I Hate The Line

There's a Toronto-based comic named Sabrina Jalees. She's all of 21 or 22, and is probably best-known nationally for appearing on a Muchmusic TV show where she makes fun of Videos. (Yup, the kind of thing Beavis and Butthead were doing almost fifteen years ago.) But she's also been a professional comic since she was 16, has played Just For Laughs and scored roles in several movies. She now writes bits for CBC Radio and the Toronto Star.

Sabrina is, I believe, of Pakistani descent. Or she's mixed-race, anyway, a real Canadian story. She also went on tour on the Allah Made Me Funny comedy tour across Canada last year -- which featured Muslim comedians, and played to mixed audiences.

I observed to a few people I knew awhile back that Sabrina is exactly the kind of person they should be considering for a junior writer on a show like Little Mosque on The Prairie. I still think that. I also think she's kind of winning, though she could use better material occasionally. But hey, she's out there doing it. And that's great.

But the latest thing she wrote in her column in the Toronto Star just made me a little sad.

Titled, "How Comedy Struggles With Being Race-Y," Jalees quotes heavily from comic Kenny Robinson, who runs a "Nubian Comedy Night" in Toronto, and Al Rae, who's one of the writers on Mosque.

Robinson says:

"Nubian night was born around the time of the L.A. riots, and the O.J. Simpson trial. It was a point where racial eyebrows were being raised in society ... we turned away 200 people our first show. We had no idea it was going to be such a huge success. It just goes to show, what's going on in the world will always affect what's going in comedy."

The question of how to approach race in comedy is a good one, and has never been more trenchant. The article goes on to recount one of the now semi-famous reasons Dave Chappelle gave for walking off his show -- about doing a sketch in blackface and getting the "wrong kind of laugh" from a white crew member.

Jalees gives Rae the last word:

"One of the biggest challenges of writing comedy where race is a component is to make sure you never get to that line," Rae says in response to the Chappelle incident.

"It's the reason that I'm reluctant to take my 14-year-old daughter to see Borat. I think he (Sasha Cohen) is clearly sophisticated enough to create one of the funniest motion pictures I've seen in years, which, on the surface, appears to be monstrously racist and inappropriate.

"The question is, when my daughter goes to see the film is she sophisticated enough as a viewer to understand? Not everyone will necessarily understand that he's satirizing anti-Semitism and not promoting it. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter what the creator thinks.

"Do the vast majority of your audience understand what your intentions are?"

For the security of Al Rae's job, the future of Canadian television and the possibility of my guest-starring role on Little Mosque on the Prairie, I'm hoping the vast majority of its viewers do indeed.

Okay, now here's why the article makes me sad. These are all good, thorny questions. But younger comics like Jalees have grown up in the era of full-blown political correctness. So it's no wonder that we're talking about "gentle" comedies about race...and Lord knows, we all have to be careful about where "the line" is.

The problem is, "the line" isn't a line anymore. Most of the times it's been moved so far back that it's a meaningless, toothless distinction. And the line is different places for different people.

What was the whole thing about "reclaiming" words about? Wasn't the whole point of Gays calling each other Queer, and f*g and d*ke and all the other stuff about denying the power of those words to hurt? Wasn't the hip-hop embrace of "My Niggas" supposed to defuse the bomb that has always been that awful word, n***er?) Well, whatever it was meant to do or mean, it hasn't worked, obviously. Now we have black comics debating using the N-word over Michael Richards' outburst...and for the last week or so we've had the kabuki spectacle of one millionaire star of a hit TV show who's probably heard one hurtful word thrown at him way too many times, turn around and bust out another word at his millionaire co-star. So we haven't gotten beyond words.

We haven't gotten beyond race, either. Not by a long shot. But like the fiction of reclaiming words, the idea of comedy "celebrating" or reaching out across our differences is a nice idea that's not being practiced. For a lot of the same reasons.

