Saturday, July 2, 2011

Can you take a joke?

Americans are hypocrites. It has never been more obvious than right now. For those who have not heard, Tracy Morgan recently said at one of his shows that his son "better talk to me like a man and not in a gay voice or I'll pull out a knife and stab that little n**ger to death." While I agree that is a bad thing to say, he is a professional comedian! His job is to say ridiculous things in order to be funny. Nobody knows if the Tracy Morgan that we see on stage is even his own personality. He is so outrageous, that I wouldn't be surprised if it is just a character. He could be the same as Larry the Cable Guy, who is a caricature of people from the South and Midwest. It's no different than the offensive things that "Stephen Colbert" says 4 nights a week on national television. There are a few major problems in this story. The first is that there is no tape of this show, and there are many reports that he is misquoted out of context. How do we know exactly what he said? A single person is the one reporting this. The CNN story even says that he "reportedly" said these things because there is no proof. Although we can probably figure it out, as I have heard that he has said almost the exact same joke before on his HBO special. Why didn't anybody have a problem with it then?
Also, why is he being the one singled out for what he said? What about Jo Koy? A man in the audience at his show, only a week after the Tracy Morgan incident, pointed out that his zipper was down, to which he responded "Why are you looking, faggot?" When word got out, he was immediately fired from the Chelsea Handler TV show that is in development. How many people know about that story though? How many people still remember/care about what Kobe Bryant said? Nobody in the media called for him to be fired, even though that is much worse than what either of the other two said. Tracy Morgan and Jo Koy made their remarks in a stand-up comedy show, where they are expected to be offensive, and knew that more than one person was watching. Kobe Bryant said it to demean a person, and thought nobody would see. I think that is much worse and uncalled for. Especially when you look at all three of their apologies. While Koy and Morgan apologized almost immediately, Bryant refused to give an apology, which shows that he found nothing wrong with what he said.
By now you may be wondering what all of this has to do with American hypocrisy. While people were up in arms over Koy's and Morgan's comments, New York Democrats were struggling to pass a bill to legalize same sex marriage. In a country where we have to struggle to give equal rights to people of all sexual orientations, why are we surprised that comedians make "homophobic" jokes? Conservative politicians are much more homophobic than those two. I am fairly certain that Tracy Morgan would not actually stab his son if he was gay. However, if one of Sarah Palin's children was gay, she would instantly disown them, and there would be no chance of her being president. As a bisexual, I am much more offended by the people that say that homosexuality is morally wrong, than I am by Koy's and Morgan's jokes.
So until all members of the LGBTQ community get the same rights as heterosexuals, Americans can't be surprised and enraged by things that comedians say, because they merely are pointing out how terrible it is to not give them these rights.