Global Crisis

Like many people, I spent some time watching great video clips of Trevor Noah's standup routines (compiled here by Vox) and laughing. I certainly enjoyed his first appearance on the Daily Show, which I happened to catch live (I don't watch the show routinely, but like many people consume clips via the internet the next day).

Today, I became aware of the controversy around a series of anti-semitic, fat-shaming, misogynistic tweets. They are pretty bad - standard stuff for many comics, perhaps, but the position of Daily Show host (thanks to John Stewart) has become something of a higher stature and visibility than the usual comic position.

Here's what's going to happen. People are going to express outrage (ongoing). Then defenders are going to defend Noah as edgy, as pushing the envelope, and blame critics as "censoring" or trying to decide what is or isn't funny. I recommend, should you dabble in these discussions, thinking about comedy in terms of reinforcing or undercutting prejudice.

Last summer, I wrote a CNN piece about jokes involving Down syndrome and intellectual disability, then had a phone call with Wyatt Cenac about comedy. He suggested that instead of thinking about punching up vs punching down (my language), which of course involved subjective assessment of power dynamics, or "offensive speech," which likewise is subjective, that there's better framing. I wrote:

In our conversation, Cenac acknowledged that for someone like me, inside the Down syndrome community, the piece could easily have come off as offensive. Most comedy risks being offensive, but his goal is never to do it "at the expense" of marginalized people or "in a way that promotes continued insensitive behavior." He talked about his experiences, as a kid, hearing people make a joke at the expense of a group of people, and thinking, "what would they be saying if I wasn't in the room?" He doesn't want to make those kinds of jokes and it definitely wasn't his goal here.

What I took from this is that comedy can promote and perpetuate stereotypes and prejudice or it can fight against them.

Noah's stand-up clips are mostly the latter. He talks about race, identity, perceptions of Africa, and so forth in ways that undercut stereotypes.

These tweets do the former. And that's the problem. The Daily Show host succeeds by mocking power, mocking prejudice, mocking convention. These are conventional jokes that reinforce the dominant, rather than attack it.

And undercutting stereotypes makes for good comedy! It's the surprise when you think something is going in a bigoted way, then suddenly switches directions, that gets the laugh.

UPDATE: Noah has tweeted a "statement" of sorts.

To reduce my views to a handful of jokes that didn’t land is not a true reflection of my character, nor my evolution as a comedian.
— Trevor Noah (@Trevornoah) March 31, 2015

"Jokes that didn't land" implies that the problem of making fun of fat women and Jews is that not enough people laughed. That's not the problem.

The apartheid government of South Africa had a problem (well, it had a lot of them, but bear with me). It wanted to discriminate by race, but how does one deal with mixed-race people? It came up with the infamous "pencil test," in which a pencil is pushed through a person's hair, and how easily it emerges determines the classification. The pencil test is penetrative, with overtones of the state's control over black bodies medically, sexually, and in so many other ways. For me, it's always been a symbol of the whole evil apartheid construct.

It's been on my mind lately because of a broad discussion about disability and fakery. How disabled must a person be to qualify as "disabled" under the law? Being disabled comes with certain civil rights protections. Being disabled to a certain degree entitles one to a check from Social Security every month. Being disabled, as Justin Bieber knows, can enable one to skip lines at Disneyworld (instead of linking to Gawker or TMZ, why not read the great Emily Ladau on Bieber). Being disabled, in the eyes of the abled world anyway, comes with advantages (great parking!), sympathy (oh, your son is cute), and money.

This is, of course, nonsense and tracks to the ways that other privileged groups envy the perceived benefits of those who experience discrimination. In the disability world, this often tracks to "how disabled are you really?"

We saw it recently with George Takei's ill-conceived posting of a picture showing a woman standing on her wheelchair to get down a bottle of alcohol in the grocery store. The caption, "There's been a miracle in the alcohol isle," suggested that this woman wasn't /really/ that disabled if she could stand on the wheelchair to get some booze. Disability advocates protested and Takei initially told them to lighten up, which is the first response of so many comedians when called on humor that replicates stereotypes. I was first alerted to it by a friend who can walk about 100 feet before using her wheelchair, and she told me that she lives in fear of being accused of faking and having to defend her disabled state.

There were a /lot/ of articles about the meme and Takei. I thought this one from Scott Jordan Harris at Slate was especially good when he offered an alaternative read of the scene. He wrote:

"Someone with the Twitter handle @Andy00778. wrote that the picture shows how “much fraud there is today,” adding “Hope insurance company see it!”

The picture does not show fraud. What it shows is a disabled person using a tool—her wheelchair—to live independently. If any judgement is to be made about the photo at all, it should be celebrated for showing that independence."

