There is something lost or obscured by this false opposition between the not very hip comic using derogatory slurs as humorous caricatures, and the anal political activist who maintains their own purity of position as the offended party.
It's a little hard to pin down what is missing, but Richard Pryor did a little short bit on it once--can't remember which tape now. After a long, monologue/story with a lot of hilarious slapstick ghetto characters conning each other foolishly and losing, he paused after the closing, and turned speculative. You know, he said, I've made my living off laughing at n-words for years, and it really ain't all that funny. It's sad, man, sad as can be.
Pryor's point was that poverty, racism and oppression have produced much of the bizarre, twisted up, pathological, and absurdly cartooned profiles of people that he used as material for humor, because they appear as absurd human forms. These forms are only funny in contrast to an expected norm (whitey in the abstract), which has been artificially cleansed (propagandized out) of the very social pathologic forces (racism, poverty, oppression) that produced the absurdity (as the only humanity available). Thus the cartoon appears in an isolated context as an inexplicable comic figure. Once this is realized, the cartoon isn't funny any more---it's tragic.
I would love to hear a Pryor routine on Jessie Helms retirement speech the other night, complete with choked sobs about Dot and I, and how much we all very much appreciate you all racist, narrow minded, petty little mother fuckers in North Carolina who voted for him for all these long years, thank you very much. Boo hoo, slobber, slobber, drool, sputter, drip. Let's get behind the human tragedy of Jessie cripple opening up to us on camera, overtaken by the magnitude of the moment. Sure. That'll happen.
So, I miss the heavy bite of ridicule and satire that maimed its political target with a cruelty that it so richly deserves. Which reminds me, aren't we living under a reign of white southern racist, jerk-water fascists with shit for brains, and nobody cares?
What's up with that?
What if Bush and company really are representative of mainstream America and they are not some gerrymandered statistically overrepresented anomaly? Then what?
Does that mean that our only hope are all the n-words, chinks, spicks, hebes, bitches and queers, along with a few bald flower children, and concerned birkenstock liberals who we have been laughing at for years? So, is that funny?
Chuck Grimes