Who's to Say What's Obscene?

by Paul Krassner

  (“Actually,” free-speech attorney David Blasband informs me, “the First Amendment does not provide an absolute defense where a public official or public figure sues for defamation. They can still prevail if they can show that the defendant knew or should have known that the publication was false. This is called Constitutional malice, but is a formidable burden for the plaintiff.”)

  Elayne Boosler came to Richards’ defense in a blog on Huffington Post:

  “Words won’t kill you unless they are ‘Ready, aim, fire!’ Now that some time has gone by since the Michael Richards rant, let’s talk about the true victim of the ‘n-word’—stand-up comedy. The Los Angeles Times continues to feature articles on the Laugh Factory, focusing on further ‘n-word’ developments, and on black comedians lamenting the loss of their use of the ‘n-word’ at the club. They’re determined to say it, even though the club owner is fining them for it.

  “When I watch the majority of black comedians on cable and in clubs, I am amazed the TV version of Amos and Andy was called racist, and canceled due to the main characters speaking less than perfect English in their rhythms. (We’re not discussing the radio show, which was done in blackface before television and which, by the way, was voted into the Radio Hall of Fame last week.) Those men had jobs, wore suits, had beautiful wives in earrings and pearls, and ate at tables with tablecloths. They were a classy version of The Honeymooners, the ostensible white welfare show.

  “By comparison, the ‘comedians’ on cable seem to be making Klan recruitment films. There is such a dearth of dignity, but most of all, such a lack of comedy, that every time I try to watch I say out loud to the performer on TV, ‘Hey, I’ve got the Kingfish on the phone here, he’d like an apology.’ These shows have reinvented comedy as style over substance, rhythm over writing. I can’t discern a joke, let alone root for the person up there. Between the ‘n-word,’ the ‘mf-word,’ and ‘bitches’ and ‘hos’ (talk about insulting half the population every waking hour of the day), they have annihilated stand-up comedy. Those words have made it possible for people to fill an hour set without five actual minutes of comedy. Maybe stand-up comedy could hire Gloria Allred to sue on its behalf, for a proper sum for not only hurting its feelings, but destroying its legacy. (Allred, what a great feminist. ‘We’re going to find a retired judge and let him decide.’)

  “The rule about heckling is this: You fire at a cop, get ready to die. Yelling ‘You’re not funny’ at a comic is firing with an AK. Hurt your feelings? Tough. Anything goes for hecklers, including excessive force. I lay myself bare up here, at my most vulnerable, you shoot me in the chest, I will kill you if I can. You know why Richards looked so shell-shocked at his own outburst? Because he’s not a racist, he was simply in the zone. Comedy clubs are like Indian reservations. They are their own country. I don’t think he should have apologized. You pay your money and you take your chances, step right up.

  “Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, far from demanding apologies, should have apologized to Bill Cosby, who tried to point out the heartbreak and social defeat of how some blacks are undercutting their own dignity and chances (did you see Queens of Comedy?). It’s one thing to use the ‘n-word’ when you are an original, like Chris Rock or Bernie Mac, or if you’re a genius, like Richard Pryor. It’s another matter when you don’t have the talent to co-opt the enemy. These currently enraged black leaders are about ten years too late in their outrage, and they are mad at the wrong person. By the way, the best black comedian I ever saw was Marsha Warfield. She cut to the bone of race relations, was brilliantly funny, as well as intense, challenging, and seething with rage, and she never used the ‘n-word’ once. . . .

  “When I started doing stand-up in 1973, the women working in comedy were the caricatures of their time; housewives who hated sex, loved jewelry, hated their husbands, hated themselves, etc. My oath to myself was that I would do nothing, no humor, no matter how easy it would have been, that propagated any of those images of women. I had to work harder, write better, face resistance, lose opportunity, to present a funny woman who was a worthwhile human being deserving of respect and dignity, and who could entertain not just a niche audience, but people. I don’t see too many comics striving for that on cable. You can’t legislate the end of the ‘n-word.’ Nobody can ever tell a comic not to say something, it runs against a comic’s soul. Don’t take the ‘n-word’ out of your act because someone wants to ban it. Take it out because you are replacing it with actual comedy.”

