Staff Reports
Remember when comedians could just get up there and, you know, be funny? No apologies, no controversy, just humor. Welcome to the upside-down, where every joke is dissected as if it’s a major political statement. Is it satire? Is it offensive? Cue the debates! Enter Druski, the brave soul and comedian who decided to throw on some whiteface at a NASCAR event. That’s right, he had the audacity to pretend to be a quintessentially over-the-top stereotypical Southern NASCAR fan as he parodied the “racist hick” image NASCAR has been struggling to shake off. And let’s admit, the sheer craftsmanship of that makeup job—Oscar-worthy, really—was enough to send the internet into a frenzy.
Ah, reminiscent of the simpler times when Eddie Murphy would strut his stuff in a white guy suit on SNL, back when it was still okay to find humor in our differences. Before “woke” was a thing, people, regardless of their skin color, found these bits downright amusing. But somewhere between then and now, we seemed to have taken a sharp left turn into the land of the perpetually offended. Nowadays, you’re more likely to see comedians walk on eggshells than take the stage with daring, boundary-pushing comedy.
Hollywood’s golden age of comedy wasn’t shy either. Remember “White Chicks,” where the Wayans brothers took on a similar transformation, flipping societal roles on its head with hilarious results? Fast forward to 2023, and suddenly we’re all expected to rewrite our sense of humor because a select few have declared past comedic gold as problematic. Our culture’s laughter police have been quite busy since the “liberal pathogen” (yep, a real term now) decided somewhere before 2015 that jokes were apparently always meant to be serious.
It’s not just about Druski here; it’s about the tidal wave of apology tours that have swept through Hollywood and beyond. Once upon a time, guys like Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon would unabashedly partake in blackface sketches. And they weren’t outliers; the practice was rather common as late as the 2000s. Remember Robert Downey Jr. in “Tropic Thunder”? That was blockbuster material and no one was writing letters to the network. But alas, today’s comedians are falling over themselves to issue apologies for things that no one batted an eye at—things that once made audiences double over in laughter.
The real kicker here? This isn’t even about whether one type of face paint constitutes racism while another is a comedic expression. Instead, it’s about how the woke brigade has corralled humor into a tiny, sterile box, where jokes go to die. We’ve traded comedy that challenges and entertains for sanitized content that offends no one but also excites no one. It’s time that we embraced the spirit of good-natured ribbing to spare us from this humorless void. In the end, if we can’t laugh at each other—and ourselves—are we truly living, or just trying not to offend?