Eventually, Takei apologized, at length and sincerely, and the story faded.

I'm writing about this because a 2008 story just made its way to my feeds. I've been working hard on the issue of disability and police violence, but I don't claim to have a master database or anything like a total set of examples. In 2008, my son was one and I was just beginning to apply my training as an academic to disability issues. I wasn't even on Facebook yet.

Here's the story and the post. In it, a cop doesn't believe that someone arrested on a traffic violation is /really/ disabled, so he decides to conduct his own test, dumping him on the floor (and breaking some ribs). This is the extreme case, but it's the same as the Takei meme in its origins (eventually there was an apology and probably a lawsuit).
Our language and our actions around disability and fraud matter. They ripple through the culture, shaping behaviors and ideas beyond. Language - comedy memes - have power. 

[Content Note: Ableist Speech including use of the "r-word." Later, I quote a passage from Huckleberry Finn that contains the n-word.]

This post works with a 1996 piece from David Sedaris and This American Life that contains terrible depictions of the intellectually disabled. It was re-broadcast in 2013. I'd like to see content notes on this episode. Here are my questions.

Can the trigger warning open up conversation, preserve texts that contain prejudicial language, and be a pathway to communication? When something from the past contains speech that now is widely deemed offensive, what do we do? I argue that the content note or trigger warning is a pathway towards preserving dialogue, preserving material, as it offers a middle ground between banning and shrugging.

The post is long, but you can just go read the storify of about 12 tweets that summarized the whole thing, with my conversation partner David quoted with permission.

For those just joining me ...

A few weeks ago I wrote a piece for CNN about an episode of This American Life featuring Wyatt Cenac. He compared a drug episode to having adult-onset Down syndrome, which I didn't like for reasons I explain. To my surprise, we connected over Twitter, then talked for a long time on the phone (summarized at link). I came away thinking that he's an enormously thoughtful person about comedy, discourse, prejudice, and representation. He's now, actually, a guy I hope I could go to first to ask for smart thoughts about the complexities of humor. I hope he still takes my emails when this kind of thing comes up again (as it will).

One of the things I argued in the piece is that perhaps we, in the disability community, focus too much on the r-word over the issues of representation that such language reflects. I'm calling for a broader engagement on such questions beyond the single word. So, naturally, here's a piece about the r-word.

The next day, another father wrote me about his experience in 2013 hearing a re-broadcast of the 1996 "The Santaland Diaries," the enormously successful radio adaption of David Sedaris' tale of being an elf at Santa-land. It's a story of loathing for others and self, and includes this section:

At noon, a large group of retarded people came to visit Santa and passed me on my little island. These people were profoundly retarded. They were rolling their eyes and wagging their tongues and staggering towards Santa. It was a large group of retarded people and, after seeing them for 15 minutes, I could not begin to guess where the retarded people ended and the regular New Yorkers began. Everyone looks retarded once you've set your mind to it.

Here are a few opening points.

First: this is MUCH WORSE than Cenac's joke. Cenac knew his story required explanation, tried to provide it in a way that explained he knew there was no such thing as adult-onset Down syndrome. He wanted to be true to his experience with pot, the actual words he thought at the time, without offending ... well ... me and those like me. What was interesting to me was that, as a listener and parent of a child with Down syndrome, the explanation failed to change the meaning of the bit. I wrote about it because I think these gray areas, these complexities, are exactly where we need to explore. If he had just made a lot of r-word jokes, there would have been no story there other than: Comedian offends to try and get a laugh. And that's not a story.

My question for the CNN piece was how Gervais' "it's not about disability" or Cenac's "I know this is not how Down syndrome works" play into the world of disability and representation. Although I regret that Cenac got a lot of grief on twitter over it (and called for it to stop), and I wish we had been able to speak before hand, I stand by my experience as a listener to the bit. I also accept Cenac's articulation of his intentions and find them reasonable. I think just a shade more context, a few more minutes of time, something, might have really changed the nature of that story.

But in Santaland, Sedaris is deliberately using this kind of language in order to say, ultimately, that New Yorkers at Santaland all seem retarded to him. He is using the most stereotypical descriptions possible in order to get that laugh. Rolling eyes. Wagging tongues.

Second: This was recorded in 1996 and written some time before. The word "retard" was already objectionable then, but had not achieved the kind of wide-spread cultural rejection as it had by 2013. We have made progress. In 1996, it was not reasonable for a parent to expect to avoid the r-word altogether. Here, though, I don't expect to hear someone saying it directly at my son, but rather as the casual self-or-other insult that teens use. And even that is fading generationally. So far, I have only heard it used to describe people with intellectual disabilities directly when voiced by an older person who learned to say "mentally retarded" as the correct, polite, non-insulting language. I rarely correct such cases.

