PAT: Dear white people, you're evil, and you need to go. That's what I expect this is about, but I don't know that for a fact. I just know that a TV show called Dear Black People probably wouldn't go over that well.
STU: Hmm. Wow.
PAT: Dear Hispanics, Dear Asian People. Why is this okay?
STU: You know, I don't know. I was watching CNN, I believe, yesterday. And they had an African-American guest on. And he was -- I think at least believed himself to be a comedian. I don't know that he actually was.
PAT: Okay.
STU: And he apparently does some show for -- for CNN. And as they were talking about Trump, they -- they said, "Well, we've got a lot to cover today in the news." And he said, "Yeah, we have a lot of white people we got to look out for." I was curious to see how CNN would react if one of their white guests were to say, "Yeah, I know we got a lot of black people we need to look out for." That would be an interesting moment in television history.
PAT: They would be done. It sure would. If they worked for CNN, that would be their last statement on CNN. That would be it.
STU: And people are like, "Well, it's different." An easy way to figure out if you're saying something racist is change the colors and see if it feels racist.
PAT: Yes.
STU: And, you know, if you're saying something like I don't know, all these typical white people who have just this bred into them. If you were to change the wording on that, you would probably have some issues in society.
PAT: Typical black people who have something bred into them. Yes.
STU: You would have issues in society.
PAT: Which is why somebody -- oh, Glenn Beck questioned whether or not there were some issues there.
STU: Right. And that's just a good guideline for everybody. The idea of racism, you shouldn't be generalizing.
PAT: Yeah.
STU: You shouldn't be disparaging. There's no reason for it.
PAT: Well, do you remember Jimmy "The Greek," his generalizations of blacks was that -- it was something complimentary too, like they ran really fast.
STU: Like they ran really fast. That doesn't make it right obviously.
PAT: Tried to put forward some reason why they seemed to run faster or whatever. He got fired for it.
JEFFY: Right.
PAT: We never heard from him again, and then he died. That was it.
JEFFY: No. Then it was over. Yeah, he was professional gambler. And then, Jimmy who? It was over.
PAT: He was gone.
JEFFY: But the show White People is about a fictional largely white Winchester University, who often rail against the roles they're put in, paving the way to both comedy and conflict in their post racial world.
PAT: Post racial world.
STU: I will say --
PAT: I wish we lived in a post racial world.
JEFFY: Me too.
STU: The issue here is the standard and how it's not applied equally. Not even applied -- not even attempt to apply it at all. I have no problem with a comedy show making fun of these differences and the differences in our cultures. I think that's generally speaking a healthy thing. I mean, you see that from comedians all the time. And there's always these controversies where someone says something that is controversial. And comedians get in trouble for it, and I always side with the comedians.
JEFFY: George Lopez, it just happened to him.
STU: Yeah, it happens -- comedy is supposed to push these buttons. That is point of it. They're trying to put you in an uncomfortable position, to think about something differently. To criticize your own side. To sometimes criticize the other side. That is supposed to be part of it when it comes to comedy. So, I mean, I don't know anything about this show. It is interesting the way this standard is applied. Which you're right. If it was dear black people, and it was teaching lessons to black people who don't understand the real world the way white people do, that would be an issue.
PAT: Oh, man.
STU: However, I could say that same sentence and say, "Well, if it's a story about black people teaching white people about the way of the world, that they don't really understand, that's completely okay."
JEFFY: Completely okay.
STU: And that's just -- just dumb. You should be able in a creative environment to be able to say pretty much anything. I mean, pretty much anything. That is what -- that's -- you get a boring world if you try to apply standards to things like comedy. Just take it out of this weird political context that everything falls into these days. The show starts sucking, right? Look at Saturday Night Live with Barack Obama. They were so terrified.
PAT: Well, they couldn't find anything funny about him.
STU: Yeah.
PAT: He was so perfect. We couldn't find anything to laugh at. The man is so wonderful.
STU: He's so amazingly wonderful. We can't find anything to criticize or make fun of. So what you get is eight years of terrible programming.
PAT: Uh-huh.
STU: You know, now, gosh they -- you can't get A list stars to that show fast enough. Melissa McCarthy is making 20 million a movie. She's showing up on her Saturday nights to do Sean Spicer. Like all of a sudden they can find comedy everywhere.
PAT: Uh-huh.
STU: And it's like -- then you have Alec Baldwin and Melissa McCarthy like, you know, doing like recurring -- not hosting, recurring episodes, where they're like, "Eh, they're in one episode, and then they're out."
PAT: There was a time too, and it wasn't that long ago -- maybe ten years -- where you could get away with certain things because it was comedy. You know, you could make fun of people. You could do accents. You could say certain things. It was a joke. Okay? We were joking. It was parody. It was comedy. It was satire. And you'd be like, "Oh, yeah, okay. Well, I mean, that was kind of distasteful." But people would move on. Now, you lose your career over that. You just lose your career. You're done.
JEFFY: We're not moving on. You don't make fun of it.
PAT: We don't move on.
STU: And you see this sort of thing as it's applied even surprises some of the comedians.
PAT: Yeah.
STU: I remember after Trump was elected, Seth MacFarlane, who is the guy behind Family Guy and Ted and other various projects that you would know from the world of pretty harsh comedy.
PAT: Ted, is that teddy bear thing?
STU: The teddy bear thing with Mark Wahlberg.
PAT: Okay.
STU: Big movie. Made a lot of money. Made a sequel.
PAT: It looks stupid.
JEFFY: It sure does.
PAT: Has anybody seen it? It looks just atrocious.
STU: Oh. The second one was not pretty good. The first one was very funny. Very funny. Yes, I thought so.
PAT: Oh, was it really?
