Salon and Paton Oswalt spar...over Asian joke

For cripes sake. THIS is not that. Oswalt's line was not meant to insult Asian culture, he was not expressing dislike of Asians, instead he just dropped a silly little pun playing off the mistake that TV news crew had made. If the line was meant to mock anyone, it was the buffoons that made the prior mistake, not Asians.

This silliness is not worth your outrage. Save it for when it's actually due.

 

This is where I come down, too. If EVERYTHING is held up to be a sign of racism and prejudice, then you're going to lose a lot of your audience when true issues of racism and prejudice come up. Kind of like the boy who cried wolf.

 

I would say also that when you're talking about a comedian and you say "I'm offended," he's going to say "Great!"

Because that's what comedians do.

It occasionally backfires (Michael Richards, or the woman who had the anti-gay rant in San Francisco a few months ago), but for the most part doing that job right requires pissing somebody off.

 

1. Is there a line where the people who didn't think it was offensive and didn't think it was funny can stand? I'll head there.

2. It's so magnanimous that y'all are taking on the burden of letting qtlaw know when he should be offended.

 

Salon's been on this type of kick for a few months. It yelled at The Onion for being too mean a few months ago, completely ignoring Onion history from 1988-2012, when it was just as mean as it supposedly is in 2013.

 

I saw the tour without Galifianakis in 2005 or 2006.

Bamford is highly underrated. I'm surprised she never became a bigger star. Posehn is hilarious.

 

Who was the woman in San Francisco?

Usually there's just a few days or weeks of backlash and then it goes away. Richards is a notable exception.

Silverman, Tracy Morgan, Gilbert Gottfried, Daniel Tosh all survived. They might have lost a gig or two over it (Gottfried losing the Afflack duck job), but they're all still successful touring comics.

 

I think it may be a mistaken reference to Michelle Shocked going batshit at a concert.

 

Is she not a comedian? My bad.

 

Just as magnanimous as qtlaw is being in taking on the burden of letting others know they should be offended in this case.

 

Of all the jokes Oswalt would get called on, they picked THIS one?

He has jokes on 9-11, gay pride parades for the mentally disabled, getting in a time machine and killing George Lucas with a shovel, described organized religion as"the old skycake dodge"...

But THIS was the one that Salon got huffy about?

As for Oswalt "I WANT ALL THE HAM!" is one of my favorite stand-up punch lines.

 

His riff on going back in time and talking to George Lucas about the Star Wars prequels is stellar.

I do think in this case he probably should have just sat it out.