  Editorial cartoonist Mr. Fish depicted Jesse Jackson saying, “In light of the Michael Richards tirade, I’m calling for the immediate removal of the letter ‘N’ from the alphabet so that racism will no longer exist in this country.” I decided to send a contribution to the NAACP in support of their anti-discrimination efforts, and I made the check out to the AACP.

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  On 60 Minutes in 1998, Don Imus told Mike Wallace that his show had someone specifically assigned to do “nigger jokes.” In 2000, Newsday’s Philip Noble monitored the Imus show for months, then cited numerous examples of his racist, homophobic and misogynist references. In 2001, Imus promised syndicated columnist Clarence Page that he wouldn’t make racist comments about black athletes any more.

  But in April 2007, on the morning after the mostly black Rutgers University women’s basketball team had reached the finals of the NCAA women’s basketball championship, Imus offhandedly remarked, “That’s some nappy-headed hos.” Calls for his removal from the airwaves were made by public figures ranging from then-Senator Barack (not black enough) Obama to Al (too black) Sharpton, from feminist Eleanor (not woman enough) Smeal to Jesse (“Let’s go to Hymietown”) Jackson. Although Imus proceeded to apologize all over the media, ranging from Sharpton’s radio program to the Today show, he felt that he was only following the lyrics of black rappers, from the Wu Tang Clan (“nappy-headed niggaz”) to Ludacris (boasting of random “hos in different area codes”).

  Platinum-seller Chamillionaire admitted, “I’ve always used the n-word,” but after he went on tour and saw mostly whites in the audience lip-synching it along with him, he announced that his new album, Ultimate Victory, would not include the n-word, explaining, “I’m not going to say the the n-word on this one because when I go back on the road and I start performing, I don’t want them to be saying it, like me teaching them.” He said this conversion was a moral issue and not a result of the backlash against Imus. Snoop Dogg said that rappers “are not talking about no collegiate basketball girls who have made it to the next level in education and sports. We’re talking about hos that’s in the ’hood that ain’t doing shit that’s trying to get a nigger for his money.”

  In 1992, hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons had stated that “oppression of artistic expression, like any sort of oppression, should not be tolerated.” In 2007, he told reporters that offensive references in hip-hop “may be uncomfortable for some to hear” but that his job wasn’t to censor expression. Yet, only one week later, in the wake of Imusgate, he joined Al Sharpton’s insistence that broadcasters should ban “bitch,” “ho” and “nigger.” Sharpton, who had announced to the press in 1995 that record-label executives shouldn’t “cave in” to right-wingers wanting to censor lyrics because it would “infringe on our First Amendment rights,” now justified his turnaround because James Brown on his deathbed had urged him to “be more aggressive in cleaning up the music.”

  In November 2007, the Los Angeles City Council unanimously approved a resolution banning the n-word. Other cities had already passed similar measures. Two months before the Imus incident, on the first day of Black History Month, New York City Councilman Leroy Comrie successfully sponsored a “symbolic moratorium on the use of the n-word.” Ironically, at a hearing on Comrie’s resolution, the word “nigger” was said nearly fifty times in less than two hours. The founder of the Ban the N-Word Movement, Marcia Harris, alone, said “nigger” nineteen times. (One man who didn’t say it was Atlanta-based attorney Roy Miller, who
managed to get the word stricken from the Funk & Wagnalls dictionary.)

  A few days later, inside Harlem’s Uptown Jeans clothing store, the voice of rapper 50 Cent, one of whose songs is titled “To All My Niggers,” blared over the loudspeaker, “Nigger you front you gon’ get it, okay, now maybe I said it.”

  “What difference does it make if they ban the n-word?” a bookseller asked. “Ban police brutality. Ban racial profiling. Ban that. Forget the n-word.” Four months after the plethora of rap-lyrics criticism that followed the Imus incident, New York City Councilwoman Darlene Mealy tried unsuccessfully to ban the words “ho” and “bitch” (which was referred to in the attempted legislation as the “b-word.)” Basketball star Isiah Thomas said that although it’s wrong for a black man to call a black woman a bitch, it’s much worse for a white man to do it.

