Stardate 20031106.1337

(On Screen): In tallying some of the reaction to an outraged rant by Kim du Toit, Glenn Reynolds and his readers speculate on why it is that the role of white men on TV family-comedies is to be the brunt of the joke.

All manner of elaborate explanations have been proposed, but I think they're missing something much more simple: the situation comedies laugh at white men because they no longer are permitted to laugh at anyone else. White men have always been the target of jokes in such comedies, but fifty years ago everyone else was too.

Jack Benny was funny not for the virtues of the character he played, but because of his faults. What we all remember about Benny was his wretched violin playing and his miserliness, and the way the other characters all seemed to make a fool of him. (The real Benny was anything but miserly, by the way.)

But contemporary with Benny there was also Gracie Allen, wife of George Burns, who played a scatter-brain. (Which was equally fictional. The real Gracie Allen was a very sharp lady.) There was Amos & Andy. In those days everyone was and could be the target.

Then we went through the sensitive Sixties and the outraged Seventies, and after that, it was really risky to portray anyone non-white or non-male in any but the most positive terms. The idea was to present positive role models. The idea was to work to shatter stereotypes. The problem was that comedy ran low on things to laugh at. The only group you could routinely run down without risk was white men.

So that's who they laugh at now. We're the target not because of a deliberate choice, but by default. We're the target because all the other targets got removed from the comedic gun-range. We're the comedic residue.