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[CAD] racist joke?
Victory63
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Not sure if safe to talk about other webcomics on here but here I go.
Just recently, the infamous gaming related webcomic Ctrl+Alt+Del released a rather controversial comic. Although just taken down, it still can be viewed here:
http://v.cdn.cad-comic.com/comics/cad-20110415-9b32c.png
Notice the punchline has caused a bit of a stir and is considered racist. However due to complaints the author, Tim Buckley, rereleased it with few changes which can be found here:
http://v.cdn.cad-comic.com/comics/cad-20110415-c721d.png
He rereleased it AGAIN with one word changed but didn't really make a difference:
http://www.cad-comic.com/cad/20110415
The comic has started a debate whether this is racist or just a harmless joke, mainly on gaming related discussion board /v/ on the infamous discussion site 4chan. In wake of the storm, forum registration has been disabled on the official forums.
The comic since its start has been about gaming however in recent years has started to include non-gaming related topics as well has started the infamous 'miscarriage' and 'B^U' jokes. This has caught the attention of other popular gaming webcomics such as Penny Arcade and VG Cats to comment and parody on the themes.
Just recently, the infamous gaming related webcomic Ctrl+Alt+Del released a rather controversial comic. Although just taken down, it still can be viewed here:
http://v.cdn.cad-comic.com/comics/cad-20110415-9b32c.png
Notice the punchline has caused a bit of a stir and is considered racist. However due to complaints the author, Tim Buckley, rereleased it with few changes which can be found here:
http://v.cdn.cad-comic.com/comics/cad-20110415-c721d.png
He rereleased it AGAIN with one word changed but didn't really make a difference:
http://www.cad-comic.com/cad/20110415
The comic has started a debate whether this is racist or just a harmless joke, mainly on gaming related discussion board /v/ on the infamous discussion site 4chan. In wake of the storm, forum registration has been disabled on the official forums.
The comic since its start has been about gaming however in recent years has started to include non-gaming related topics as well has started the infamous 'miscarriage' and 'B^U' jokes. This has caught the attention of other popular gaming webcomics such as Penny Arcade and VG Cats to comment and parody on the themes.
Victory63 on
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But less funny.
I guess if Family Guy can get away with that sort of thing, Tim shouldn't having anything to worry about ...... apart from /v/ raiding his forums and posting about the various jokes and memes about him.
If the rest of the punchline, let alone the rest of the comic, was witty or showed some sign of logical characterization, it would have been a forgettably dated stereotypical joke. As Honk said, Family Guy throws these out week after week.
And this isn't coming from a CAD hater, I've never really read it.
I guess what I'm saying is that if I'd expect an apology for anything, it's putting zero effort into a strip and reaching into a grab-bag of stereotypical jokes and plugging it in. That, to me, is more offensive.
Joke? Not so sure about that part. It's just plainly stating a stereotype, there's no punchline or humour.
He realized that mentioning race at all was unnecessary for the new punchline. Imagining that thought process is pretty great.
That being said, that's comedy and you gotta find the line. You can at least give credit to Buckley for quickly pulling it and saying "I thought about this one in advance, gave it a shot and as it turned out, it didn't work at all. Really sorry, here's an alternate."
Not a huge deal in the grand scheme of things.
So just like every other CAD strip ever?
ZING!
Of course the joke is racist. "White people go to movies like this, black guys go to movies like this" and apparently it's funny because obviously it's the dudes' blackness that causes them to be loud in movies.
Sometimes it's okay to tell a racist joke, but when shows like Family Guy "get away" with it, they get away with it because they just allude to the actual racism and let the audience make the jump themselves, rather than just baldly write it into the dialogue. Says more about buckley being a hack than anything else.
(And because they have Cleveland, who's funny primarily because he spends all his time contradicting popular black stereotypes.)
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Shitty Tumblr:lighthouse1138.tumblr.com
I'm not going to give credit to someone for pulling something that really offended people. That's insane. It's a normal, human response to backtrack. Now on the other hand, if Buckley were a Dickwolf things would be different.