  On April 9, 2007, CBS Radio announced it was suspending the Imus in the Morning show for two weeks. Two days later, a Pennsylvania radio station fired a disc jockey for urging listeners to mimic the Imus epithet. That same day, MSNBC decided to cancel its simulcast of Imus’s radio show. Although sponsors—General Motors, GlaxoSmithKline, Procter & Gamble, American Express, Sprint Nextel, Bigelow Tea, Staples—had pulled their commercials from the Imus show, NBC denied that the loss of advertising motivated his cancellation. The next day, CBS fired Imus. Sponsors had already dropped out, and others were threatening to do so.

  Imus hired attorney Martin Garbus, who annnounced that Imus would sue CBS for $120 million, since they had contractually encouraged Imus. A clause acknowledged that his program was “unique, extraordinary, irreverent, intellectual, topical, controversial.” Garbus said the firing was “unconstitutional,” which could be considered an accurate claim, since the FCC is a government agency. Imus and CBS settled out of court. Meanwhile, a clue in the New York Times crossword puzzle was “Fired celeb,” and the correct answer was “Imus.”

  In a Los Angeles Times op-ed, civil rights attorney Constance Rice, sounding somewhat like Lenny Bruce, wrote, “But rest assured, the Imus crew has plenty of kike, wetback, mick, spick, dago, Jap, Chink, redneck and unprintable Catholic priest jokes too. Not to mention the rabid homophobia and occasional Islamophobia. . . . Imus’ remarks were racist, offensive and, given that these athletes are not fair targets, out of bounds. There is no excuse for what he said. But there’s also no basis for firing him or ending his show. Firing Imus for racist riffs would be like firing Liberace for flamboyance. It’s what he does. More to the point, Imus should only be fired when the black artists who make millions of dollars rapping about black bitches and hos lose their recording contracts. Black leaders should denounce Imus and boycott him and call for his head only after they do the same for the misogynist artists with whom they have shared stages, magazine covers and the awards shows.”

  Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz—whom Imus had once referred to as “a boner-nosed, beanie-wearing Jewboy”—stated, “I do not believe Imus is a bigot—not a man who raised millions for cancer-stricken kids of all races to stay at his New Mexico ranch.” New York Times columnist Frank Rich argued in favor of free speech, and that Bill O’Reilly should be allowed to say “wetbacks,” a term used as dismissive shorthand for undocumented Mexicans. O’Reilly claimed that he was actually searching for the word “coyote.”

  Gloria Allred represented a member of the Rutgers team who planned to sue Imus and CBS for slander and defamation of character, charging that his comment had damaged her reputation. This was reminiscent of the joke about a public speaker who states, “The trouble with women is that they take things too personally”—then a woman in the audience stands up and says, “I do not.” In September 2007, the basketball player’s frivolous lawsuit was withdrawn, ostensibly so she could focus on her education.

  In April 2007, CBS fired the hosts of The Dog House with JV and Elvis after they placed an on-air order to a Chinese restaurant for “slimp flied lice” and compared food items to body parts. “In the wake of the Imus case,” said New York City Councilman John Liu, “it would have been maddening to the communty if these idiots did not get fired.”

  The next month, XM Satellite Radio suspended shock jocks Opie and Anthony for thirty days after they aired a segment with “Homeless Charlie.” When they mentioned Laura Bush, Condoleezza Rice and Queen Elizabeth, he said about each, “I’d love to fuck that bitch.” Although the station is not subject to FCC regulation or punishment, it did need FCC approval to merge with satellite-radio competitor Sirius. In 2002, the pair had been fired by CBS Radio for broadcasting a call from two listeners who said they were having sex in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Now they expressed sympathy for Don Imus, saying that his career was “gone, just because he was trying to entertain people.” In fact, though, Imus would be returning to radio, on ABC.

  Meanwhile, Glenn Beck called antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan “a pretty big prostitute,” then softened that epithet to “tragedy pimp.” Michael Savage called Barbara Walters “a mental prostitute” and “a double-talking slut.” GQ editor Jim Nelson, parodying The Secret, advised readers to “visualize what you want (an Alfa Romeo? Leather pants? An Asian whore?), think positively and the universe will make it happen to you,” arousing the ire of the Asian American Journalists Association and the Asian American Justice Association.

  Nobel Prize winner James Watson told the London Times that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, whereas all the testing says not really.” Bill O’Reilly was more succinct when he expressed his surprise about eating at a restaurant in Harlem because black patrons weren’t yelling at the waitress, “Hey, where’s my motherfucking iced tea?”

