's breath stinks". O'Neal claims over time the white woman deteriorate's the man's spirit and that's how they keep getting murdered.
-In his HBO special Patrice complains how it's unfair that a man born from India gets to ask him for his ID at the airport. He claims that his own accent should be proof enough that he's American, while the Indian man is saying "dooble dabble ID".
-Patrice wonders why we're so eager to get Mexicans out of the country. He asks who else would ride a bike down the highway, against traffic, to deliver you a panini sandwich for lunch? Or who else would kick in your hotel door, trying to squeeze past the chain saying "Please sir I MUST make your bed, I MUST".
Ok theres plenty more but I think I've made the point. Watch the clips below because I didn't do the jokes any justice and I'm sure you have time to kill. Now you might be thinking, Patrice O'Neal died in 2011 and comedy has strayed from race in the nine years he's been gone. Too bad I was ready for this thought. Let me introduce you to Ramy Youssef.
Ramy came out with the 2019 show, "Ramy", about being a modern-day Muslim in today's society. It's probably my favorite show I've seen in the past two years. It's witty, it's honest, and it's uncomfortable. Ramy often uses race and ethnicity as a mirror to show the viewer the subtle, and sometimes not so subtle racist situations that Muslims constantly find themselves in. There's a sex scene involving a creepy white guy with a Muslim fetish and his sister that will make you embarrassed that you check the Caucasian box. Scenes like this are made to prove a point, while portraying it an sheepishly funny light. However, Ramy is not without it's own characters with blatantly intolerant views. Ramy's anti-Semitic uncle, Naseem, is constantly spewing hatred that would get him cancelled if he ever decided to convert his thoughts to tweets. In Episode 2, Naseem is offering to give Ramy a job in his jewelry store with the warning that most of his customers are Jews. His uncle stays consistently racist and kind of rape-y towards his sister throughout the dinner. Ramy is forced to drive him to the train station once the night ends, even though it's pretty clear he's done with his uncle's bullshit. During the car ride Naseem is going off about how Ramy's father wasn't man enough to make a man out of his son, but he, Naseem, doesn't mind picking up his father's slack for Ramy's sake. This is the exchange that follows Naseem's rant.
Ramy: "You know at least my father has a family that loves him. What do you have huh? Why do you think you're so alone? You think it's cause of the Jews?"
Naseem: "You don't know how they are, I'm surrounded by them."
This one little line is so flagrantly racist that you can't help but laugh. The man is confronted by is family leaving him by his own nephew his first instinct is to blame the Jewish population. Race in jokes doesn't mean that the racist line itself has to be funny. Sometimes the character not having the social awareness to understand that what they're saying is immoral that makes for candid comedy. This is more the racism in comedy today. Blaming an older persona on funny albeit narrowed-minded shit that flies out of their mouth. That can only sustain for how long though? One more generation and it will be us who are depicting the older characters. Since we're afraid to laugh at something based on race, will the joke die with us?
Since I'm a tasteless chicken lovin honky, it's time to address the elephant in the room. I'm a white dude rooting for jokes with racial undertones to survive. Who better to help me explain my stance than Patrice? Patrice on the topic of him joking about race: "Black people ain't getting no money, for slavery. We ain't going to get reparations. What we did have is language. We got to say anything we want, the way we want. Which is the reparations, which is the fact that I can say 'cracker' all day and everybody goes hahaha, but because that was my payoff". He hits this rhetoric again in Elephant in the Room when he says, "I can say anything I god damned want racially, and white people have to sit there and take it like 'Yeah I know, I am evil, yes' ". I'm here to tell you that he's absolutely fucking right. When I say keep race jokes going I'm not speaking to white people. Let the Patrices, the Ramys, and everyone else in between take the reigns. We fucked this one up a while ago, it's time to take a back seat. No one is saying don't enjoy the jokes, they were created to be laughed at. We just can't make the jokes ourselves, which fuck it, whatever that's fair. If you have a problem with that? Dust yourself off, you're white, you'll live.
Like it or not, racism is prevalent in every day life. If we can't depict or joke about something so seeded in our society then we yield to the ideology itself. Without the exposure of poking fun by means of racial tension, then kids will only learn shitty racist ideals from their shitty racist parents. If we are daring enough to laugh at the things deemed inappropriate, then maybe we'll try our damndest not to act like the character that's being portrayed on a stage.
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