South Park and the ironic tail of bigotry.. [View all]

[LessAspin]

I never really found South Park, Archie Bunker.. humorous but I get the attraction. Pretty fair piece here about the genre.

Link to tweet

...Outside of South Park, Parker and Stone’s most lasting cultural contribution might be the Broadway musical The Book of Mormon, which opened in 2011 — somehow still less than 10 years ago! — to wild critical acclaim, lots of Tony Awards, and a general sense of Parker and Stone vaulting from potty-mouthed class clowns to part of the American mainstream. (They were already in that mainstream, I would argue, but having a hit show on Broadway still carries way more cultural clout than having one on Comedy Central for pointless, New York-media-centric reasons.) The Book of Mormon treats its Mormon characters lovingly. But when it comes to the Ugandans they’re meant to be missionaries to, well, let’s look to Helen Shaw’s apt description of the problem in an excellent essay at Vulture about how The Book of Mormon already feels like it’s from another time:

The sequences in Uganda are grimly unfunny, especially as black actors are forced to sell jokes about curing AIDS by sodomizing babies. The romantic interest Nabulungi (Kim Exum) is the brightest girl in the village, and she thinks that “texting” means typing on a broken typewriter. That’s not a joke about poverty or disenfranchisement. That’s a joke about an African woman being an idiot. In 2011, some critics called the show out for its painful racism, but not many. The assumption was that the offended parties would be Mormons.

What Shaw gets at here is something that many white Americans have gotten better at understanding in the long gap between 2011 and 2020: The media is too susceptible to prioritizing the emotions of white people and writing off people of color who have legitimate grievances with the status quo. The humanity of an imaginary white Mormon who will probably never see The Book of Mormon is easier for many white Americans to conceive of than the humanity of a black theatergoer sitting one row ahead of you and not laughing at the jokes about Ugandans. A white theatergoer might simply conclude that the person in the next row should just lighten up already! Everyone’s a little bit racist sometimes!

https://www.vox.com/2020/6/6/21277256/for-now-avenue-q-everyones-little-bit-racist-south-park-george-bush-donald-trump-book-of-mormon