Will the racist black and latino jokes make a hill of beans really?

[pat_k]

60. Forgot all about that! The 1/2 Hour News Hour in 2007

https://www.popmatters.com/1-2-hour-news-hour-joel-surnow-fox-news-failed-foray-into-satire-2500322998.html

...
For example, the pilot episode featured a sketch with Rush Limbaugh as the president and Anne Coulter as his vice president. At one point the commander-in-chief asks if the VP would like to join him in a cigar.

“Isn’t the White House a smoke-free zone?” Coulter asks.

“Not anymore,” Limbaugh replies with his trademark smugness. Cue the laugh track...

However, the bigger problem might have been that Surnow et al misunderstood the function and form of political satire altogether...

To its credit, The ½ Hour News Hour strove for laughs, and some of the jokes were genuinely funny. “Illinois Senator Barack Obama admits that as a teenager he sometimes used cocaine,” says Kurt McNally (Kurt Long), one of the show’s cohosts, in one faux-news bit. “The news sent Obama’s approval rating among Democrats plummeting to an all-time low of 99.9 percent.”...

...successful satire must move beyond laughter alone. It should offer a critique of persons, places, institutions, and/or ideas that pose some threat to society. In a sense, it weaponizes humor in an effort to draw attention to a problem.

This is why historically, satire has been a tool of the powerless and the marginalized. We mock world leaders, governments, and oppressive traditions not only because it’s amusing, but because it’s a way of calling out corruption and incompetence among those who have the most control over our lives.

...satire entails a considerable power imbalance between speaker and target and usually comes from the bottom up. This is why, as Jezebel writer Lindy West points out, at company parties it’s the boss who’s roasted, not the custodian. For people in positions of power to mock their subordinates isn’t funny, it’s tasteless.