So Sedaris was, to my reading, deliberately mocking the disabled in order to mock New Yorkers. He used a term that had not become a universal pejorative at the time, but I think he recognized the cruelty of the humor because his comedy depends on loathing. Principally, he claims the rhetoric of self-loathing; given that, he can loathe all others with impunity. It's obviously worked very well for him as a writing strategy.

But let's give him and Ira Glass the full benefit of the doubt and say that in 1996, no reasonable media personality would have thought this was objectionable. Maybe a little mean, but totally fair game. I hope everyone will agree that in 2013 (or now), no reasonable person would NOT think this is objectionable and offensive. The offense is now evident.

Third: As I recounted in my blog, here's what the father who heard the re-broadcast in 2013 wrote:

I cannot explain my reaction to hearing this in any other way than to say that I felt like I was punched in the gut. I suddenly could not breathe, I had to pull over the side of the road, I turned off the radio, and then I cried. I cried so hard because I have been waiting for this moment for 6 years. I have been waiting for someone to overtly make a discriminatory comment that shook me to my core.

THIS IS WHAT BEING TRIGGERED LOOKS LIKE.

Moreover, that someone would be triggered like this was predictable. I'm glad I didn't hear it without warning.

What I asked Ira Glass, in an email that was not answered (I'm a nobody; and since he wouldn't comment for the CNN piece, he's certainly not going to spend any time on me for my blog. Busy man, I know), was what obligations the radio host had when presenting material from the past. I wanted to know what kinds of conversations and decisions they made. Whether they would just broadcast a show like this forever, or would it expire someday? How do they make those decisions?

I went back and looked at other issues in the This American Life catalog, which is of course both vast and available online. I just did a search for the word "warning." I do not claim this is

Here are some interesting sentences:

• Episode 458 - "Play the Part" - "A warning to listeners that this is a story that's partly about race, and a racial slur gets used."
• Episode 341 - "How to Talk to Kids" - "A warning to listeners, we don't get very explicit in this discussion, but we do acknowledge that people, and teenagers, have sex."
• Episode 404 - "Enemy Camp 2010" - "A quick warning for listeners before we begin. This story acknowledges the existence of sex."
• Episode 457 - "What I did for Love" - "A warning, I should say, before we go any further in this story. We're going to acknowledge the existence of sex between adults. Nothing explicit."
• From a Facebook post of theirs last August 11, on pedophilia: "Warning: the article includes some graphic descriptions of abuse."
• Episode 119 - "Lockup" -  "A warning before we start. This reading contains material that may not be appropriate for some younger listeners. There is no explicit language or graphic depictions of anything, but it does acknowledge the existence of certain sex acts."
• And most interestingly, Episode 531, from just last July (a few weeks ago). First, this intro from Glass on the website:

Hey there, podcast listeners, Ira here. So there's some cursing in this week's show, and we're not going to beep it here on the podcast and internet version of the show. If you prefer a beeped version of our program, like we do on the radio, that's great. Go to our website, thisamericanlife.org, and you can download it from there.

This thing about not beeping the words is something we've tried a few times here on the internet. And we're not sure how often we should do it, or if we should keep doing it. We would love to hear what you think. If you have an opinion about this, email us at web@thislife.org, and it would help us a lot to sort these emails out if you put in the subject header, Beep Yes, or Beep No, in the subject line. OK, Beep Yes or Beep No. I think that's pretty simple. I think you understand which one goes with which one you feel. I'm not going to say anything more about that. OK. Here is today's show.

Then Glass says [my emphasis]:

A quick trigger warning, for anybody who needs a trigger warning, that this story does include descriptions of incidents of violence against women. 

That's a fascinating aside, right? At least if you've been apart of the whole trigger warning debate (too many links to even start. Just go google it. Here's something I wrote in which I am opposed to TW policies but say that good teaching requires informing students about content.), this kind of aside shows that the folks at This American Life are, right now, trying to figure out what to do about the triggering material of their show.

Let me go on record again to say, basically, that I am a fan of the show. I don't listen to all of every episode. But when they get a great story, they do it right - funny, sad, thoughtful, etc. They can be great.

There is no trigger warning on The Santaland Diaries. I'd like to hear from Ira Glass and the other producers whether that might change. What is the process for deciding these things?

One argument against trigger warnings, one I've in fact made, is that trauma is so specific that you never can tell what might trigger one person or another. Content notes, therefore, are a better model. You say - here is the content, as best you can, and let people decide as they might. I think, though, that in 2013 it is impossible to listen to that David Sedaris passage and not think - whoa, something is wrong here, maybe we need to warn people.

This is not a new problem. Here's Huckleberry Finn, chapter 6, the voice of "Pap."

