Anybody here think there’s a problem with this Weekend Update segment? Apparently people on the Internet do:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/tina-feys-eat-cake-strategy-after-charlottesville-is-bad-advice?via=twitter_page
There are many “good” responses to this tragedy, especially for white people. We can follow Heyer’s lead and show up at counter-protests and rallies. We can provide financial support for victims and organizers and pay activists’ legal fees. We can make calls, sign petitions, and out Nazis and white supremacists in our communities. We can educate ourselves and attempt to dismantle white supremacy in our daily lives. In spite of all of these possible avenues for action, Tina Fey went on Weekend Update on Thursday to trademark her own approach: staying home and binging on baked goods with a side of biting political commentary. Quite literally, let them eat cake.
While Fey appeared to be tapping into a long history of tone-deaf white women, she was also adding to her own “problematic white feminist” portfolio. The beloved comedian has been criticized for repeatedly employing racist stereotypes, like when she crafts Asian caricatures for laughs. She’s come under fire for jokes that appear to have crossed the line—rape jokes, using sex workers as punchlines, and blackface gags, to name just a few examples. She also starred in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, a war correspondent comedy (?) that, among other questionable decisions, cast two white actors in major Afghan roles.
Fey’s response to all this criticism has been to publicly “opt out” of internet scrutiny. In a 2015 interview, the SNL alum explained, “We did an Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt episode and the internet was in a whirlwind, calling it ‘racist’, but my new goal is not to explain jokes…I feel like we put so much effort into writing and crafting everything, they need to speak for themselves. There’s a real culture of demanding apologies, and I’m opting out of that.” Of course, you can’t please everyone, but choosing to ignore the haters when said haters are trying to point out and correct your racial blind spots will probably just lead to more fuck-ups in the future.
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/08/let-us-eat-cake/537294/
The bit is, in many ways, classic Fey: It’s self-deprecating, and uses food in particular as a tool of deprecation; it’s at once slapstick and cerebral; it folds a sweeping message about the emotional state of the country into a joke about baked goods; it refers to white supremacists as “chinless turds.” But the bit is classic Fey in another way, too: Its humor is also punctuated with moments of cringe-worthiness—about race, in particular.
At one point Fey makes a joke about a drag queen being “a 6-foot-4 black man.” She yuks to Michael Che about her placement on the set: She’s sitting next to Colin Jost rather than Che, she explains, because the angle highlights “the better half of my face” (“This week, I think it’s important to be clear about that”). She ends the whole bit with an apparently off-handed joke about Thomas Jefferson and … Sally Hemings, “that hot light-skinned girl over by the butter churn.” (This was an echo of a line in her memoir Bossypants: “To get some play in Charlottesville,” Fey wrote of her time at UVA, “you had to be either a Martha Jefferson or a Sally Hemings.”) All that came in the context of a segment that is in one way channeling a sense of national despair but that is in another toying with complacency as a response to evil’s banality: Let us eat cake.
https://bossip.com/1579674/tina-feys-white-privilege-response-to-nazis-is-the-whitest-white-thing-to-ever-white/
Before we begin: 53 percent of white women voted for Donald Trump. Just saying.
Anyway, Tina Fey went on Weekend Update and tried to deliver some ether to the president. She laid some zingers about Paul Ryan and the pres. But she also had a gag about encouraging people to stay at home and eat cake instead of resisting. The jokes were meant to entertain but it really reminded us of the privilege white people have to not engage in oppression because it doesn’t concern them.
I mostly agreed with this assessment:
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/08/19/tina-fey
Tina Fey’s segment on SNL’s Weekend Update this week was so good I’ve watched it three times already. It’s just amazing.
Yet, remarkably, it has drawn criticism from people on the left. Exhibits A, B, and C. If you’re claiming to be offended by Tina Fey’s segment this week, you’re either utterly humorless or willfully obtuse, and either way, you are part of the problem. The only people to be offended by this week are fucking Nazis, and Tina Fey just skewered them.
I remember being a kid learning that Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal was controversial in its time, because some sanctimonious shitheads thought Swift literally wanted people to eat Irish children. I just couldn’t believe there were people who were incapable of understanding satire. But here we are today, with people thinking Tina Fey literally wants us to stay home and eat cake. If that’s what you think, let me break it to you: your heart might be in the right place, but you’re an idiot.
but I do know that the it’s just a joke response is very problematic.