STU: And I like Family Guy a lot. And they take -- I mean, they put things on that show -- it's utterly unbelievable the stuff they get away with, not from just the perspective of it's on. Remember, on Fox. It's not on FX. It's not on HBO. It's on Fox the network. The same place that owns Fox News Channel, which they mock relentlessly on that show. But they make jokes about the handicapped. Jokes about races. Jokes about rape, sexual assault, all sorts of stuff on there.
PAT: Wow.
STU: And they push that envelope so far. If a conservative ever tried to do it, they would be thrown out of society. But because Seth MacFarlane is, A, very talented and, B, very liberal. He somehow skates away with most of this stuff. Even he gets some of it sometimes.
But his complaint after the Trump thing -- obviously, he did not want Donald Trump to win. But his complaint to his liberal friends was, look, people are rejecting this world we've created where everyone gets offend over everything. That's what they're rejecting with this election. And I think he's on to something there.
PAT: Yeah, I think so too.
STU: People are sick of this. They understand that, you know, people can say offensive things and we can all move on with our lives. When someone says something -- this is why I'm never for boycotts. If someone says something you don't like, generally speaking, and I know we don't all agree in every instance of this, but it's like generally speaking we come together --
PAT: And in the exception of Jeffy, certainly we would boycott him.
STU: Well, I would boycott him. I'm against all boycotts except for the Jeffy boycott.
PAT: The Jeffy boycott.
STU: But you just move on with your life. You go on to another show.
PAT: I know.
STU: We talked about this with Simon Sinek yesterday who was in here and talking about social media and how ten to 14-year-old girls have this big spike in suicide rate, which is obviously terrifying. And I don't know how this applies to everyone else. I don't know how you get here. But I can tell you, on social media, the way to defeat being bullied on social media is to not care about it.
And I don't -- we are -- we have this gift.
PAT: That's really hard. When it comes to 14-year-olds.
STU: And it's impossible. And I don't know how to apply it. But I can tell you that being here in this job, you get the gift of being assaulted, of being called Hitler so many times.
PAT: Sure. But we're adults. We're big boys. We can take it, and we can ignore it.
STU: Right. I know. But, I mean, adults don't do this well, Pat. This is not -- it's not an adult thing.
I see this with people all the time, that get their lives turned upside down because someone made a comment that disagrees with them on their Facebook feed.
This happens all the time. We've even seen it in this room from Mr. Glenn Beck many times.
PAT: Yeah.
STU: The only cure for it is to not care. People call me the most genocidal maniac of all time. Adolf Hitler. How many times have we been called that?
PAT: Many.
STU: How many times have we been called every nasty horrible word people can come up with.
It never impacts me because I don't care what you think. I don't care if you think I'm a terrible person. I don't care if you think I voted wrong. I don't care if you think I should -- my opinion on red velvet Chips Ahoy cookies is incorrect, which, by the way, is not, they're delicious -- I don't care about anything you're saying when it comes to calling me names. It doesn't impact me because I think we've been so saturated with it because of the business we're in, that we just are able to just toss it off to the side. Most people are not. Most people, you know, get a comment that is distasteful, and it eats them up the whole day.
And I think maybe because we're developing a whole new society here based on social media and outward angry criticism, constantly flowing, maybe at some point, the saturation hits everybody and nobody cares about this stuff anymore. But until then, it's going to be hard for people to deal with
PAT: Yeah, this discussion began with the Dear White People show that's moving to Netflix.
STU: Yeah.
PAT: This is original programming. And I can't -- it seems like we spent some time talking about the dear white people thing on Pat and Stu a while ago. Do you remember this? And I think this all began with some -- I don't know -- just a clip or a trailer of somebody. And then it developed into a movie. And now it's a Netflix phenomenon. But here's the trailer that they've developed for this soon to be Netflix story.
VOICE: Dear white people, here's a list of acceptable Halloween costumes: Pirate, slutty nurse, any of our first 43 presidents. Top of the list of unacceptable costumes: Me.
PAT: She's black.
VOICE: Wow.
PAT: So you can't look like her.
JEFFY: No.
PAT: Nor can you look like the 44th president, Barack Obama. You can look like any of the others. How do you -- how did we get there to that standard?
STU: Would she be able to dress up as Richard Nixon?
PAT: Yes.
STU: Yes, right?
PAT: I mean, the answer is yes.
JEFFY: Yeah, yeah.
STU: The answer is yes under this standard. It's bizarre.
PAT: It is.
STU: I mean, look, I have no interest in going out on Halloween as a black person in the year 2017. No interest at all.
PAT: Still, this culture appropriation stuff is silly.
STU: And this goes back to -- who was it back in the day? It was Ted Danson, famously came out -- remember? With Blackface. And he was very liberal, obviously. So it didn't ruin his career.
JEFFY: Yeah, they even tried to cover him up because Whoopi said she told him to do it.
STU: Yeah, they tried to cover it. Every once in a while, you see something like this. Most people know that these lines kind of inherently -- that doesn't mean you can't say how ridiculous they are. I have no interest in mixing that up. But it is a weird thing.
PAT: It really is.
STU: We see it all the time. I mean, weren't pirates people too?
PAT: Yes.
STU: If you want to talk about the pirates of today, if you wanted to be a pirate today, the most logical costume you would dress up is as a Somali pirate, which would be completely off-limits.
PAT: Right. Off-limits. You can't do that.
And she was saying that being a slutty anything is okay for white girls.
JEFFY: Yeah.
PAT: You go ahead and act like a slut, and that's fine because that's your area.
STU: That's you.
PAT: That's you. That's your culture. You are sluts.
(laughter)
PAT: Is that what that is? That's pretty weird. Pretty weird.
[break]
