Blackface/whiteface--offensive or humorous?

Nowadays it seems like there's so much racial humor that it doesn't seem to phase people anymore, but does it still create a lot of hype in the media? Many movies have used this method of entertainment such as White Chicks, The Jazz Singer, Tropic Thunder, and even shows like Saturday Night Live that have made this type of comedy so popular.

It's intersting to think that using whiteface/blackface throughout entertainment would've been more offensive around the 1930's-1950's because of all the segregation, but now, even though some people still take it offensively, society has come a long ways of taking such a certain matter like this that personally. Movies like The Jazz Singer (1927), where the main character Jack uses blackface to sing jazz for the broadway plays he was in, seemed very normal around that time period since blackface was such a common form of entertainment. Of course with all the discrimination back then, not having any form of racial humor against whites, many African-Americans were angry and offended for what they had to deal with. Now, there's so much racial humor with any type of race that as a whole, most people find it a positive sense of humor that's rare not to find in most comedies today.

One movie where blackface was used in a very humorous, but exaggerated way, was Tropic Thunder. Talented actor Robert Downey Jr. played the role of Kirk Lazarus, an Austrailian actor that had a pigmentation alteration to play an African-American character called Sergeant Lincoln Osiris for the movie they're shooting. Personally, I think he did an amazing job for playing such an exaggerated role of how a typical black person would act. What's also impressive is that not only does he have to be in character for an African-American, but he had to pull off originally being Australian, which ended up really successful. What was so funny about his role was that even off screen of filming, his character still played the portrayal of a black person. He had sayings like, "yeeah, hah!", "yo!", but even funnier is that at one point, he brings up that most of what he says has to end up in the exclamation "hah!".

For a whiteface example, Eddie Murphy had a hilarious role of playing a white guy in the show Saturday Night Live. The whole clip before he was actually "transformed" into this white guy, was about him studying how white males act in public. He talked about things such as keeping his butt and posture firm while walking and how white people read many Hallmark cards. After his transformation and going out to see how whites treat other whites, he notices that it's a very different perspective than he thought; white people giving eachother free things at the cashier, having a little party on the bus after a black guy walks off. Many exaggerated acts of humor may have seemed a little offensive, but looking around my classroom after watching these scenes, everyone continued cracking up over every racial joke.

With this in mind on how blackface, whiteface, and even other "faces" of racial jokes that come up in entertainment so casually nowadays, this use of humor seems like more of a use of comedy that most people like to watch, as long as people don't go over the top to offend anyone. This simply is just another form, of the many racial jokes out there, that seem to positively entertain people of all ethnic backgrounds.











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