I didn't know anyone was still looking at this

I'd guess there is no subject about which more bullshit has been written than the alleged power of comedy to bring down tyrants, to expose frauds, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.  History proves it has no such power anymore than any other kind of light writing does.  It's bullshit. Anyone who pretends to believe that is either lying or stupid enough to buy it without thinking about it.  There was no more biting comedy than that which went up against the Nazis and, guess what, the Nazis won without any problem.  They harnessed it to their own ends. 

I'll Let Hugh Dillon Say It For Me

Ah, two weeks without anyone telling me what Stupy's doing.  Just one telling me what he didn't do and I didn't much care.   Will this be the last time I mention him?   Can I finally say it?

The beauteous Hugh Dillon when he had hair.  Not that he's bad now, either.   Ah, to be 40 again.  

Here he is an an off-beat short film.  Not a bad actor, either. 

When White People Lecture Other People On What Isn't Racist Or Racialized

 

My last friend who frequents Eschaton tells me that Duncan didn't rouse his lazy ass to ban Simps, Simps left when he was critisized for being such an example of old, white, male, middle-class privilege that he didn't acknowledge the inherent racism of the old Ernie Kovacs Nairobi Trio sketch WHICH IS BLATANTLY AND OBVIOUSLY PRESENTING AN OLDER, WIDELY USED RACIST SHOW BIZ STEREOTYPE OF BLACK MUSICIANS AS APES THAT GOES BACK BEFORE JAZZ AND INTO THE MINSTREL PERIOD and, indeed, well back into white, European racism.  

It's so thoroughly embedded by racism into the thinking of, not only white people but in human culture that it even appears, unplanned and unconsidered in the algorithms that computer scientists come up with.

Back in 2015, software engineer Jacky Alciné pointed out that the image recognition algorithms in Google Photos were classifying his black friends as “gorillas.” Google said it was “appalled” at the mistake, apologized to Alciné, and promised to fix the problem. But, as a new report from Wired shows, nearly three years on and Google hasn’t really fixed anything. The company has simply blocked its image recognition algorithms from identifying gorillas altogether — preferring, presumably, to limit the service rather than risk another miscategorization.

Wired says it performed a number of tests on Google Photos’ algorithm, uploading tens of thousands of pictures of various primates to the service. Baboons, gibbons, and marmosets were all correctly identified, but gorillas and chimpanzees were not. The publication also found that Google had restricted its AI recognition in other racial categories. Searching for “black man” or “black woman,” for example, only returned pictures of people in black and white, sorted by gender but not race.

I don't think there's much of a question that Ernie Kovacs may well have imbibed the same thing, perhaps unwittingly the images of racism so deeply embedded in American as well as European culture,  when he heard the piece of crap song "Solfeggio" and immediately linked it to a parody of a racist music-box image of Black musicians as Gorillas, it is even less of a surprise when his wife and the other all-white members of his company (and, according to Simps in our earlier go round on it, the white Jack Lemmon)* didn't see any problems with it.  I wish I could find out if there were any contemporary Black people who commented on it because I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't have any problem seeing it for what it was at the time.  

And, really, calling it the "Nairobi Trio" is rather a dead giveaway of the racist nature of it. 

It is rather presumptuous for a white guy to declare that a bunch of white show-biz guys in one of the most racist periods of reaction against the great Civil Rights Movement, dressing up and personifying a very old, racist stereotype taken directly from the past and their very present, present were not, in fact, doing what they were obviously doing.  I'm glad to live in a time when, especially younger people fed up with that long history are no longer willing to just skip over that and to call it what it is, no longer impressed with the admitted though very much exaggerated genius of Ernie Kovacs and those who participated in it with him.  

Oddly, enough, one of the most interesting confirmations of the racism of using ape and, specifically gorilla images that has been ubiquitious was the Brit-American use of exactly the same images used against Black People against the Irish in the 19th and very early 20th century.  But that ended, though the same bias is certainly present in Brit comedy and attitudes today . I wouldn't expect that most Irish Americans would worry about that kind of bigotry regaining its former ubiquity though note what David Pilgrim, a Black sociologist who started the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia has to say about how his assumptions of the diminution of racism even a few years ago has been proved to be wrong by the racist rise of Trump and the Republican-fascist part. 

I saw several images in his collection that are reflected in the Nairobi Trio skit. 

*  You can hear Edie Adams talk about how not only Lemmon but Milton Berle and Tony Curtis put on the gorilla suits to participate in it all without seeing any problem in impersonating a well-practiced racist stereotype.  I'd like to know if any Black People ever worked for Kovacs and his team, I strongly doubt it.  If any did I'd love to hear them on this topic. 

Too Funny, Too Stupid To Not Announce

REALLY?  Simps got dumped by Duncan over a stupid picture of a puppet?  After all of these years after he was documented to be attacking Duncan's regulars with sock-puppet names - something I caught him doing to me back when Digby still had comments - I wondered if that incident wasn't what made her realize that for a writer as good as she is, maintaining comment threads is a liability.  

Geesh, let no one say that Duncan is much bothered by anything  like consistency or integrity.  To drop Simps over that when he could have dropped him for being a lying, libeling, backstabbing creep with Duncan's complete knowledge and sponsorship all these years is pretty stupid, even for that rapidly aging slacker.   I thank God every morning that I didn't go to a prep school or Ivy, the state universities I went to didn't damage my character the way that those typically do.

"Are you missing Simps?"

No. I am also not missing knowing what lies he's telling about me at Duncan Black's blog.  A complete break, only thing to do when it's necessary.  It's like taking a good shower when you're dirty.