There's a scene in The Bruce Lee Story where Bruce reacts to seeing that Mickey Rooney caricature. It's heartbreaking. I see the same look on my Chinese American husband's face when he sees a bucktoothed, squint-eyed 'Chinaman' in any movie or TV show (whether played by a Caucasian 'in drag' or Asian cast specificlly for that look.) It's shame.

I saw that scene, too. Didn't find it heartbreaking, though I could understand his frustration in a world where there were no authentic, masculine Asian images. As for you and your Chinese American husband, to each their own. You're offended. Okay. I don't remember my Chinese American cousin (who was my best friend growing up) ever having a similar response.

I'm the one who brought up the Mickey Rooney comment. The performance is hysterical, and obviously a cartoon. I wonder if people are as bothered by Khan on King of the Hill, Apu on The Simpsons, or Miss Swan and the two hispanic ghetto chicks on Mad TV or whether they're just willing to give themselves credit ("We can laugh because we know the producers know this is just comedy") that they won't give people who lived before them ("People who laugh at Rooney's Mr. Yushioshi are insensitive"). Blake Edwards directed Breakfast at Tiffany's. He later created the role of Cato, the aggressively trained valet to Inspector Clouseau for his Pink Panther series. I don't sense any kind of bigotry from Edwards or Rooney.

You wrote probably the best post on this thread.

I'm gay. I have no tolerance for homophobia. But I know a joke when I see it, and I think I'm pretty good at telling the difference between a joke for me and a joke at my expense.

I get a kick out of clips I've seen of the Bruno character, who's here, queer, deal with it. He's funnier than Jack on Will and Grace, if maybe not as funny as Jasper, Brian's gay cousin on Family Guy. It's great to see a character so satisfied with himself, so unafraid, that his lets his bright fushia self shine forth.

Part of what makes a difference between a homophobic joke and a non-homophobic one is that homophobes rarely know enough about gays to pick out the telling details to exaggerate and spoof. Under the excess, I've encountered enough Brunos in my time to recognize the source of humor.

Of course, your larger point is that comedy shouldn't have to fit some "accountability test." And I agree. I'm always surprsed when people deride Mickey Rooney's great comic turn in Breakfast at Tiffany's. It's about the best slapstick anyone did that decade (yes, better than Peter Sellers in The Party, which was also rooted in racial caricature), but we're not supposed to laugh anymore because it's "wrong." Are we supposed to think there was a time Rooney actually convinced audiences he was Japanese? Or that his low-down mugging is the same as putting Asians in interment camps?

We Americans are often too quick to react self-righteously.

I get bored when others satirize Fox News, because it seems too easy and knee-jerk. But it's sweet when they makes fools of themselves just by talking.

What's the difference, besides who you choose to castigate and who gets a free pass?

Thanks for a moment of clarity. Don't know why the public and private personas are so hard for people to seperate.

Isn't leaving the child in an interminate state just going create a different, equally painful, situation?

Palin is curious as a political figure, constantly setting the bar higher than she is capable of reaching, thus failing on her own terms and contradicting an image she herself created. If she's such a tough mama, which indeed is the image she created for herself, what "pit-bull with lipstick" ducks and runs when attacked? What politician who cares only about serving her state walks away when there's no future glory in finishing the job? What "regular American" (whatever that trope means) leaves a job unfinished? And how does one serve a state better by leaving its service?

I think you're entirely right that is was her image as a mother—and not a willowy helpless mom, but a tough, fiercely protective one—that intrigued people. She was photgenic, and we all know about the guys that wanted to hit it, but I don't think that increased her popularity by many votes. The "mom meme" did. Yet in typical Palin style, she created an intersting image, then flubbed it. Probably because there was no substance beneath the image.

Aw, come on. Even Asimov ultimately accepted "SciFi" as a designation.

CanadianBill,

Ivins was the bigger asshole, literally as well as figuratively. She peddled a "down home" persona only embracable by those in the big city (can't believe she actually listed "sumbitch" as a Texas phrase, Larry McMurtry already hilariously having cited it as the kind of "Texasism" you never hear except in a university town or among pseudo-intellectuals), and the kind of establishment feminist who has to do what she can to erase all dissenting opinion, thus trying to "take down" Paglia, and only demonstrating Ivins didn't know how to read. I don't miss her, sadly or otherwise.

Tom,

I will give Havrilesky props for comparing Syfy to the name of a disease or the kind of dog that should be hit with one. But come on, no need to use cheap sexism to make a point. We men aren't superior or more heavily burdened. We've just historically had more print space in which to claim both.