Over the weekend, the Republican Leadership Conference hosted an Obama impersonator named Reggie Brown who told a series of off-color jokes before forced off the stage when he started making for of Republican Primary candidates.
Here's the New York Times recap:
He said that Michelle Obama, the first lady, enjoys celebrating all of February, Black History Month. He said the president celebrates only half the month.
“My mother loved a black man and, no, she was not a Kardashian,” Mr. Brown said later, referring to the family that stars in reality shows. Khloe Kardashian, who is white, is married to Lamar Odom, who is black and plays for the Los Angeles Lakers.
The audience, which was nearly entirely white, watched with befuddlement as the impersonator told them to look into the future to see what the Obamas will look like when they are retired. An image of a feuding husband and wife, from the TV show “Sanford and Son,” was flashed on screens in the ballroom.
Well, you can look at the video for yourself, but there's no indication to me that the audience was "befuddled" by the Sanford and Son joke. Maybe there was some "befuddlement," but mostly what you hear in the video are howls of laughter (via Melissa McEwan).
I'm less interested in whether the jokes were "offensive" than in what they reveal about the audience laughing at them. For a while the was a genre of routine deployed by black comics that doesn't actually have a name but is perhaps best described as "black people do stuff like this, white people do stuff like this." It got old pretty quick, but the existence of the genre itself implies how key cultural context is to being able to sense humor, in defining what is funny and what isn't. Comedy is deeply revelatory in the sense that the relationship between a comic and his audience defines the borders of a shared moral universe. When Louis C.K. jokes about how being white means he can time travel wherever he wants, the audience laughs because of a shared understanding about the long historical legacy of racial discrimination against minorities. It's a shrewd joke precisely because it forces the question of discrimination into an impossible hypothetical that circumvents the expected defensive reaction of someone who might normally deny that such things still matter. To think it's funny though, you have to be someone who doesn't pretend that race no longer makes a difference.
Brown's jokes are similarly revealing, although they don't say anything particularly flattering about the Republican Party. The Black History Month joke is mostly tired--black people and white people alike tell jokes like this--but in any circumstance they reflect a basic discomfort with the implications of miscegenation. Even when I've told a joke like this about myself in the past, it's usually a response to someone else's difficulty in reconciling my heritage.
The Kardashian joke is something else. To think this joke is funny, you really have to believe there's something strange about the Kardashian women being attracted to wealthy, athletic men because they're black. White women aren't people but resources that "belong" to white men, and the Kardashians reflect some unethical redistribution of white women to the undeserving black masses. Laughing at this joke reflects a discomfort with interracial relationships that seems anachronistic in 2011, except perhaps in the Republican Party. The GOP draws much of its support from people over the age of 50, who remain conflicted about the acceptability of interracial marriage. Younger conservatives were less amused.
It's not really worth it to get bent out of shape about a joke--but what the joke says about those who laugh at it? That's far more interesting.