  Presidential candidates John McCain and Mitt Romney used the racially offensive term “tar baby” and later both apologized. On her Comedy Central series, Sarah Silverman insisted to an African American waiter that the Holocaust was worse than slavery, then as a social experiment she did the rest of the show in minstrel-blackface. In Tropic Thunder, Robert Downey Jr. played a method actor who tints his skin black for the role of an African American soldier. Black comic Sheryl Underwood called Monica Lewinsky “an amateur ho.” And Don Imus referred to his wife Deirdre, an environmental activist, as “the green ho.”

  In July 2008, a live microphone caught Jesse Jackson whispering that he wanted to cut Barack Obama’s nuts off for “telling niggers how to behave.” Whereupon Jamie Masada—owner of the Laugh Factory, who had originally joined Jackson’s call for a ban on the n-word after Michael Richards’ outburst—wanted to fine Jackson just as he does whenever a comedian says “nigger” on his stage, the fine being donated to the Museum of Tolerance, only it’s been raised from $20 to $50. Inflation everywhere.

  And finally, the Black Panther Party’s mission statement, in a masterstroke of co-option, is now featured as the slogan in a commercial for the Oral-B battery-operated toothbrush: “Power to the People.”

  THE GREAT MUHAMMAD CARTOON CONTROVERSY

  As a secular humanist, I find it simultaneously tragic and absurd to witness so much unspeakable anguish caused by religious wars in the Middle East being fought over deities in whose existence I disbelieve—Jehovah vs. Allah, Jesus vs. Muhammad—and, as a free speech advocate, to witness the death and destruction triggered by Danish cartoonists’ depictions of the latter prophet. There are basic principles of semantics concerning symbolism—the menu is not the meal; the map is not the territory—which serve only to intensify both the tragedy and the absurdity.

  “Okay,” said Pultizer Prize–winning editoral cartoonist Joel Pett, “let’s put down our pens and swords, and recap. Danish editors, concerned about self-censorship over Islamic imagery, challenged cartoonists to portray Muhammad, an Islamic no-no. Outraged Muslim clerics pressured the Danes to apologize, outraging more European editors, who reprinted the cartoons, outraging many more Muslims. The clerics circulated them, leading
to riots throughout the Muslim world.

  “Meanwhile, fearing editorial censors, not to mention firebrand jihadists, U.S. cartoonists did a lot of self-censoring. Plenty of people pointed to what they said was the hypocrisy of the Muslim reaction to the Danish cartoons, given how often the Arab press publishes hateful images of Jews. An Iranian editor raised the stakes when he announced that his paper would challenge cartoonists to debunk the Holocaust, a crime in several European countries.”

  One such cartoon had Holocaust victim Anne Frank in bed with Adolf Hitler after having sex. Hitler says, “Write this one in your diary, Anne.” Beyond that, the British revisionist historian David Irving decided that he would plead guilty to charges of Holocaust denial when he appeared in a Vienna court. He had been held in an Austrian prison for several months. He said that he did not consider himself to be a Holocaust denier but that he had no choice but to plead guilty as charged. “Under the law I’ve got no alternative,” he stated—but, he added, “I deny that I’m a Holocaust denier,” as though he had been inspired by Groucho Marx, who once declared, “I deny everything, because I lie about everything. And everything I deny is a lie.”

  “In the end,” concluded cartoonist Pett, “the fine line between respectful deference and timid self-censorship is only clearly defined by sticking your toe, or your neck, out over it. Outraged reaction is a daily byproduct of strong satire, but let’s be clear: Cartoons don’t burn embassies, people do.”

  An offending cartoon reprinted in Geneva’s Le Temps and Budapest’s Magyar Hirlap showed an imam telling suicide bombers to stop because Heaven had run out of virgins to reward them. In September 2007, after Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks drew a picture of a dog with Muhammad’s head on it, the Islamic State of Iraq placed a bounty of $100,000 on the head of Vilks—“$150,000 if he is slaughtered like a lamb”—and a $50,000 reward for killing the editor of the newspaper that published the cartoon. Vilks responded, “I suppose this makes my art project a bit more serious. It’s also good to know how much one is worth.” Police took him to a secret location and told him that he could not return home because of the death threat.