Imus = CANNED.

[JFortune]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/business/media/12cnd-imus.html?hp



He'll go to satellite, IMO.

[r0t8]

never even heard of him until now

[Bucho]

i think the whole thing is fucking stupid.

besides the whole first amendment rights thing, what he said wasn't racist in my opinion, nor did Anne Coulter ever have to apologize to the 9/11 victims, NOR did Al Sharpton ever apologize to the Duke students after the shit he said about them in regards to the rape situation with the stripper.

who cares.

[mikemcgrath]

i have mixed feelings on this , but one thing i know is that there is a hell of a lot more important issues for the black community to be protesting like, oh , say, the fucking war, for instance, or famine and aids in africa.

he should not have said that , though, so tough luck, Imus.

[The Professor]

it was a joke... i think he just got himself in the situation where stuff blows up on you...

i never really liked the guy anyway,... he wasn't inciting riots or calling for hate crimes...

and you are right, if Ann Coulter can get away with even worse, then why can't he?

[The Professor]

really good editorial from Jason Whitlock, of all people... a really good read if you get the time...

http://www.kansascity.com/182/story/66339.html

[r0t8]

since when did "nappy ho" become a racial slur? i'm sure i've called a few white girls that before. talk about collective uber self-consciousness.

[JFortune]

^ ha - yeah, afterall, we're dealing with a bunch of 18-22 year old girls....talk about self conscious. they cried, they're parents got offended. the college got offended. the balck community got offended. on and on - - - good point about coulter. she needs to get fired from life. LOL

[r0t8]

they cried
which is really strange considering they're basketball players who surely talk shit on eachother nonstop. on top of that any one of them could probably kick Imus' ass, so I don't understand why they don't just chin up and ignore it. I wonder if they would have (ignored it) if Al hadn't stepped in and blown it up so he could boost his image.

[mikemcgrath]

really good editorial from Jason Whitlock, of all people... a really good read if you get the time...

http://www.kansascity.com/182/story/66339.html

he was on espn radio today and i was very impressed with what he was saying, he seems to be a very down to earth guy that makes sense.

[r0t8]

there's a good article on testosterone nation about it:

http://www.t-nation.com/readTopic.do?id=1529643

"Humor is a bizarre thing. One man's Legend of Ron Burgundy is another man's Hannah and her Sisters. There's no universal barometer with which to measure humor. Why is the word loofah funnier than, say, coronary?

There's nothing funny about a heart attack!

Well, why not? Edgy jokes are almost always funnier than that tame Jay Leno stuff, and cruel humor is often the funniest of all.

Of course I don't know if Don Imus would necessarily agree right now.

This is what I don't get. Imus got canned, but other quasi comedians like Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, and Anne Coulter say stuff as bad or worse than Don Imus did on any given week. Limbaugh routinely calls Halle Berry and Barack Obama "Half-rican Americans." Savage mocks the attempts to make voting easier for disenfranchised blacks, calling the program "a chad in every crack house." Coulter calls John Edwards a faggot.

Where's the outrage? How come they don't get fired? Well, they shouldn't be fired. They're paid to incite. They say outrageous things for a living. That's why people listen. Don't like 'em? Change the channel. Tune to another frequency, Kenneth.

But poor old Imus gets trounced. Grandpa farts in public and we put him in the garage.

He made a comment about some black women he didn't even know. He perpetuated two nasty racial stereotypes. He indiscriminately shot what he swears was a joke into the airwaves. Well, when you have to ad lib 20 hours of live radio a week, you sometimes misfire. Imus has said far worse things before, but why he got spanked this time, no one knows.

Maybe he should have said something bad about Middle Easterners instead. I hear they're not so popular nowadays.

Comedienne Sarah Silverman regularly does some of the most over-the-top comedy in history. She makes fun of 9-11! 9-11! She says we should apply "positive spin" to it.

Take something tragic and make it something good! If American Airlines were smart their logo would be: American Airlines. First through the towers.

But that isn't all she makes fun of. She worries about her biological clock, wondering if she should have a baby:

Of course, the best time to have a baby is when you're a black teenager.

Brutal stuff! Ali G stuff! Borat stuff! South Park stuff! Holy Mackerel! Burn the bitch at the stake!

But people laugh. Nervously at first, but they laugh.

Sam Anderson, a columnist for Slate, has labeled this type of racially targeted comedy as meta-bigotry. "Meta-bigots," he writes, "work at social problems indirectly; instead of discussing race, rape, abortion, incest, or mass starvation, they parody our discussions of them...it's a dangerous game: if you're humorless, distracted, or even inordinately history-conscious, meta-bigotry can look suspiciously like actual bigotry."

