A friend asked my thoughts on the recent controversy surrounding Adam Sandler’s new movie, The Ridiculous Six, which is currently in production. In case you haven’t heard, it’s a comedy, a spoof of Westerns (a reference to The Magnificent Seven, get it?).
It seems about a dozen American Indian actors, mostly Dene (Navajo) walked off the set because they felt the script was racist, costumes were inaccurate, and that their concerns were not addressed.
My friend, who like myself, champions equal opportunity offense in comedy, wanted to know if I thought their concerns should be addressed or if they’re being overly sensitive about what are just some bad jokes. My email reply began getting a bit long, so I decided to post it here.
I think this issue stands at the oft overlooked intersection of comedy and cultural capital, which is a fancy term for being able to throw your weight around in society. Let’s start with the comedy.
If an edgy joke is successful, ie. “funny,” it often (though not always) erases a lot of concerns about whether it’s in bad taste. Why? Because successful comedy usually contains an element of truth. Which is not to say good jokes are are literally true; they often aren’t. But rather that a funny joke frequently reflects a larger truth.
Successful humor often makes us laugh not because the punchline is literally true, but because the joke reflects social fears, anxieties, and discomforts. It offers some kind of recognizable insights. And if you’re laughing, it doesn’t mean you believe the joke to be literally true. In fact, it often indicates that you realize the joke is NOT literally true, but that you recognize the larger truth it reflects.
If you’re laughing, it usually means you “get it.” And if you get it, then you assume the joke teller gets it too. Thus, people who do not consider themselves racist can laugh at racial humor because they realize that it is not championing racism, but rather exposing it or mocking it in some way.
Thus, a white comic like Lisa Lampinelli can make racial jokes about black people, but most folks give her a pass, including many black people, because the jokes are funny. And once we laugh, on some level we’re buying into what she’s saying. We know her jokes aren’t literally true, but that they reflect larger truths about society’s racism. That is, Lampinelli pretends to be racist, and in so doing, she reveals uncomfortable truths about racism in American society.
So when someone’s telling racial jokes, the questions “Is it racist” and “Is it funny” are inherently connected.
If you’re comedically off-key, then you expose yourself. Why? Because failed jokes don’t bring the audience along with implied agreement. Almost by definition, failed jokes tend to lack insight and fail to reflect larger truths.
There are all kinds of technical reasons why a joke might fail, but regardless of the mechanics, without a successful punchline, a failed joke is just a statement, making it vulnerable to criticism. An “offensive” joke, when funny, usually isn’t offensive. We realize it’s “just a joke.” But if something’s 
“offensive” and also not funny, then it has to stand on its own merits. And I think that’s part of what you’re seeing with the Sandler situation.
Obviously, The Ridiculous Six isn’t out yet, so we’re only hearing descriptions of the jokes instead of witnessing the jokes. But they do seem pretty dumb and flat.
An Indian woman named Never Wears a Bra. Another one named Beaver’s Breath.
There aren’t too many jokes older and more tired than the fake Indian name joke. It’s very hard in the 21st century to make that funny. And if it’s not funny, and therefor doesn’t reflect some larger truth, then what do you have? Just some white guy making fun of Indians for having dumb names.
If there were even a sense that Sandler’s Indian humor is funny, it would be a lot easier for him to shrug off the criticism. There might not even be any, because if the actors had seen the script and laughed, odds are they wouldn’t have launched these criticisms to begin with, much less walked off the set.
But of course, whether a joke’s funny is not all there is to it. After all, we can argue all day long about what’s funny and what’s not. I, for one, have never found Sandler to be funny, yet millions of other people do.
So how else can we figure out whether this is a case of people being overly sensitive or if there’s actually a problem?
The simple litmus test is: Would this kind of stuff fly with other ethnic groups? If you made these kinds of jokes about Jews or Blacks or Asians, would society be okay with it?
Let’s try.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think an equivalent of the Bra and Beaver name punchlines would be joking about Chinese people named Ching Chong.
It’s not funny and it just sounds racist. Right?
But the fact that we even need to use that litmus points to another important issue, not about comedy, but about cultural capital: the ability to throw your weight around in society.
If Sandler were making bad Ching Chong jokes, or dressing up like a black person and making unfunny jokes about black women, there would probably be a major uproar. Why? Because Jews, Asians, and Blacks have enough cultural capital to make things uncomfortable for the rest of society. But Indians? Not so much.
American Indians don’t have as much cultural capital as other groups, which means society is less likely to care about their complaints, or even listen to them for that matter. As a result, Indians don’t have the same effective recourse that Jews, Blacks, Asians, women, and other groups have.
And since American society usually does not listen to Indian people’s complaints or share their concerns, Americans have trouble figuring out what lines should or shouldn’t be crossed, whether it’s dumb Adam Sandler jokes or sports mascots like the Washington Redskins.
So in some ways this is the same old story. Indian people, like every other minority group in America, are subject to a certain amount of bigotry. But when they try to make their concerns heard, people either don’t listen, dismiss it out of hand, or if they’re thoughtful like my friend, question whether the concerns are legitimate.
But the fact that my friend feels compelled to ask me the question at all, reflects a larger truth: Indian people, their issues, and concerns are largely absent from the national discourse.
And that’s no joke.