If you go to Sabrina Jalees' website, she's got the tagline, "if you don't find me funny, you're probably a racist." Now, that's funny because she means it ironically. But in a very real sense, it's not funny at all. Cause it's kind of true. Well, not true. But that certainly is a prevailing attitude out there. That's a thing that holds us back. That accusation can get hurled and grind everything to a halt today. Why? Because to challenge the assertion would be to have an honest conversation about race. And that is something that we've simply forgotten how to do.

The fact is that we have gone far, far, far backwards in our conversation about race, in all art, but specially in Television. They're dated in many ways, but if you look at old episodes of All in the Family, or Good Times, or even The Jeffersons, you will see a far funnier, and more honest expression of our cultural differences than you ever see on TV today. Those 70's comedies were being more honest about race than any of the dramas of the time. When Mike Evans, who played Lionel on Family and later, The Jeffersons, died recently, I had the chance to back and watch some of his exchanges with Archie about race. They were sublime. Funny. True. Talk about promoting understanding. They were sophisticated in a way that you could not even have the barest hope of trying today.

Because today, the truth of race is that we don't talk to each other about it. Not really. The marketing machine has found a way to hive us off from each other. And we're all tacitly embracing this. There are movies now that black audiences go see and white ones don't. There are separate TV shows. Separate pundits. Separate magazines, radio, and media of all types. There is no conversation about race anymore, certainly nothing as honest as those exchanges between Lionel and Archie Bunker. In a very real sense, we've given up trying to understand each other -- except for the occasional, non-threatening comic who tries to work the other side of the fence. Ho hum.

I don't know how many white people saw Tyler Perry's Madea movie. I rented it because I saw him on Tavis Smiley and thought he was one of the most interesting guys I'd ever seen. I admire what he's trying to do in his community. But see...that's the point...that he's focused plainly on speaking to his own community. Time was, Perry would be the kind of guy making provocative comedy that reached across those lines.

Which brings me to Chappelle. Chappelle was wonderful and exciting because he was the first guy in a generation to really stick it. To throw down the truncheon and speak to EVERYONE's cultural biases. The fact that he eventually felt he couldn't go on maybe says something about who we are today. Maybe it just says something about him. But while he was saying it, Chappelle was the man precisely because he blew away all the carefulness, all the calcium that had crept between "the understanding between the races" through the years.

He. Moved. The Line.

Borat, too, is an interesting case. I felt uncomfortable with the movie because of the personal stuff, not because of the racial stuff. I respect and understand Rae's point - but this, too, is nothing new. One of the old criticisms of Archie Bunker back in the day was, "What if people don't get the joke?" And you know what? There were people who didn't get the joke--who thought the point of All in the Family was that no one saw Archie's common sense. But I'm betting there were far more people out there who, like me, learned a lot of lessons about race by seeing the face of a genial, ignorant racist on TV, and knowing the things he said and thought were unacceptable.

Things like All in the Family, and comics like Richard Pryor, hell, they were scary. And they shook things up. And sometimes, you weren't sure if you should be laughing, and that made you think, too.

In contrast, I have no problem watching the hicks on Little Mosque be completely boorish and awful to the Muslim characters, because that doesn't threaten me at all. I'm evolved. I don't think that way. I can feel nice and superior. Of course, it's not funny. And because there's not an ounce of subtlety to it, it doesn't run the risk of actually tripping me up on my lingering mixed feelings, which are probably in there waiting to be exposed by a surprising joke that makes me go, "oh, wait, why did I laugh there? Is that me?"

In comedy, if your object is never to cross the line, then you never learn where the line is, and that always, always, always means that the line gets moved steadily back.

It's a shame that Sabrina Jalees works in a world where the line is where it is, wherever it is, today. Because race is screwed up in this country (Canada.) It's even more screwed up in the USA, and it's no prize through Europe these days, either. There's nothing gentle about racism, and there's nothing gentle about gentle comedy that tries to defuse racism, either. It's not gentle. It's toothless. And if you're really going to take on something as deep as our ingrained attitudes about each other, you need those teeth, my friends.

Where's Archie Bunker when you need him?