2006-11-22 - 8:38 p.m.
Oh, lord, have you been listening to all the pillar and carnage about this ridiculous comedian who flipped out at the Comedy Club and started shrieking foul things at the African Americans in his audience? I love this story! It is my great pleasure that some celebrity has been captured on tape howling “Nigger! You’re niggers! 50 years ago we would have hung you upside down and stuck a fork in you!”
What a filthy brute! And it’s not as though he can argue his way out of it, saying that he’s being persecuted by this one or that one. It is on tape! And it’s actually hilarious that the TV news has been running the tape, bleeping out all the curse words. The end result is that his disgraceful act looks all the more vile, since the “bleeps” allow us to imagine more horrifying things than even what he said.
What a foul creep! And to think that for years and years, the network publicists and executives have presented him as being a charming and sweet-natured eccentric, due to his quirky and charming appearances on TV as Jerry Seinfeld’s “wacky” neighbor.
I think I mentioned this when I was writing about Mel Gibson’s Anti-Semitic tirades a few months ago, but I love those seconds in which the mask of respectability falls for a minute and you see the real monster and animal lurking underneath. That is the moment when you see the real man – a creature of hatred and bigotry who believes that he would get away with it, just as long as no one else is watching.
Mind you, in some respects, the entire scandal to me appears to be much ado about nothing. This fellow, whose name I can’t even remember at the moment, is no Mel Gibson. If he hates blacks, well, his hatred of them really has no impact on anyone else. He is not necessarily part of the zeitgeist, like Gibson or whoever.
I mean, did anyone even think for a moment that someone who played a shrieking freak on a TV sitcom would be anything BUT a shrieking freak in person? And, in fact, the head of the Comedy Club came out and said that he would never have the comedian back until he apologized. Of course, the only reason he said this was because the foul mouthed insults and ravings were committed to video – and before he knew the filthy talk was on tape, the manager actually had the comedian back to perform the very next night.
As always, the other thing I love about this sort of story – apart from the incident itself, with the comedian roaring and howling and shrieking, spittle flying from his mouth – is the attempts at “damage control”. Publicists are spinning the story like Penelope working on her loom. And his apologies are increasingly abject and sniveling – and insincere. I am keenly anticipating the announcement that the comedian will be making a sizable donation to the Martin Luther King, Jr. Museum, or will be the Opening Act for the next Maya Angelou poetry reading.
Which is the real man? The man who howls, “You niggers! Niggers! Goddamn you filthy niggers!” Or the man who snivels and sputters, “Oh how sorry I am, you must know that these are ANYTHING but the opinions I have towards ‘Afro-Americans.’ Really, I am a kind and wonderful fellow who loves children and dogs and ‘Afro-Americans!’
I think we both know the truth. And the attempts to whitewash the issue, the whole “oh I didn’t know what I was doing” or “I was drunk” or “You know I am not REALLY like that!” simply don’t fly. The publicists assume that we are going to buy the last thing that the guy says, not the stuff that’s the truth.
But don’t you also find it alarming that, with all the horrific news in the world, from corpses piling up in Iraq to our Civil Rights being eroded right from underneath us, that the media has chosen to focus hours and hours of valuable air time on this cretinous racist, a mediocre, B-grade talent, who really has nothing to say? That’s the real unimaginable atrocity – and the manipulation of our emotions with such minor idiocy is how the media keeps us all tamed and obedient to the gigantic corporate cult.