Here was a free nigger there from Ohio—a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat; and there ain't a man in that town that's got as fine clothes as what he had; and he had a gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane—the awful- est old gray-headed nabob in the State. And what do you think? They said he was a p'fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain't the wust. They said he could VOTE when he was at home. Well, that let me out. Thinks I, what is the country a-coming to? It was 'lection day, and I was just about to go and vote myself if I warn't too drunk to get there; but when they told me there was a State in this country where they'd let that nigger vote, I drawed out. I says I'll never vote agin. (6.11)

So that's pretty complicated to read. But it's in a great work of literature, it reflects a voice of the time, and anyone who argues that Huck Finn should be banned is, well, wrong. But no one should just have it handed to them without some contextualization, right?

The Santaland Diaries is not Huck Finn. It's also not a minstrel show, though, in which the premise of the material relies on racism. We don't broadcast "Little Black Sambo." We don't show Disney's "Song of the South." We don't show overtly racist material - material that is about projecting racism - without very good reason in highly specific contexts. We do read Mark Twain.

So where does this leave us?

I do not believe that in 2013 you can broadcast a show with Sedaris' brand of speech there without a content warning. The trigger was predictable. The problem with such speech is widely known across American culture (and of course beyond). I don't think you have to cut it - though I would, as the joke is fundamentally, rather than incidentally, demeaning to the disabled.

The trigger warning, therefore, emerges as a pathway towards preserving content, preserving material as its language ages our of the mainstream into the widely and wildly offensive. Because without the trigger warning, well, then I have to advocate that this never be aired again.

Surely more on this to come.

I have a piece up on CNN today about comedy and disability, focusing on an episode of This American Life. I'm interested in the use of disclaimers, something I've talked about before, as a way to try to escape the consequences of one's words. I know some will disagree. They'll say it's just comedy. Or he didn't mean to be offensive. I'll have more to say about that tomorrow.

Here are some resources, such as the transcript and Ira Glass' response to a parent who wrote him. That parent is named Julie Ross, and I am giving the rest of my blog space to her, so that she can fully articulate her position. Comments are welcome, but people who get nasty to Julie will find themselves deleted promptly. No warning.

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Right now, I've got a piece working on comedy, disability, and disclaimers (see yesterday's resource post).. Here's a much more serious story on anti-Jewish hate in France. As you may know, there were riots in a suburb of Paris that damaged Jewish shops and a synagogue. For Jews, like me, as well as anyone who studies history, it raises the specter of historical mob violence against Jews and is very frightening. NPR had a piece this morning on French Jews moving to Israel despite the war there, because they no longer feel safe (in part due to anti-Islamic sentiment among French Jews, as well).

I want to focus on Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, the comedian whose routines are all about the Jews. He's mentioned in the NPR piece and has been in the news a lot, but here's an excerpt from a Washington Post piece from June.

“I am not an anti-Semite,” French comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala says with a devilish grin near the start of his hit show at this city’s Théâtre de la Main d’Or.

Then come the Jew jokes.

In front of a packed house, he apes Alain Jakubowicz, a French Jewish leader who calls the humor of Dieudonné tantamount to hate speech. While the comedian skewers Jakubowicz, Stars of David glow on screen and, as the audience guffaws, a soundtrack plays evoking the trains to Nazi death camps. In various other skits, he belittles the Holocaust, then mocks it as a gross exaggeration.

In a country where Jewish leaders are decrying the worst climate of anti-Semitism in decades, Dieudonné, a longtime comedian and erstwhile politician whose attacks on Jews have grown progressively worse, is a sign of the times. French authorities issued an effective ban on his latest show in January for inciting hate. So he reworked the material to get back on stage — cutting, for instance, one joke lamenting the lack of modern-day gas chambers.

But the Afro-French comedian, whose stage name is simply Dieudonné, managed to salvage other bits, including his signature “quenelle” salute. Across Europe, the downward-pointing arm gesture that looks like an inverted Nazi salute has now gone so viral that it has popped up on army bases, in parliaments, at weddings and at professional soccer matches. Neo-Nazis have used it in front of synagogues and Holocaust memorials. Earlier this year, bands of Dieudonné supporters flashed it during a street protest in Paris while shouting, “Jews, out of France!”

He starts with a disclaimer, then reinforces and promotes stereotypes. He finds the limits of hate speech, then slides just to the safe side. He reaps enormous publicity rewards, as the New Yorker puts it, "very little talent and a good deal of hate."

A disclaimer means nothing except that you are aware that you are about to objectionable and don't want to be punished for it. The cases I'm working on in regards to disability are NOTHING like the hate of Dieudonné, but I am a writer with a focus on epistemology and language, and the parallels are strong.This is an argument ad extremum. Does it work, do you think?