Whether it’s Ali G or Tina Fey, ironic racism just isn’t funny any more
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Version 0 of 1. The surprising thing about Sacha Baron Cohen’s appearance as Ali G at the Oscars on Sunday, wasn’t that it was unauthorised by the Academy, but that it was so unfunny. The comedian’s decision to revive his almost 20-year-old alter ego was, obviously, part of the evening’s commentary on race, but even in a room full of people selling something, it seemed highly self-serving – a way to say: “Hey, guys, I was doing spoof race-baiting before some of you were even born!” It appears that it went down better in Britain than in the US, where the jokes about “little yellow people” largely fell on deaf ears. I think this is partly a case of American audience-fatigue with a certain type of naughty British comedian. But it’s also the fact that Baron Cohen’s satire seems outdated and heavy-handed, a party piece that has been over-used in the past few years and that everyone is a little tired of. We had Amy Schumer doing her jokes about Latinos being rapists (“I used to date Hispanic guys, but now I prefer consensual”). In Britain, Jimmy Carr is still labouring away at the coalface of “unsettling” comedy, fearlessly confronting taboos and upsetting people with no sense of humour who don’t understand the real targets of his jokes. Even Tina Fey and Amy Poehler have done it– not just with Fey’s Asian and Native American characters in Kimmy Schmidt, which came in for criticism from some minority groups, to which she responded haughtily: “There’s a real culture of demanding apologies, and I’m opting out of that.” But also with their Bill Cosby segment at the Golden Globes last year. The two were applauded for taking him on, but as a rule of thumb it seems to me a bad idea for a white person to do an impression of a black person, even if it is Cosby. Everyone gets it. Most of these jokes are sending up racists and white supremacists. But they also gratify the comedian’s intellectual vanity, signalling to the audience how sophisticated the act is for posing as a bigot. It’s not that it’s lazy. It’s not even that it’s backhanded racism – although it often is. It’s that, a generation after Ali G first said “booyakasha”, it’s simply an exhausted approach to making people laugh. |