What are the Politically Correct Stereotypes

My best friend has often said that in his view the last acceptable stereotype is the white male. It is true that in Sitcoms and commercials it is usually the white father who is made the stooge.

However recent events make clear that perhaps there is one more stereotype that is acceptable today.

Tonight on Saturday Night Live the opening skit was a brilliantly biting satire of the recent Sports stories featuring Jeremy Lin. Jeremy Lin is the Asian point guard who has become an overnight sensation with the New York Knicks.

This week headlines in New York said things like Amasian and showed pictures of a fortune cookie being opened up and Jeremy Lin coming out. Are these insensitive to Asians. I do not know. Certainly they could be interpreted that way.

What Saturday Night Live showed so brilliantly was that while that might be funny to some if a newspaper or anyone else showed this form of humor regarding Asian folks would lose it completely if a stereotype as relates to Black Americans were made. In this skit SNL showed two sportscasters who were white and two who were black speaking about Lin and Carmelo Anthony. While the jokes made by the black folks about Lin were considered roaringly funny any similar reference to Anthony was considered unacceptable.

What does it all mean. It means what we already know. There is a double or perhaps even a triple standard as relates to stereotypes in this country. What is funny about Jeremy Linn or Mel Gibson or Rick Santorum would just not be funny if it were told about Bill Cosby or Arsenio Hall. Is this correct. Is any stereotype funny? I do not know the answers to any of this. I know I laugh at some things that offend other people. I am sure I do not laugh at some items that others find funny. Still when we laugh at the Lin headlines and references and think they are funny we should not feel bad. I do not think he minds. Certainly joking about Tim Tebow and his Christianity is acceptable....but that is a whole new column. What we should consider however is should we all take it all seriously or only some of it and what causes the distinction between what each group finds acceptable.

Those distinctions might tell us more about ourselves that we care to know.