BOYCOTT/PLZ READ
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| Also listed in: Campus Progress Blog |
A new film is debuting this week: Bob Odenkirk's Let's Go to Prison. My outrage with the premise of this film has warranted this decidedly alarmist and uncreative post. This movie, debuting November 17, is a comedy based on the sub-human conditions faced by American prisoners, including sexual assault. I feel this is a good as time as any to draw more attention to an old blog of mine, entitled "The Truly "Other" America," and simultaneously call on all progressives to boycott the film.
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Anything can be a target of humor. Racism itself isn't funny, but jokes about racism can be -- which is partly why (most recently) Dave Chappelle and so many others who've come before him in the comedy world have been so successful.
Sarah Silverman, perhaps my favorite comic, just recently came out with a movie entitled 'Jesus is Magic' -- it was mostly Holocaust and AIDS jokes, and it was hilarious.
Our prisons are an awful mess (though so are Europe's, I must note, before anyone tries to talk about how much more 'enlightened' they are), but that can still be a target for humor.
Grow up and lose the insipid, easily-outraged, more-progressive-than-thou veneer.
Furthermore, there is a tremendous difference between racial humor and intentional cruelty; Dave Chapelle's comedy does not condone or incite violence.
Unfortunatley, in the case of sexual assault in prison, the two are intertwined; men are raped in prison (in numbers even greater than women on the outside) largely due to crass social attitudes that mock their plight.
So before you label me "easily outraged" by a harmless film, I would ask you to imagine if your father or brother had been wrongfully arrested and was raped during his stay. And imagine if that rape led to AIDS infection. And imagine if someone profited of mocking the entire ordeal.
fuck spr.org
yeah fuck it literally in the b-hole.