Racist Comedy?

W. Kiernan wkiernan at concentric.net
Sat Aug 25 09:36:07 PDT 2001


Dennis wrote:
>
> When "All in the Family" premiered in 1970, a lot of people, liberal whites
> especially (like John Leonard in Life magazine), worried that Archie
> Bunker's coarse language might seem too literal to some, that the show was
> tacitly endorsing the use of words like "spade," "chink," and "hebe" solely
> to get a laugh.

The difference being that Carroll O'Connor was trying to portray a specific social type, a fairly common one, as a character in a drama. So in order to accurately portray that type he had to use the words he did; it's either that or delete the character altogether. In the case of "All in the Family" better than half the plot of the show was the conflict between the cranky Dad and his daughter and son-in-law on the other side of the generation gap; to make Archie Bunker talk sweet would have the same effect on "All in the Family" as rewriting "Star Trek" where it took place in a world without space travel. Whereas a comedian rapping out a string of disconnected jokes is free to say or not say any one particular shtick; Silverman could easily have dropped that one joke from her routine and no one would have noticed, nothing would have been lost.

Yours WDK - WKiernan at concentric.net



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list