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CULTURE

"Parks and Rec" Stars Reunite in a Brand New Episode for Charity

And the whole thing was shot from their homes.

The Parks And Recreation Cast Sings - Late Night With Seth Meyers

via YouTube.com

It's hard to believe it's been over five years since the final episode of Parks and Recreation aired.

For a start, 2017 has come and gone, and in a world without Gryzzl we continue to be deprived of transparent, holograph-projecting phones and tablets—though folding phones are kind of a thing finally. But now, the old crew is getting back together for a one-episode charity event to benefit Feeding America.

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Culture Feature

Why We Shouldn’t Cancel Cancel Culture: We Need Transformative Justice

To cancel cancel culture—and to write off the impulses that motivate it—would be to miss a valuable chance to learn.

Photo by Markus Winkler (Unsplash)

Kanye West is canceled.

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TV

Leslie Jones Shines in "Time Machine"

In her Netflix special, the "Saturday Night Live" alum calls on twentysomethings to have more fun—for America's sake

Leslie Jones at 'The Mother' film premiere - Los Angeles, CA -

Photo by CraSH/imageSPACE/Shutterstock

Leslie Jones has zero chill. That's what makes her such a thrill to watch.

On her new Netflix special Leslie Jones: Time Machine, the raucous Saturday Night Live alum uses equal amounts of joy and rage–sometimes simultaneously–to show how tough it is to always be on the edge of laughing or screaming, especially in these extremely stressful times.

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CULTURE

Ronny Chieng's "Asian Comedian Destroys America" and the Ghost of Fu Manchu

When did Asians become funny?

Ronny Chieng at 13th annual Stand Up for Heroes

Photo by lev radin (Shutterstock)

When did Asians become funny?

Sure, Asians have seemed funny to Americans since the early twentieth century when media had two representations of them: Fu Manchu, the archetypal vainglorious villain trying to "kill the white man and take his women"; and Charlie Chan, a Chinese-American detective (played by white actors Warner Oland and Sidney Toler) who became wildly popular by embodying Oriental stereotypes. But then the U.S. was pulled into World War II by the Japanese plane that struck Pearl Harbor, and suddenly Yellow Peril seemed all too real. Everyone with Asian features was suddenly a "jap," "nip," or "Asian menace" threatening to take over or generally debase America with their inferiority, a fear which intensified with the Korean War and then Vietnam War.

Maybe those fears were grounded, because Netflix recently released, "Asian Comedian Destroys America!" It's the title of Ronny Chieng's stand-up special, a play on the use of "destroy" to suggest out-of-the-park success and the history of xenophobic fear in America. "Or maybe I just came up with something funny and I'm just trying to explain it retroactively," he told The New York Times. "It came from Netflix telling me I'm not famous enough and I need a title to get people to click on the icon."

Frank admissions–somewhere between deadpan humor and social awkwardness–characterize Chieng's hour-long special, which captures his equal parts bemusement and devotion to the country he's called home since 2015. Beginning with admittedly hackneyed observations on American attention spans and wastefulness ("every night in America is a competition to see how many screens we can get between our face and the wall: iPhone, iPad, laptop, TV, and then Apple Watch"), he wades into deeper waters about racial politics and divides between his Malaysian Chinese culture and American diversity.

Asians, who only account for about 5.6% of the population, need to "get that number up," he says. Why? First, "We are the only objective referees in your ongoing race war between white and black people," Chieng explains. "Because you don't care about us, and we don't care about any of you. So you can trust us...Our skin is not in the game. Literally. NFL, NBA, our skin is in none of those games." Second, we need to elect an Asian president; "Man or woman, get that Asian president in the White House. We will fix this sh*t in a week!" The proof? "We don't shut down for anything," he said. "We don't shut down for Christmas. We work through public holidays. Any city in America when it's 3:00 a.m. and you're hungry, where do you go? You go to Chinatown cause things are delicious, affordable and open."

Chieng, already recognized for his satirical correspondence for The Daily Show and his role as Eddie Cheng in Crazy Rich Asians, doesn't defer to self-effacing humor to critique social issues, from healthcare and civil liberties to the Darwinism of gluten intolerance and the undeniable coolness of the black community owning their own racial slur. "You never see Chinese people walking around, 'Yo, where my chinks at? My chinks!" he mimes with finger guns, "Hey, stay yellow, my fellows–sounds awful!"

