Your argument over the only thing mattering being the quality of the writing tends to contravene the percentage of bad comedy writing that managed to still be broadcast on the air today.

The Colbert Report and the Daily Show are disproportionately well done.

There's plenty of bad comedy writing among all races. The UPN, back when it existed as a separate network, was well-known to disproportionately and proactively hire African Americans to write for their sitcoms, which in turn featured almost entirely African American actors. If anything, UPN shows sucked at a far greater rate than the average. Race has nothing to do with one's prowess at comedy, but finding the right comic writer for a given show is an exceedingly difficult art.

Comedy is a fickle thing. It is primarily practiced by liberals, and I doubt there's a bias against hiring African Americans, considering that a disproportionate number of the universally recognized godfathers of comedy are African American.

My guess is that with such a narrow pool of people who are "right" for a given show, the producers simply do their best to find who they think will fit regardless of the color of their skin, and in an industry dominated by the Ivy Leagues that means that occasionally these shows will end up written by entirely white teams, with no racial animus on anyone's part.

Also, I find it a grand coincidence that you're sure the response from the TDS writer was "just a joke."

Uh, I'm "sure"?

August, do you even bother reading what I write?

I wrote that he may have been making a joke.

I even put may in italics, just as I'm doing in this sentence, to emphasize it.

Because if not, you'd have to question why a predominant group of Ivy League grads don't have experience working with black comedians, which a much more difficult topic than merely saying someone's oversensitive.

How is that a difficult topic?

(By the way, I look forward to the story about when you made a sarcastic racial joke with a black man you just met for the first time at a party. Or, in short, oh please.)

I have at some points before? Shrug? (And you have to admit, assuming he did mean it as a deadpan joke, it'd be pretty funny, since it'd mean the guy didn't get the joke and wrote a NYT article about it. Sort of like Sarah Silverman's humorous rape accusation in the Aristocrats that almost got her sued.) Plenty of people of other races have made sarcastic racial jokes to me in meeting me for the first time, and the world didn't end. Part of the joy of growing up in an exceedingly multicultural area was that rather than the uptight, stuffy, "nobody jokes with anyone" attitude, everyone joked with everyone. Didn't matter if you were a stranger or good friends, really. The thing about such humor is that it's anti-racist at its core.

I wouldn't do that out here, because the East Coast is a puritanical hellhole and so the manners are different. But I'd have a hard time believing that parties within the comedy writing industry have the same standards of prudishness.

It's quite disturbing how much of a defensive response liberals and libertarians tend to take when it's suggested that maybe, just maybe, they might have unintentional racial prejudices.

I'll be the first to admit I have unintentional racial prejudices. Hell, I'm quite cognizant of them. The only thing is that they're all against white people, to the point that I still cling, no matter how absurdly, to the notion that as a Jew I'm not really white and should be classified as something else. It took me at least the first year at college to be get over the feelings of suspicion and paranoia when faced with a large group of white people. I narrowly avoided getting assigned to "sensitivity training" after casually referring to my RA as a cracker in freshman year.

Believe me, I'm not trying to pretend the world is color-blind.