Asklemmy

1454 readers

75 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

How racist/controversial would this skit from the 90's be today? (feddit.nl)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by neidu@feddit.nl to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

10 comments fedilink hide all child comments

To summarize, this scandinavian comedy trio from the 90's made a parody of Miami Vice. This being 90's scandinavia, you can probably guess that the actors/comedians didn't exactly have the melanin-credentials of parodying the black guy from Miami Vice, so one of them instead wore blackface (well, brownface would perhaps be a better description, due to the color tone).

As far as I can recall, the skit didn't really make race much of a punchline, except from when they're fixing their hair before the final showdown (which one of course have to do, this being a Miami Vice parody), and the white guy asks the black guy to borrow some hair gel but gets the response: (roughly translated) "I'm black, I don't use hairgel. I use chocolate pudding."

So yeah, asking because I'm a middle aged extremely white guy, and I found this skut funny as shit when I was a kid, and I stumbled across it recently, and I got curious.

EDIT: Found it. Turns out it's from 1989. https://youtu.be/GDpLUXtA-4M
I can't be arsed translating, because in retrospect it's not really that good, but you can see the blackface and its origin in the beginning.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] degrix@lemmy.hqueue.dev 10 points 1 year ago

I think it’s a very difficult choice to navigate. The biggest example of brown/blackface where it doesn’t work I can remember is Fisher Stevens playing an Indian guy in Short Circuit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Circuit_(1986_film). In that movie, he’s playing an Indian person as a stereotype to juxtapose with how white counterpart. Contrast that to Robert Downey Jr. being nominated for an Oscar and BAFTA for his blackface roll in Tropic Thunder. The way it was handled within the movie itself was legitimately a good representation of why blackface is usually on the wrong side of “is it racist?”

I think just based on the little I’ve seen without any other translation besides your edit, it looks fairly racist.