While the 34-year-old comedian has lived and been educated in Singapore, Australia, and the U.S., his comedy career, since 2009, has clearly been informed by the fraught history of Asians being accepted in western culture. From the title of his special to the promotional trailer's riff of media's anti-Japanese propaganda during World War II, he speaks back to Yellow Peril with alternating empathy and hardened logic.

Ronny Chieng Netflix Standup Comedy Special | Asian Comedian Destroys America! Traileryoutu.be

It might be working, at least in comedy. This year Bowen Yang became the first SNL cast member of Asian descent in the show's 44-year history, and the viral humor of Joel Kim Booster has been showcasing his observations on being gay and Asian in America ("I'm not a bad driver 'cause I'm Asian; I'm a bad driver because I won't wear my glasses and I text. It's a CHOICE!"). And in film and TV, of course, there's been Lulu Wang's The Farewell starring Awkwafina, six seasons of Fresh Off the Boat, and the flash in the pan of Crazy Rich Asians' success. But back in the early aughts, only a handful of East Asian and Indian individuals had found mainstream success in comedy (this was back when Korean-American Margaret Cho was told by a major network that she "was not Asian enough"). In cartoonist Adrian Tomine's graphic novel Shortcomings, he captures the complexities and contradictions in Asian-American masculinity and, more largely, the respectability politics involved with being accepted.

Culturally, respectability politics is an odd game of self-effacement and personal betrayal that's weighed against the prize of acceptance.

Thessaly La Force at The New York Times describes "Asian jokes" as "an accepted kind of humor when it comes to talking about Asian-Americans — it's a humor comfortable with its own ignorance, like the bully in the schoolyard who pounces on perceived weaknesses and kicks up dirt for a laugh. These types of jokes often concern Asian men's masculinity, or lack thereof — or the Asian man's helplessness in life, his neediness, his foolishness, his greed, his feminine demeanor and physicality."

Or, as Joel Kim Booster puts it, "I'm terrible at math. I don't know karate. My dick is huge." On the surface, this might even seem lazy: "Why does every comedian of color have to have material about their racial identity? Can't you come up with something else to say?" But every person of color has, at one point or other, felt the weight of racist stereotypes in the room–like an invisible, crushing fog–and been sorely tempted to comment on them first; because with stereotypes (however hackneyed) come a haunting fear that someone else will invoke them first. Whether that's in the form of an attack or, more commonly in 2019, a blatant display of the speaker's own ignorance, the resulting awkwardness permeates the room. Imagine knowing the discomfort is all about you. Embarrassment and a baseless guilt starts churning your stomach–you feel responsible to ease the tension but, at the same time, f*ck off, you didn't create this ignorance. It's all very unpleasant and, just as bad, it's never funny.

Similarly, just about every comedian of color targets racial stereotypes at some point in their act, because in an industry dominated by non-POC entertainers, their race is still an elephant in the room. Diffusing that tension is hard to do well when there are centuries of ignorance and propaganda and yellow face that have come before you, and it's even harder to do in a way that's refreshing and unique. Maybe Chieng pulls it off because he's partly socially awkward and partly just "a grumpy person," as he self-describes. "When someone says that people of your race are not supposed to be grumpy, it just makes me grumpier." Or it's his brand of authenticity when there's still been more mockery of people of color than genuine representation in American media. "I'm just trying to write what I think is funny," he says. "I'm just trying to have as authentic a reaction as possible to something."

In English author Sax Rohmer's 1913 novel, he writes, "Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan ...one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present ...Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the Yellow Peril incarnate in one man." Rohmer's caricature would become an icon of satire because of its over-the-top portrayal of foreign threats and the Asian menace. Between the 1950s and '80s, he became a subject of parody in radio and film: He became funny. Whether he's a mockery of Asian culture or the ignorance that once surrounded it depends on whether or not American media is ready for comedians like Ronny Chieng to "destroy" racist stereotypes (see what I did there? Stay yellow, my fellows).