It's definitely tricky stuff, but when you're a funny fuck, or trying to be a funny fuck, you have to keep casting the comedy nets into the sea. Once in a while, you come up empty, save for a few license plates, conch shells, or the body of "Big Pussy" Bonpensiero, while other times you pull up a bounty of tasty humor flounder.

Grandpa Imus snared Big Pussy instead of the humor flounder, but I don't think he's a racist. The guy is nasty to everybody. His venom appears to be all-inclusive and non-denominational. He's an equal opportunity snorky porkie.

In his defense, he's a big fan of BB King and Ray Charles and Jackie Robinson. He clearly likes former Tennessee representative Harold Ford. After the James Byrd lynching in Texas in 1998, he was disgusted and told black people never to trust whites.

But one "nappy headed hos" comment later, he's gone. If some redneck on the street mutters the same thing, it's not funny — it's scary. You stay away from that mofo. But if you're a semi-comedian like Imus, you should be able to get away with it.

Maybe, as Anderson's theory posits, Imus was humorless or distracted in his delivery. Not only that, but the joke or line or whatever you call it was bad, crude. A good joke causes the object of the joke to first get pissed and then, maybe, smile. But Imus ended up sounding like the redneck in the street. America doesn't tolerate a bad act.

Oh well, trying to be funny is risky and unless you've got some good scriptwriters and you practice your lines, it sometimes goes bad.

Sure, if one of the girls he slimed were my sister or daughter, I'd be pissed. If I knew someone who died on 9-11, I'd be pissed at Sarah Silverman. If I were Polish, I'd be pissed at Polish jokes. If I were gay, I'd probably be pissed all the time. Somebody's always going to be pissed at a joke. The only exceptions are those little Family Circle cartoons in the Sunday paper where Billy, Dolly, Jeffy, PJ, Barfy, and Sam accidentally knock down a trancetrancetrancetrance and have to sit in the corner while grandma and grandpa in heaven look down and smile.

Comedy is generally a rough game. You need emotional padding. You need to wear a cup whether you're on offense or defense.

Maybe I should disclose that I'm not even a particular fan of Imus. I listen to him about once a year, but when I see political correctness rear it's head, I frown mightily.

Oh, I think I getracism and sexism and all that, but we're not talking about the Klan here; just doddering ol' grandpa who got singled out by the political correctness death squad.

I really do understand the umbrage over the remark. I understand that we're not far removed from minstrel shows. I realize that blacks pretty much didn't even have full voting rights until 1965. I realize that black women are disproportionately disparaged. But like I said, jokes — even the bad, throwaway lines Imus dispenses — often wound. That's the nature of humor.

Oh, and even though my ancestry is Northern European, I'm no stranger to being stereotyped. A girl friend once told me that an ex-boyfriend of hers was also Finnish, and that he too, was "well endowed."

I grew incensed. Bitter. I screamed at her. "So we all have big cocks!?! We're all just big-cocked Finnish boys slapping our meat against the hot rocks in the sauna, huh!?!

After that, we smeared herring oil all over each other and made love on the cold stone floor like two savage reindeer, but I'll never forget the sting, the hurt, of ethnic stereotyping.

Okay, okay, I'm a jerk. Maybe I just pulled up Big Pussy instead of the flounder. That's okay, I'll keep trying.

Anyhow, if NBC and CBS had wanted to make a positive statement about Imus, they should have made him devote some time every day to teaching racial sensitivity or black history. I guess they just bowed to economic pressure. When enough companies pulled their advertising, they had to bail.

I just hope everybody tries to relax, because jokes, when they're done properly, make the bad shit easier to endure and often illuminate our flaws. I just hope this doesn't herald a whole new witch-hunt where they go after every radio or TV announcer that utters anything close to a politically incorrect joke.

The last time they killed comedy and made political correctness the bore du jour, they were goose-stepping all over Europe. Man, think of the humor possibilities the Nazis had to pass up! Stuff like:

"Yo mama so ugly, it made Hitler go into the bunker and shoot himself."

"Yo mama so stupid, she thought Mussolini was something you served with pizza."

Oh well, so it goes."

[Bucho]

i love the part about the family circus knocking over a trancetrancetrancetrance and then sitting in the corner...shit's hilarious.

[r0t8]

lol, yea... it replaced the word "l a m p" with that