Letters to the Editor
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we are outraged
OK, so if Sarah Silverman uses a cultural or racial slur to tag an individual or group, we can see that the humor lies not in our feelings of superiority or hatred (one hopes) but in our discomfort and in the absurdity of the underlying fears, ignorance, and beliefs that groups or individuals could be attributed traits based on content-free utterances (“nigger”, “faggot”) that ultimately have no meaning other than what we are trained to award them. The joke is that we invest the power of a nuclear device in, and allow ourselves to be terrified by, empty sounds and symbols which in actuality have no more import and meaning for relating to groups or individuals than an unintelligible grunt. We award magical power to empty constructions, and part of Silverman’s brilliance is that she helps us learn experientially that our knee-jerk impulse to be outraged is, in fact, what helps give the black magic its power.
Paris is no Silverman, but do we know that she is racist or homophobic? We do know this: she uses black magic – utterances which are completely meaningless but carry the immense power our fear and ignorance give them – to elicit our outrage. She seems to have us in a trance, a spell. And that does seem newsworthy.