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CULTURE

Pam and Angela's New Podcast Will Not Address Sexism and Racism on "The Office"

It's just a good old nostalgia-fest.

Angela Kinsey and Jenna Fischer 'The Office' TV Series celebrates its 100th Episode at Calamigos Ranch, Malibu, CA - 14 Apr 2009

Photo by Sipa/Shutterstock

My heart leaped a little bit when I read that Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey (AKA Pam and Angela) are starting a weekly podcast called The Office Ladies.

For a brief, beautiful moment, I thought that they might be starting a podcast dedicated to criticizing the way that The Office treated women, intending to reclaim their own narratives as women on a show that sexualized, insulted, and demeaned them. Maybe they'd even address the show's rampant sexism.

Then I realized that the podcast is purely about nostalgia...which is fine. Straight up, I love The Office. I think it's some of the finest comedy ever made. I'm not really a believer in cancel culture—I believe in a culture of learning and growing together—so I'm not going to say that we all have to stop watching The Office. But collectively, we do need to buck up and admit that the show has serious problems.

Part of learning and growing comes with admitting that a show wasn't actually all that great to its characters other than its straight white male leads. That's not to say that its creators and writers were malicious, evil, sexist people—but that's just how things were and are, until very recently, when women and minorities began to actively shout about how uncomfortable they feel in office environments and in everyday life.

Ok, now we're going to visualize a scenario. Imagine this: It's The Office, but with a woman of color as the boss and a majority of women and people of color on staff. There's a single white male employee in the office who is constantly harassed about his white maleness. Every other joke is about white people, and you know that no white people will ever rise to a position of power on the show. And every person of color you know thinks the show is the best thing since sliced bread.

Kind of disconcerting, right? If you're still not convinced that maybe The Office isn't immune to criticism, this might change your mind: Even Steve Carrell himself thinks the show wouldn't work today. When asked if he thought that The Office should be rebooted, Carrell said no, citing the show's off-color humor. "I mean, the whole idea of that character, Michael Scott, so much of it was predicated on inappropriate behavior," he said. "I mean, he's certainly not a model boss. A lot of what is depicted on that show is completely wrong-minded. That's the point, you know? But I just don't know how that would fly now."

In the era of Time's Up and #MeToo, he's right: The Office couldn't work if it came out today. But what has allowed it to remain so beloved for so long?

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The Office's Culture of Casual Racism

As is the case with many pre-2010s TV shows, most of the women and people of color on The Office are defined by their appearance, age, race, and relationship status, and this comprises a lot of the show's jokes. (Sidenote: It's funny that white men—who tend to complain the most about "identity politics"—tend to get annoyed when told they can't use people's identities as the butt of their jokes anymore).

So, where do these identity politics appear in The Office?

Some of the show's most disturbing incidences of casual racism revolve around Stanley, the office's single black employee, and people of color. In one episode, Michael literally jokes about being nostalgic for slavery when he says, "Let's have an auction. Let's do this. We'll auction off people, like in the olden days," and the camera zooms in on Stanley.

Imgur.com

Mindy Kaling, the only woman of color employed in the office, is often the butt of racist jokes and tropes that surround women of color. She's brash and loud and desperate, the polar opposite of Pam's delicate white femininity. In the episode "Diversity Day," Michael eventually goes to her and says in a fake Indian accent, "Kelly, how are you? Oh! Welcome to my convenience store. Would you like some cookie cookie? Well I have some very delicious cookie cookie. Only 99 cents, plus tax. Try my cookie cookie! Try my-" You get the picture.

Though a lot of the racist humor is self-aware and designed to call itself out, the problem is that the show rarely gives the subjects of its racist jokes the chance to make their own jabs, or to take part in plotlines about something other than their identities.

rebloggy.com

The Pam Problem: Sexism on The Office

Then there's the matter of sexism, which can be seen in the way that most of the female characters are written.

Let's start with Pam. Soft-spoken, intelligent but non-threatening, conservative, and compliant, Pam is essentially the ideal woman, a veritable '50s housewife down to her secretary job. Much has been written about the problems with Jim and Pam's relationship, which everyone seems to see differently. Some have called Jim the archetypical "Nice Guy," citing the many incidents where he appears to feel entitled to Pam. There's also the fact that he basically used his girlfriend Karen in order to "get" Pam—and that he's pretty mean to everyone but Pam—and that he persuaded Pam to leave her stint at Pratt in order to spend time with him. The list goes on.

