Obama Is Not Our Nation’s Black Comedian
Long ago, I saw this black comedian’s stand up routine. I forgot who it was. But one of the funnier bits of his show was when he talked about how it was unusual being a black guy in a large group of white people. And if he was out with a large group of white people when another black guy did or said something stupid, all the white people would look at him as if to say what are you going to do about that? Well, let’s stop doing that to Barack Obama. Asking him about Kanye West or calling the country Obama’s America after a bunch of black kids beat up a white kid as if he can do something about it is just stupid. He’s not just president of black people, you know.
September 22nd, 2009 at 10:38 am
Yo, Uncle, I’m happy for ya, and imma let you finish, but Dave Chappelle is the best black comedian of all time
September 22nd, 2009 at 11:18 am
I, for one, am glad to see our nation united in these troubled and divisive times, able to join together and enact change to call a
jackassspade ajackassspade.Anyway, it was meant to be off the record, and can understand the urge for a couple friends to talk over recent popular media news.
September 22nd, 2009 at 11:21 am
This is one of your better posts ever. I just watched his interview on Letterman (YouTube) and he said something that I find pretty important given a lot of the irrational perspectives of others concerning his presidency.
“One of the things you sign up for in politics is, folks yell at you.”
He’s got his Big Boy pants on, y’know.
And Richard Pryor was the greatest black comedian ever. FTW.
September 22nd, 2009 at 11:29 am
Obama’s really over-exposing himself on tee vee.
And Bill Cosby is the best black comedian ever.
September 22nd, 2009 at 11:36 am
Well said, Uncle. I’m probably far from the average viewer of your website, being a very left-leaning, Obama-Voting, art-school-graduating, long haired kinda guy, but I do follow your blog pretty closely. Needless to say, some things i agree with, some I don’t. This is a very insightful thing to say. It’s easy to get caught up in things.
I felt the same way when I was at the inauguration and everyone booed GWB on his way out…and I certainly had nothing good to say about him as a President. I just felt it was a disrespectful thing to do as a person.
September 22nd, 2009 at 11:43 am
+1 to Rusty, Tho I would qualify that Cosby was the best COMEDIAN ever, and in no way did he make the color of his skin part of his act. That means a white little boy growing up in yuppie suburbia can get the same laugh as a black man living in the city, or a first generation immigrant from wherever.
As far as a comedian who DID make his race an issue, I gotta go with Metulj, and give a hat-tip to Pryor.
September 22nd, 2009 at 12:00 pm
I’m confused; is Bill Clinton still the ‘first black president’ or not?
September 22nd, 2009 at 12:20 pm
Cosby did make his race part of his act, he just did (does) it in a more indirect way than someone like Pryor or Eddie Murphy. In some ways, Cosby is way more subversive than either of those two. I taught an urban geography class where I made people guess where different TV shows were set. The Cosby Show wasn’t set in Manhattan (about 70% of people in my classes thought this; 25% didn’t know at all). It was set in Brooklyn Heights, which isn’t exactly a poor place, but kind of broke up the notion that wealthy, well-adjusted New Yorkers didn’t necessarily live on the UWS/UES. It wasn’t just a passing thought that the Huxtables were black, though….
@anon: Bill Clinton still holds the that claim. Easily one of the funniest ever viz that creep.
September 22nd, 2009 at 12:53 pm
Another vote for Cosby.
September 22nd, 2009 at 2:15 pm
Flip Wilson was the best black comedian. IMHO, Flip Wilson is rivaled only by Bob Hope as the best comedian ever.
September 22nd, 2009 at 2:44 pm
I gotta go with Cosby, myself..
As to the lone black guy getting the “what are you gonna do…” looks – no mystery there — in a group of white folks, ONLY the black guy can properly chastise the black idiot/fool/jackass without drawing a “racism” charge.
September 22nd, 2009 at 3:18 pm
I understood the “Obama’s America” riff to have two points. First, that the post-racial, colorblind society various commentators promsised us during the campaign if we elected Obama has markedly failed to materialize. Second, there’s a double standard when black kids beating the one white kid on a bus while everyone watching *cheers* is declared, in a reversal from the first police statements, to have no racial motivation, when if the races were reversed there’d be no question.
Now, you can debate either of those points, but it’s a little precious to miss them entirely and lump it in with asking Obama about another black man, i.e. Kanye West. On that point you are entirely correct.
September 22nd, 2009 at 4:15 pm
I understood the “Obama’s America” riff to have two points. First, that the post-racial, colorblind society various commentators promsised us during the campaign if we elected Obama has markedly failed to materialize. Second, there’s a double standard when black kids beating the one white kid on a bus while everyone watching *cheers* is declared, in a reversal from the first police statements, to have no racial motivation, when if the races were reversed there’d be no question.
Now, you can debate either of those points, but it’s a little precious to miss them entirely and lump it in with asking Obama about another black man, i.e. Kanye West. On that point you are entirely correct.
I agree it is apples and oranges above. I don’t see the connection between the two. How the Kanye thing ties to the bus beating doesn’t make sense.
I do see a lot of LGF going on. This isn’t about playing nice with black people. It is playing nice with socialist. I don’t care what race Obama is, I care about what he is doing. With heavy socialist moves he is also not helping in race relations. So we are supposed to give him a pass because he is kinda black? When did people start giving socialists a pass? It is about what the man is doing. Not who his parents were or what he looks like. This is the same man who wants to bail out newspapers. We are just supposed to say fine and dandy?
Maybe I don’t see it, what has Obama done to heal race relations?
September 22nd, 2009 at 5:47 pm
Redd Foxx FTMFW!
September 22nd, 2009 at 6:26 pm
“Flip Wilson was the best black comedian.”
Looking back at a glance, I think Flip Wilson was the first black comedian. I was listening to Cosby by about 1964 (“Right!”), and the thing about him was that there was little or no race in his act at all, certainly as it appeared on the LP albums. Cosby hit on generalities of life available to everyone, without the speciation of color.
Flip Wilson is the first guy I remember who went straight at things like racial caricatures and cultural distinctions unselfconsciously. His work on “Rowen And Martin’s Laugh-In” was seminal. White people laughed at themselves as white people for the first time under a black man’s spotlight in a nationwide context. Black people saw some of the harmlessness of cultural distinctions usually attributed to race, and I think he loosened up a lot of tensions that were brewing through the late-60’s.
He was a good spirit in those times, and that was rare enough.
September 23rd, 2009 at 12:21 am
Hmmm, how is Obama like a black comedian? #1, he’s nowhere near black enough, and he acts like he’s been getting lame coaching in that department. Black comedians don’t have the writing staff he has. He can’t do extemp at all, and as jazz cats used to say, he couldn’t swing from a rope. I don’t remember Flip or Bill ever getting a whole hour on Letterman, or pre-empting Bones and House for a special. Twice in one week.
When you leave a Chris Rock show, you think, someday we’ll look back on this and laugh. Not so Obama.
September 23rd, 2009 at 8:54 am
Dave Chappelle is the best black comedian now, Richard Pryor was the greatest black comedian ever. Bill Cosby, Flip Wilson and Rudy Ray Moore were average.
September 23rd, 2009 at 4:41 pm
I almost agree with #10 Huck, but the question shouldn’t be who’s the ‘best black comedian ever,’ he’s right it should be ‘who’s the best comedian ever,’ fully conscious that there’s no way in hell you’d leave Chappelle, Wilson, Cosby, Murphy, Prior or any other comedian out of consideration.