sign of the times #362

Theoretical Situation:

a.) I approach you and say, “I hate gay people” (I don’t).

b.) I approach you and ventriloquise, “I hate gay people”

Would you think a.) was funny? No, you probably wouldn’t, because there’s nothing inherently hilarious about homophobia. Would you be more inclined to laugh at b.) because I used a puppet as a proxy for my parochial hatemongering? If you were one of the 7.9 million people that tuned in to watch the pilot for The Jeff Dunham Show and didn’t ragequit it after the first two minutes, I would imagine your answer to be something along the lines of, “Fuck yeah, that shit’s funny as hell. Hyuk. I watch it right after Leno.” The sad fact is that The Jeff Dunham Show makes Leno look like highbrow humor filled with incisive social commentary.

The Jeff Dunham Show opens with a racist “joke” about how ironic it is to have a black president in the White House (sigh) and it only gets worse from there. Dunham and his crotchety old man puppet, Walter, just can’t seem to get along so they visit a therapist to work on their issues. Through the course of the conversation, it is revealed that the therapist is gay. Walter’s mouth hangs open while he and Dunham glance nervously at each other. This is followed by a string of offensive homophobic comments that ends in the realization that the only thing Dunham and Walter can agree on is that they don’t want to be homosexual with each other, and by extension, at all. This is just a microcosmic example of the horrifying world Jeff Dunham, his lifeless proxies, and the millions of slack-jawed Jeff Dunham fans inhabit.

I don’t have a problem with incendiary, unapologetic humor that a lot of people might take issue with. However, I do have a problem with humor that is cheap and hateful. There are no jokes in Dunham’s show, there are only insults levelled at homosexuals, black people, Jewish people, and women. In an interview with Slate, Dunham dodges accountability by saying that he would “shudder to utter” the things his puppets say. Yet, it is hard to imagine that Dunham has the artistic capacity to invent personalities for his puppets other than, “the old one hates gay people, the Middle-Eastern one is a terrorist, wait, no, he’s a terrorist ZOMBIE, and the redneck hates every minority.” The dodge is rendered increasingly ineffective when you can see his mouth moving in unison with the mouth of the puppet on his hand.

The worst part of this clusterfuck of hate is that we (as a society), not only allow Jeff Dunham to get on stage and spew his hatred, but we flock to see him, we pay him an inordinate amount of money, we demand he gets a television show, we actually watch it and what’s more is that we love every single goddamned second of it.

If Mel Gibson would have been wearing a puppet on his hand during his drunken anti-Semitic outburst, would it have been acceptable or funny? What about Michael Richards’ (Kramer) crazed racist diatribe? It’s depressing that at least 7.9 million people would answer “possibly” to these questions.