the big joke was an accent and too much cologne

March 15, 2017 11:01 AM

Kal Penn (actor, former White House staffer, currently acting as a White House staffer) found a bunch of scripts from his early career in the long-ago 1990s and tweeted up a storm about how racist some of them (and the experiences of filming them) were.
posted by Etrigan (15 comments total)

That was really interesting, thank you.

I suspect the difficulty with leaving out the accent and letting it be funny on the merits is that the kind of writing that calls for the accent isn't actually funny on the merits.
posted by jacquilynne at 11:33 AM on March 15, 2017 [10 favorites]

I honestly do not know how actors of color (and women) survive Hollywood long enough to - if they ever do - make it to the reasonably humane roles.
posted by Lyn Never at 11:33 AM on March 15, 2017 [4 favorites]

There's always work at the Post Office. Oh, wait...
posted by bongo_x at 11:59 AM on March 15, 2017 [3 favorites]

"Abdul shows off some s*****c techno pop moves."

What the actual fuck. This is so messed up. Glad he's getting treated with more respect now, but I wonder how many young actors are getting similar scripts today.
posted by Braeburn at 1:22 PM on March 15, 2017 [2 favorites]

They read like parodies of Hollywood casting but they aren't parodies at all.
posted by tommasz at 3:07 PM on March 15, 2017

This was about the same time as "Mujibur and Sirajul" on that racist old fart Letterman's show wasn't it?
posted by jfwlucy at 3:36 PM on March 15, 2017

So demeaning, so objectifying. And some people in the Ghost in the Shell thread were still wondering why Asian-Americans were so upset about letting that rare Asian protagonist role (in which the character is actually kinda human, and three-dimensional, and not something to be deliberately mocked) go to Scarlett Johansson.

Reading the script excerpts and character descriptions, you see how normalized the dehumanization is.
posted by aielen at 3:44 PM on March 15, 2017 [4 favorites]

"Abdul shows off some s*****c techno pop moves."

What the actual fuck. This is so messed up.

Not that it isn't messed up, but as far as that specific term goes, this is one of those "divided by a common language" things. I gather that this is a serious slur in the UK, and is understood by all to refer to people suffering from particular diseases. In the US, it has no such referent, and just means something like "clumsy or uncoordinated."

(Weird Al unwittingly ran into this buzzsaw a couple years ago...)
posted by Shmuel510 at 8:17 PM on March 15, 2017

It means “clumsy and uncoordinated” precisely because it arises from people with spastic displegia, usually due to cerebral palsy. US colloquial usage lost that association more than a generation ago - Wikipedia thinks before 1960 - whereas in the UK it always kept the idea of being clumsy due to being disabled. The origin of the word is the same in both cases however.
posted by pharm at 12:55 AM on March 16, 2017 [3 favorites]

Huh, I have the opposite sense, in that it was always a term of abuse on a par with "the R word" when I was growing up in the US, and then when we moved to England in the late 80s we were a bit shocked to see earnest signs for the Spastics Society, as if it were a socially-acceptable word to use.
posted by Hal Mumkin at 6:28 AM on March 16, 2017

I think, at that time here in the UK, it was an acceptable word to (neutrally/respectfully) refer to refer to people actually suffering from cerebral palsy - in the same way that the R-word originally had a neutral medical meaning and then became a pejorative.

But in both cases, times have moved on and it's not considered an appropriate description or a pejorative.
posted by A Robot Ninja at 6:35 AM on March 16, 2017 [1 favorite]

US data point here. I had no idea of that connotation of spastic or the origin of the term and I'm a pretty huge word nerd.
posted by dudemanlives at 9:18 AM on March 16, 2017 [1 favorite]

Hal: The Spastics society name was a holdover from when the word was simply descriptive & didn’t have much in the way of pejorative connotations (the use as a playground insult was much less visible at the time). They rebranded to “Scope” back in 1994.
posted by pharm at 2:06 PM on March 16, 2017

They rebranded after a lot of pressure from disability activists....
posted by Helga-woo at 2:17 PM on March 16, 2017

Yeah, "spastic" is just a word you never hear in America. Pretty much the one pop culture reference I've ever heard of it was "Summers, you drive like a spaz!" in Band Candy on Buffy (from Principal Snyder, not exactly Mr. Enlightened), and I just took it to mean something like "bouncing off the walls."
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:10 PM on March 16, 2017