In the tribute below, Crystal shows a progression of clips from Williams’ brilliant career starting with his early appearance on the Tonight Show and going to some standup routines. The clips highlighted Williams’ ability to improvise, including one scene where he borrows a pink scarf from an audience member in the front row and wraps its round his head like a Hijab, or Islamic headscarf. He then says “I would like to welcome you to Iran . . . Help me!”
The response was outrage on social media sites which called both Williams and Crystal racists and the tribute “offensive” speech. One critic objected that “After that, people who’d never heard of Robin Williams would think he’s Billy Crystal’s racist friend who was on a lot of talk shows?” Others called for apologies and sanctions. While Williams did a brief accent of a women from Bombay, it was the use of the scarf as a veil that led to the posting of most of the objections.
However, the critics ignore the alternative meaning of the joke. I took the joke as less as statement on Islam generally as a statement on the treatment of women in Iran — a subject of continued discussion on this blog. Clearly many women choose to wear burkas and veils and they should have every right to do so. However, we have also discussed how women have been abused in Iran and other Muslim countries when they have tried to resist discriminatory rules and compelled clothing requirements. Comedians use such controversies as the grist for their comedic mills. The best comedians have an edge and a point of view. While to some the veil is a religious symbol, it is also to others a symbol of the plight of many women who want greater freedom from Sharia law and cultural/religious restrictions. There are many women in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other countries who have fought bravely for equal rights. The veil is often a symbol of that political struggle, including the continued abuses by morality police against women in countries like Saudi Arabia. This includes the recent sentence of flogging for a women who insulted the morality police and the earlier tragedy of girls forced back into a building school because they were not wearing veils and appropriate coverings.
The greatest concern is that in some Western countries like France, England, and Canada, we are now seeing people criminally charged after complaints have been filed over speech deemed to be offensive by particularly groups or individuals. It is part of a growing threat to free speech that I have written about. For recent columns, click here and here and here and here. When (as we have seen) this crackdown starts to include even standup routines, we have reached an unnerving point in our treatment of free speech and expression. In addition to the prosecutions of such cases, there is the creation of a chilling effect on many who do not want to be accused and potentially charged. The result is a type of self-censorship.
To be honest, I do find some comedians to be incredibly offensive and not funny: I would put Andrew Dice Clay and Kathy Griffin among them. I have even objected to the airing of inappropriate sexual displays during Superbowl shows or New Year shows due to the audience. Indeed, as many have noted, I tend to be a bit old-fashioned (some would say prudish) about crude jokes and a thuggish conduct. However, these objections go further than folks saying that they disliked the joke and raise the question of whether some jokes should be labeled and sanctioned as hate speech or racist. Kathy Griffin simulating oral sex on Anderson Coopers is hardly a disagreement of interpretation. It is appropriate (though in my view still decidedly not funny) in some contests (like a comedy club) and not others (like a television audience with kids celebrating the New Year). The Williams clip controversy turns more on the content of the joke and its meaning.
The clip below can be seen by different people in different ways. However we appear to be losing our tolerance for different or opposing views — even in a comedic routine. The result is pressure to strip away controversial or edgy elements — leaving a type of vanilla flavored level of discourse in our society. The free speech community needs to do a better job in advancing the notion of tolerance for speech in a pluralistic society. It may require giving the benefit of the doubt to people like Williams or Crystal and just not laughing at a joke.
What do you think?
Aridog, The fact that you can joke about being a wounded veteran says a lot. Humor is key to recovery. Thanks.
And, the contempt for women was what Williams improv was all about!!
Aridog, You nailed it. Female castration shows the depravity of a culture and their contempt for women. I’m waiting for the usual suspects to compare this mutilation to Christian fundamentalists in the US. It is almost certainly going to occur.
Paul….I am very aware of that. Some of my friends are Israelis and conservative (just not Hasidic). None-the-less, it was incorporated originally for sanitary reasons, to the best of my knowledge. Heck, my family had me circumcised at birth, and they were Irish, essentially a mix of both Catholic Irish and Presbyterian Irish, at the grand parent level, and that was the reason they emigrated to Canada (intolerance of the mix) and then to the USA, where my parents and I were born.
Maybe way back when somebody also decided it to distinguish Jews from animals of the field, etc. If this is controversial I will ask my Israeli friends. Much of Hasidic practice is contrary to modern concepts…such as the shaving of women heads among Satmar women. Although I know several Hasidic Jews and respect their practices within their own confines, I find it otherwise barbaric….and would never ever advocate adoption by the wider community of Homo Sapiens Sapiens.
When I was a finally ambulatory recovering resident in an Army Evac hospital back in the day, nearly half the ambulatory ward also requested circumcision …actually kind of funny to see guys trying to find their whiz gear amongst the bandages, especially if they had only one arm left, etc….not funny really, but we did laugh and we did help them…anyone who finds that weird, that one wounded guy would help another find his gear, just hasn’t been there, done that…not their fault, just fact.
Aridog – the whole sanitary thing was started after WWII with mothers and infants trapped in the hospital. Doctors knew more about ‘birthing babies’ then women who had been doing it for 10s of thousands of years. Now we find out that circumcised males actually engage in riskier sex making them at risk for more STDs.
Paul and others….just for the heck of it, lets start calling “female circumcision” what it really is: the amputation of a stimulus sensitive body part done expressly to deprive women of whatever pleasure is derived by that sensitivity. In short: it is equivalent to castration, the removal of testicles in a male, not circumcision, which merely removes a flap of skin and in no way inhibits sensual pleasure. Millions of wankers can testify to that :-)) Actually to fully deprive a eunuch of any pleasure you’d have to also remove or otherwise disable the prostate gland.
