You may have seen the hilarious supercut of Al Sharpton flubbing his lines put together by my extraordinarily talented colleague David Rutz. If you haven't watched it, you should: it will literally make you laugh out loud.
The spontaneous laughter that the dear Rev's flubs will prompt are a problem for some people, however. They're a problem because, well—and I'm just being blunt here—their politics tells them that it's inappropriate for white people to laugh at conservatives mocking a black man. They want to judge the content of the video by its character but have a hard time seeing past its skin color.
For instance, here's the AV Club, one of the best pop culture concerns going, tying itself in knots in an effort to signal to their (mostly liberal, mostly cocooned in racial politics) readers two things: One, that Rutz's video is funny, but two, they recognize that it's problematic for good liberals to laugh at conservatives making fun of black people, even remarkably incompetent black people. Writes Katie Rife:
(Honestly, dancing around the racial politics inherent in a conservative political website making fun of the way an African-American political leader talks is exhausting, not to mention practically impossible. But let’s agree to collectively take our hands off of the keyboard, maybe pop some popcorn, and indulge in the childish, apolitical pleasure of giggling at the funny way Al Sharpton says "hubris." Deal?)
I'm glad Rife decides it's okay to laugh at our nation's premier shakedown artist, but it was an awfully circuitous route she had to take to arrive at that conclusion. This is, of course, a near relative of my point about Twitter and moral/social positioning. And it's something you see come up over and over again with regard to humor and politics. Consider the way a certain part—the super-serial, super-scoldy part—of the left reacted to Patton Oswalt's brilliant deconstruction of our nascent apology culture. You had people yelling at him for making "rape jokes" and "racist jokes" even though he had literally said nothing about rape and nothing about race. Because some things you just don't joke about, even if you're not actually joking about them.
Call me old fashioned, but I'm a big believer in the idea of comedy—especially the type of comedy practiced by stand up comedians—as a sort of safe space. I love watching the scenes in Louie where the comedians all get together to play poker: nothing is too outré, no insult too vicious, no portion of the identity taboo to joke about. Left-leaning comedians like Louis C.K. (who found himself in hot water recently for daring to criticize Common Core) and Sarah Silverman rub elbows with conservatives such as Nick DiPaolo and plain-talking moderates such as Jim Norton.* It's weirdly heartwarming to watch these folks who disagree take such joy in good-naturedly tearing each other down.
Anyway, if something's funny, it's funny. You don't need to clear your throat and remind the world that you're one of the good people who would never support something as terrible as the Republican Party. Just have a laugh!**
*I've always gotten the sense that he leans ever-so-slightly right, but I may just have been blinded ever-so-slightly by his plainspoken rejection of political correctness.
**Needless to say, there are plenty of folks on the right who could take this lesson to heart as well.