Yeah, the joke as racial tones to it, but I think for me (and this kind of is getting into OptimusZed's thread a bit back about entertainment), it doesn't hit racist, just unfunny. He could've told it in so many different ways and it would've come off funnier and people wouldn't be hinging on this one speech bubble. Unfortunately he failed at that attempt, and is now back tracking.
I think if he was deliberately trying to be hurtful, this would obviously be a different story. It just seems like he was trying to do the same joke but with this new element to it of a robot, and failed. The only thing I can really say about his backtracking was that at least he pulled it down and replaced it with numerous comics because he wasn't quite sure and he listened to his audience. He could've instead become deliberately obtuse and stuck to his original comic no matter how many people it offended.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
If anything, it just adds to Buckley's uncreativeness.
I didn't get that from his explanation. He knew why people would be offended and said about as much in this:
This doesn't say to me "Gosh, why are you so offended. Okay, shut up, I took it down." He seemed pretty aware that this could go badly and stayed up the night he put it up to watch how it was perceived in case the little voice in the back of his head was true. Maybe I'm reading too much sincerity into this, but to me it doesn't seem like he doesn't know why it would make people mad.
The original isn't funny at all, the second joke (told either way) is less not-funny.
The ZING is made funnier by your avatar.
But yeah this wasn't that racist, or funny. The new comic is even less funny, if that's possible.
Though it's been said many times and many wayyyysss....:whistle:
The thing that gets me is how much worse the new punchline is. The first one, despite the light racism, actually has the underpinings of a joke. The new one doesn't really.
This is, to me, the best part as well.
Point out how it was silly to bring race into the second joke, for the joke...because otherwise there really isnt a joke there.
I also love how with the change the entire premise of the whole too many mouth muscles gets made pointless because the LOL BLACK MAN NO TALK AT MOVIES ISNT REALISTIC! joke is gone...
Kinda racist in the ignorance way rather than the hateful way and anything close to humor is buried under a pile of words that don't need to be there.
So....typical CAD.
Used to be a longtime CAD reader, until I realized I was giving ad money to a complete waste of space. His treatment of his (full of fans) guild in WoW was enough to turn me off the guy.
Nevermind that his shtick was actually, ya know, funny.
Did I really need to explain that?
On a side note, I think if you really want to preserve the blackface joke you can probably have Ethan introduce the robot in blackface, have him point out the problem, switch to whiteface with some variation on ethan claiming the problem is solved and just have lucas facepalm and keep the joke, the same quantity of humor and cut your word count and (I think) the level of offense that you give. I'm still not sure its funny enough to be worth the effort of inking though.
edit: As far as the question of the joke crossing some sort of line, I'm going to steal a measuring stick from Carlos Mencia (who may have stolen it form someone else): If I can't tell that joke to someone of $offendedClass then I should not tell it to anyone. That joke doesn't come close to crossing that line. As far as the joke being racist? Yes, the joke does discriminate on the basis of race. Does that make Tim Buckley racist? I have no idea if he discriminates based on race or not and that joke doesn't give me any information for that.
What most people seem to be saying (or those who think the joke is at least a little racist, anyway) is that it is the joke that is racist, not necessarily Buckley himself. Which seems like a relevant distinction.
I was more or less referring to this:
I probably should've quoted this from the get go.
That I agree with, I've always loved racial humor because it points out the absurdity of stereotypes, which I believe allows people to move past it. It might be because growing up and being of mixed race (white and hispanic), I've had to deal with some stupid shit from ignorant people.
However, that wasn't what was bothering me, but I already went over that.
The execution's just so lousy, though; the entire premise behind the punchline is that quiet black people inevitably draw a lot of attention, presumably more than loud black people draw. Alright, so, let's say you just can't help yourself and want, nay, need to make a joke about a racially-based stereotype. This is not how that particular stereotype works.
I think it's probably worth it to point out that among the many reasons Chapelle had for leaving his show, longs hours away from family, massive pressure/stress, little to no privacy, etc., one of them was that he feared that many of his jokes were simply re-enforcing harmful stereotypes, instead of destroying them, funny or not.
That said, without the explanatory post, I don't think I would have even noticed the racial tones. I simply would have read, not laughed and moved on.