Tellingly, The Office doesn't really address these problems, even in joke form. It usually paints Jim and Pam's perfect, normative, nuclear family-type relationship as the ideal, compared to the crazy irrationality of everyone else.

Of course, the problem is not reserved for Pam. There's also the fact that most of the plot lines surrounding women on the show revolve around their romantic relationships. As Grace Bello writes on B*tch Media, "The main female characters [on The Office], are relegated to the reception desk. First it's Pam (Jenna Fischer), Jim's crush and eventually his wife; later it's Erin (Ellie Kemper), who becomes Andy's girlfriend and Pete's crush... And while the show illustrates this stereotypical gender imbalance satirically by portraying Michael as a dolt undeserving of responsibility and Pam as talented and underappreciated, the show never gestures toward the possibility of change and therefore serves to maintain the status quo." The one woman who is seen in a position of true power—Jan—is eventually painted as crazy and sociopathic.

Then there's Holly. Holly and Michael's relationship is one of the best parts of the show, but Michael effectively falls in love and starts flirting with Holly the very first day she comes into the office. He almost tells her, until Jim advises him to wait it out. Imagine going into work for your very first day and being told your boss is in love with you?

Probably the biggest example of sexism on the show is the way that Michael treats women. Yes, I know it's supposed to be satire and it is quite funny a lot of the time, but the thing is that he never gets called out on it, even though he's allowed to take his staff to Victoria's Secret and mentions getting a b*ner around Phyllis, and this all goes on and on. In the very first episode, talking about Pam, Michael says, "If you think she's cute now, you should have seen her a couple years ago." Really?

buzzfeed.com

Ageism and fatphobia also make appearances, too, usually in conjunction with sexism. Poor Phyllis is constantly criticized and made fun of for her appearance and weight—and admittedly, so is Kevin, but that only reaffirms the show's culture of body-shaming. There's all the queer jokes about Oscar, too.

The Beacon Beat puts it rather succinctly. "Why do we lambast Aziz Ansari for pushing himself on a date who was visibly uncomfortable in real life, but root for Angela to stop squirming away from Dwight when he tries to kiss her although she's married when watching 'The Office'?" that article asks. "Why do we lament statistics like 60% of women who have experienced harassment in the workplace, but chuckle when Michael brings Pam along on a sales call for the sole reason that she's 'the hot one'?"

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The Point

Critiques of The Office inevitably wind up in the same place: a kind of sad one. They ultimately raise questions about the parameters of satire, and the boundaries between satire and actual racism and sexism.

thewhisp.mommyish.com

"How effective is the skewering of bad behavior if the characters perpetuating it are never held accountable for their actions?" asks The AV Club. It's true: The Office's jokesters are never held accountable. Michael Scott treats people terribly and yet always manages to be loveable and sympathetic, because he is good at heart or too naïve to know otherwise, but that's part of the problem. We can't hate Michael, so it's even harder to address and critique how racist and sexist he is. It's hard to admit, but The Office is a toxic work environment, where employees are subject to constant abuse and harassment—about their appearances, their love lives, their worth as human beings—but it's so funny to watch that most of us are simply willing to excuse all the bad.

On the other hand, The Office actually presents a pretty realistic picture of many office environments. It's not likely that most of the women and minorities would really speak out and engage more than they already do on the show, for many reasons. Speaking out takes energy or could cost people their jobs, and toxicity and ridiculousness happen all the time in and out of professional environments. Maybe the marginalized characters on The Office (and we) let it keep happening, and we keep laughing along, because Michael's actions are so absurd and outlandish that they do make the workday somewhat more entertaining. Maybe Dunder Mifflin's employees knew that although the office environment was somewhat toxic, it was better than a sterile, emotionless workplace where people don't talk except about the weather.

The Office had its day in the sun, but we need to be wary of excessive nostalgia for the days when Michael Scott reigned supreme. A caveat: It's definitely not fair to demand that Fischer and Kinsey's podcast addresses sexism and racism, as they aren't responsible for its presence on the show. Still, we can't keep laughing off the truth forever.