New term: Female Castration.
Because that is what it is most equivalent to in reality…even though I believe the ovaries are left intact.
And no, female surgical removal of a female body part, just because of some religious interpretation, should no more be allowable in a civil society than castration for the same reason. Bris on the other hand is merely a sanitary measure removing a cloak of skin….in humans that cloak is no longer necessary, as it remain necessary for horse and other animals who run about nekid 🙂
aridog – for Jewish males the bris is a religious necessity.
docmadison,
Yep. (;
me, You obviously have no understanding of PC. The only “place” for PC is on the ash heap of failed philosophies like Fascism, Communism and Nazism.
Nick – I am against female circumcision as well, but it is practiced by some cultures. Should we allow this?
Amazing to me how some idiots criticizing the joke and calling Williams racist has turned into ” the Party of Tolerance become so intolerant that comedians can no longer make jokes about Sharia Law?” (Karen’s words)
Seems to me the party that cannot abide those who disagree with them without calling names and aspersions is the party of all inclusive, anyone who disagrees with them is painted with one broad stroke.
“The US gave UN schools over $100 million last year alone, knowing full well that these schools hire Hamas soldiers to indoctrinate kids to become suicide bombers.” Karen do you have citations for this?
Robin Williams was a brilliant, loving, and compassionate person. I appreciate political correctness–in its place. Robin’s mind was a marvel. He was hilarious. Did I laugh at the segment? Damn right I did! It was funny when he originally did the skit and it’s funny now. Robin was an equal opportunity humorist–everything and everyone could be the center for humor. Lighten up, folks. Life is too short. Nanoo-Nanoo.
I could be sitting next to any of you and be (fill in the blank) Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Muslim……….It’s not a race and it’s too damn bad that a theocracy like Iran gets it’s feelings hurt in the uproar now isn’t it? I mean, isn’t that why we have a separation of church and state here so we don’t have ignorant confusion here?
I will be glad when all the news about Robin Williams is done with.
And yet, Prof. Turley was so deeply offended by the words of “The Thug”, Richard Sherman. A view that I suggest was shared by many others here.
Americans are so very good at labels: racists… thugs… cultists. See how easy it is?
John:
For awhile I believed your rants were due to overexposure to Robert Welch, the Koch family and other discredited Birchers. Now I see you’re adding a dose of George Lincoln Rockwell. Nice mixture.
Mike A – wow, did not take your for an Alinsky acolyte until I read your comment to John.
“Was Billy Crystal’s Tribute To Robin Williams Racist?”
Let’s ask Abraham Lincoln.
What do you have to say, Abe?
Uh, hum!
“If all earthly power were given me,” said Lincoln in a speech delivered in Peoria, Illinois, on October 16, 1854, “I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution [of slavery]. My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia, to their own native land.” After acknowledging that this plan’s “sudden execution is impossible,” he asked whether freed blacks should be made “politically and socially our equals?” “My own feelings will not admit of this,” he said, “and [even] if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not … We can not, then, make them equals.”5
One of Lincoln’s most representative public statements on the question of racial relations was given in a speech at Springfield, Illinois, on June 26, 1857.6 In this address, he explained why he opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which would have admitted Kansas into the Union as a slave state:
There is a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people to the idea of indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races … A separation of the races is the only perfect preventive of amalgamation, but as an immediate separation is impossible, the next best thing is to keep them apart where they are not already together. If white and black people never get together in Kansas, they will never mix blood in Kansas …”
In conclusion, you folks are going to make one heck of a mess trying to mix oil and water. They’re unmixable you know.
Thank you and a long good night.
John are you serious?
“In conclusion, you folks are going to make one heck of a mess trying to mix oil and water. They’re unmixable you know.”
seems like that has been disproven over and over, just look at the numbers of interracial marriages and the fact that the numbers continue to be on the rise.
“Those who voluntarily place themselves in the “victim” category have given up, or soon will. It’s an occasion for sadness, not anger.”
An occasion, possibly, for brief sadness but definitely not an occasion for redistribution of wealth through punitive and confiscatory taxation of income obtained through a heavily, oppressively overregulated American business.
In biology, tell me the animal grouping that does anything other than walk on after a member has fallen. An elephant may look back at the laggard but quickly moves on.
That’s life. Not sadness. Life.
You don’t get to tax everybody else because you can’t deal with life.
Damn!
The inmates have taken over the asylum.
How come we are not talking about the real issue with Robin Williams, apparent suicide? The psychiatric drugs he was taking, possibly even forced to take, that lead to suicide
The government found their way into your home and business with Income Tax, that very Marxist concept. Now they find their way into your computer.
We are already on thin ice with ‘hate crimes’. A crime is a crime no matter the motive, but the concept of a ‘hate crime’ is to censor the thoughts of the individual, quickly leading to ‘thought police’. We have had this in religion before, but now the state is taking the place of the preacher, even in America.Seperation of church & state is apparently not saving us from this one.
They’re blowhards. Don’t pay attention to them.
Spend your time teaching your children what they need to know/do to thrive in the world. And, especially, teach them to take control of their destiny, their success; not to blame others for their failure.
Those who voluntarily place themselves in the “victim” category have given up, or soon will. It’s an occasion for sadness, not anger.
Confusion about what is racism is the 5th stage.