White New Yorkers are Encouraged to laugh at...insults about themselves

Just the other day, Madonna moaned at the MTV awards that she was a "skinny white girl" in Detroit, so unlike that fabulously obese Black icon Aretha Franklin. In fact, she spent about five minutes berating her white self for being white, and, clad in African garb, declared her undying devotion to the inspiration of Aretha...a woman whose music has nothing to do with Madonna's disco drivel.

The trend for whites flogging themselves seems to be a weekly preoccupation at The New Yorker. Why not? It purges their inner racist, too. You know, the inner racist that enjoys the fact that only white people are on the machines at that expensive health club, and only white people are shopping for lipstick at that expensive boutique.

It's SAFE to make fun of white people. The white editors at The New Yorker will tell you that, and they'd be proud, PROUD, to also tell you they paid a black woman to make fun of whites.

Let's not look the other way. For example, the Wayans Brothers were cheered for making an entire movie playing white chicks in drag. Think white people would be cheered for doing blackface impressions of blacks? No, no, and let's make sure revisionist history ignores Al Jolson, and while you're at it, maybe Bill Dana should be in an unmarked grave for his Jose Jimenez records, and his gold record returned to the RIAA.

This is a world where white Johnny Depp barely sneaked into his dark drag role as TONTO in a bad Lone Ranger film by insisting he had some Native American blood, and where a white guy couldn't play Michael Jackson (as he appeared in his last years, totally white) on a British TV comedy.

You laughed? You nodded your head and agreed this is JUST the way white people are? ALL of them? You see white people cringing and gasping at blacks on the subway and on the street and making phone calls JUST LIKE THIS? Recognition humor!!!!!!!!

The editors at the magazine would be able to give you a two hour lecture on what's funny and why, and in this case, it's the level change of hyperbole that is behind the trope and the underpinning that leads you to be informed of today's zeitgeist.

It was so cutting edge hilarious, right?

Well, no, if you didn't laugh, don't feel bad. That's The New Yorker, where "humor" and "comedy" are two different things, and a regular feature in the magazine is called "SHOUTS" when it actually sits mutely on the page doing nothing.

Happily, white readers can say, "Yes, we deserved this. Glad a black woman was paid to tell us off. We can't expect Spike Lee to do EVERYTHING." PS, white people, next time you're on the dance floor, find the nearest black, make a goofy smile, and apologetically say, "I'm white! I can't dance!" And then, really, just get the fuck out.