By Steve Sailer
04/25/2012
When Rich Lowry fired John Derbyshire, that of course excited the witchburner sort of pundits to hunt down more crimethinkers suspected of not taking the reigning racial pieties with full somberness. Attention has thus shifted to an obscure young comedy writer named Lesley Arfin, a staff writer for "Girls."
Thatâs the new HBO show that everybody is tweeting about but (virtually) nobody is actually watching. Itâs a half-hour downbeat comedy about four not-quite-affluent enough young ladies trying to make it in New York City. It was created by 25-year-old Lena Dunham, writer of the 2010 indie film Tiny Furniture.
I donât have cable TV, so I havenât seen Girls. (Here is a rave about the show by Slateâs quite reliable TV critic Troy Patterson, who is just about the best black writer in America whom nobody notices is black.)
Unsurprisingly, there were the usual complaints that all four of the girls on "Girls" are white.
Arfin, one of Dunhamâs staff writers, cheekily tweeted in response:
"What really bothered me most about Precious was that there was no representation of ME."
This is in the same vein as Sara Silverman worked: the Evil Innocent ("I donât care if you think Iâm racist; I just want you to think Iâm thin"), the young woman too narcissistic to notice the rules about what you are allowed to say about race.
Silvermanâs best joke went:
I got in trouble for saying the word âCh*nkâ on a talk show, a network talk show. It was in the context of a joke. Obviously. Thatâd be weird. Thatâd be a really bad career choice if it wasnât. But, nevertheless, the president of an Asian-American watchdog group out here in Los Angeles, his name is Guy Aoki, and he was up in arms about it and he put my name in the papers calling me a racist, and it hurt. As a Jew â as a member of the Jewish community â I was really concerned that we were losing control of the media.
But Arfinâs tweet is still still pretty good for 140 characters.
This enraged various moral watchdogs. Itâs fascinating how in this Age of Point 'n' Sputter, this Era of Not Getting the Joke, how much pride some of these people take in being humorless buffoons.
On CNN, Soledad O'Brien, the networks go-to gal for all things African-American, and Sharon Waxman were confused and outraged by Arfinâs joke:
âWow!â Waxman responded. âWow.â
The CNN panel momentarily tried to figure out if Arfinâs racially-inflammatory tweet was a joke.
âDo you think so?â OâBrien asked. âI guess it seems like sheâs not necessarily taking the question of representation seriously to me.â
The New Yorker called Arfinâs joke "breathtakingly dismissive and intellectually dishonest."
ThinkProgress whined:
Lesley Arfin, John Derbyshire, Vice, Taki Magazine, and the Lingering Cultural Capital of Racism
Elspeth Reeve of the Atlantic, who had piled on Derbyshire, entitled her angry piece:
'Girls' Writer Responds to Critique of 'Girls' with Horrible Joke
and followed up with:
'Girls' Writer Is Learning Thereâs No Such Thing as Ironic Racism
Another notoriously butt-hurt site, Gawker, complained:
A Girls Writerâs Ironic Racism And Other âWhite People Problemsâ
You might think that the best way to complain about a comedy writerâs joke is by making a joke back, especially if your complaints are really intended to get you an affirmative action job writing an HBO show. I mean, there are a lot of complainers in this world, so if HBO is going to have to hire some to write a People of Color sit-com, they might as well hire funny ones. But that kind of thinking is so pre-Trayvon.