The Whisp

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CULTURE

Revisiting Babe.net in Light of Aziz Ansari's "Right Now": A Kind-of Review

Right Now is Aziz Ansari's reckoning with himself.

Netflix

Like everyone else, the burning question on my mind going into Aziz Ansari's new Netflix special, Right Now, was whether or not he would address the Babe.net article.

He did––barely a minute into his set, in fact. Right off the bat, Aziz Ansari is more grounded, less hyper, so clearly transformed from the Aziz Ansari of yesteryear. The entirety of his monologue on the topic can be read here, but this was the most important part:

"There's times I've felt scared. There's times I've felt humiliated. There's times I've felt embarrassed. And ultimately, I just felt terrible that this person felt this way. And after a year or so, I just hope it was a step forward...I always think about a conversation I had with one of my friends where he was like, 'You know what, man? That whole thing made me think about every date I've ever been on.' And I thought, Wow. Well, that's pretty incredible. It's made not just me but other people be more thoughtful, and that's a good thing."

On his last point, Ansari was right. In many ways, the Babe.net article felt like a watershed moment in a movement already chock full of watershed moments. Up until that point, the #MeToo movement (at least in my limited perception as a straight, white dude) had been about speaking truth to power, exposing the many abuses that women faced at the hands of affluent men who felt they could get away with anything. Yes, the movement led many men to introspection, but for a lot of us, especially the "woke" ones, there was also a certain degree of detachment.

tom haverfordNBC

The perpetrators of the most prominent #MeToo cases were men like Harvey Weinstein: true predators who intentionally wielded their substantial power and social clout to target and rape women. Even someone like Louis C.K., who wasn't outright raping or physically assaulting women, displayed consistent patterns of using his status to target and sexually harass women around him.

None of that applied to me. I already respected women in the first place. I had been in a committed relationship for nearly seven years, and I was 100% positive that I had never used my status (I'm another writer in Brooklyn; what status do I even have?) to pressure anyone into doing anything sexually that they didn't want to do. Of course I'd strive to empower the women around me. Of course I'd call out sexual abuse if I saw it in the workplace. Of course I supported the #MeToo movement wholeheartedly. But #MeToo wasn't about me.

Then the Babe.net article about Aziz Ansari came out. The piece followed "Grace," a girl who went on a date with the comedian after a chance encounter. Grace described how they went back to Ansari's place after dinner, he made it clear that he wanted to have sex, and she spurned his advances multiple times. They did engage in sexual contact (not sex, but he kept attempting), during which Grace signaled that she felt uncomfortable.

This excerpt from the article stood out to me:

"Most of my discomfort was expressed in me pulling away and mumbling. I know that my hand stopped moving at some points," she said. "I stopped moving my lips and turned cold."

Whether Ansari didn't notice Grace's reticence or knowingly ignored it is impossible for her to say. "I know I was physically giving off cues that I wasn't interested. I don't think that was noticed at all, or if it was, it was ignored."

Ultimately, Grace texted Ansari after the date, telling him that the encounter made her uncomfortable. Ansari apologized to her directly and later clarified in a public statement, "It was true that everything did seem okay to me, so when I heard that it was not the case for her, I was surprised and concerned. I took her words to heart and responded privately after taking the time to process what she had said."

babe.netTab Media

Journalistic issues with Babe.net aside, the whole situation sat poorly with me. Unlike all the other publicized #MeToo stories—wherein I could safely say that the perpetrator was, indeed, a remorseless, sexist predator who should never work again ("How is Max Landis even the same species as me?")—Ansari's case felt murkier.

I immediately recognized his behavior as uncouth. He was selfish and gross. If a friend came to me and told me that was how her date went down, I'd say something like, "That guy sounds like a massive a**hole, hope you never see him again." But I probably wouldn't say, "He sexually assaulted you, put him on blast."

Part of my hesitation came down to Grace's description that most of her cues were nonverbal. As a person on the high-end of the autism spectrum, nonverbal cues are a pain point for me in general––I have a very hard time reading and interpreting them, and I always ask people close to me to verbalize explicitly what they want from me, sexually or otherwise.

My point in bringing this up is that while nonverbal cues are practically imperceptible to me, they aren't necessarily natural to everyone else, either. Through that reasoning, it was easy for me to imagine a scenario wherein Ansari genuinely read the sexual encounter as fully consensual and Grace genuinely tried to stop it through nonverbal cues. In that situation, Ansari would be in the wrong, but it would still be hard for me to consider him a sexual predator, as opposed to it just being a really bad date.

But the situation at hand was even more complicated. Grace did verbally tell Ansari that she didn't want to have sex, and he still persisted in trying to move their encounter in that direction. I had the distinct thought that if it had been me in Ansari's shoes, I definitely would have stopped at that point, even if I hadn't picked up any of the nonverbal cues.

At the same time, I didn't understand why Grace wouldn't just leave his apartment––even in her recounting of the experience, she never seemed to feel unsafe. She was also in an entirely different industry, so there wasn't the same subtextual pressure that might have existed if she had been a budding stand-up comedian. Obviously, no one has the right to judge whether or not another person should feel unsafe in a given situation, but I wanted to fully empathize with the story, and I felt that my lack of understanding was preventing me from connecting. I couldn't wrap my mind around what kept her there, but I wanted to.

So I asked my girlfriend what her thoughts on the situation were, and she told me that she fully understood what Grace had felt. And I read articles on the topic written by women, most of whom fully understood what Grace had felt. Moreover, almost every other woman to whom I brought the subject up had a similar take––encounters like the one between Ansari and Grace are ridiculously common, and nobody really knows if it's "sexual assault" or not. But, at the very least, it's not a good thing.

So maybe it's not useful to get bogged down in technicalities. Shouldn't we be holding our sexual encounters to a higher standard than "not technically sexual assault?" If so many women are leaving sexual encounters with men feeling like they were, at the very least, deeply uncomfortable, that means we need to do a whole lot better. Doesn't it?

Grace's story brought to light a deep rift in the way men and women are socially conditioned to communicate, especially in sexual scenarios. Men are taught to be aggressive. Women are taught to be demure and non-confrontational. This means that in uncomfortable sexual situations, a lot of women will respond physically through subtle physical cues to avoid making a scene, instead of shouting "NO" or outright leaving––and a lot of men aren't conditioned to pick up on those cues.

Again, this means we need to do better. Our sexual encounters should not be defined by whether or not the other person literally ran away.

And sure, it would be great if every woman felt comfortable enough to outright say "NO" when they didn't want things to move further, but women are also put in very precarious situations should men respond with violence––and the fact that most men would never react like that doesn't change the fact that some men do, and women don't know which until it's too late.

In the end, it doesn't matter if Aziz Ansari did or didn't technically sexually assault Grace. What matters is that she left the date crying because she felt violated and didn't feel comfortable enough to express that in the moment.

What's important is that men who feel uncomfortable with the story––especially the "woke" ones––take the opportunity to confront their own dating experiences, come to terms with how their own behavior might have made someone else feel that way, and hopefully use the reflection to grow into a better person.

aziz ansari right nowNetflix

Incidentally, this seems like exactly what Aziz Ansari did. The frenetic, hyperactive Aziz Ansari who played Tom Haverford in Parks and Recreations is no more. While he still goofs on his cousin Harris after nearly a decade, his main point is deconstructing how jokes evolve, mature, and rarely age well with time. Aside from that, Ansari performs a sober set exploring the mortality of parents and the subtle racism that pervades modern, liberal white culture. Finally, Ansari concludes:

"That old Aziz who said, 'Oh, treat yo' self,' whatever, he's dead. But I'm glad, 'cause that guy was always looking forward to whatever was next: 'Oh, am I gonna do another tour? Am I gonna do another season of the show?' I don't think that way anymore. 'Cause I've realized it's all ephemeral. All that stuff, it can just go away like this. [Snaps fingers.] And all we really have is the moment we're in and the people we're with."

It's not the world's most hilarious stand-up special, but it isn't supposed to be. Right Now is Aziz Ansari's reckoning with himself.

Perhaps, if we truly want to be the "good guys" we claim to be, we should all aim to do the same.

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