The controversy wasn't the ethnicity of the character, it was that the character was portrayed in a stereotypical manner by a white guy no less. It is basically the audio equivalent of blackface.
The Simpsons debuted 30 years ago this year and there are plenty of 30 year old comedies that are extremely objectionable by current standards. It isn't always fair to criticize that comedy since it is important to always judge art in the context in which it was originally created. However, The Simpsons is still running and therefore needs to continue to justify these decisions today and into the future. No one was suggesting that the character should be edited out of past shows or anything, but the show shouldn't be immune to present criticisms about shows created in the present just because the mistake originated 30 years ago.
> isn't always fair to criticize that comedy since it is important to always judge art in the context in which it was originally created.
I strongly disagree. I very much remember how my dad (an immigrant to the US) felt about it when he saw the Simpsons in the 90s; I remember how obvious the racism was when he pointed it out. Just because you were oblivious to how it made people feel doesn't mean it didn't make people feel horrible.
This historical relativism crap is really just a cheap copout for not taking the time to ask: "is what I'm doing going to hurt or demean someone?" If the answer is yes, dont do it, it doesn't matter how many people are accepting of it at the time. If the answer is "I don't know", ask the person it might hurt.
The reality is, people largely didn't care how others were impacted by the things they did and giving them a lazy and thoughtless copout is nearly just as demeaning as the original actions.
(Think about it, all those guys getting negatively swept up in the metoo movement claiming that they didn't know any better with regard to sexual harassment sounds absolutely absurd; putting "historical context" on racist things is equally as absurd)
(People who are not minorities usually dont come close to understanding how racism feels; I look and sound "white" and it was always troubling to see how my dad who doesn't look or sound "white" was treated relative to me; it's painful to see all the microaggressions that my friends deal with on a daily basis (in a place as liberal as socal) and to see comments like this trying to invalidate the damage done because of copouts like historical context is incredibly disheartening because it makes me realize how far away we are from the point where we no longer treat people like second class citizens because of their grouping)
I did start that quote with "isn't always" meaning there are certain situations in which I agree with you. However, I think intent has to play a factor when judging comedy like this. It is not just intent to insult that is inappropriate, but knowledge that your comedy would insult and doing it anyway even if that isn't the primary intent. I think a lot of people were just ignorant of the repercussions of their jokes. That doesn't make those jokes acceptable today, but I have a hard time judging them retroactively like that. If we judge everyone by that standard, basically anyone born before 1995 is an awful person in one way or another.
It's also not as if Homer's speech was portraying him (or white people) in the best light. Apu was a recognizable character because of the setting and the accent. People do have accents. The audience watching the show in the 90's could relate to that specific convenience store experience. So Apu isn't the best representative of people from India/Pakistan. Homer, Barney, and the rest aren't the best representation of people from America. Comedy/satire is a thing. About the only character who represents with sterility is Dr. Hibbert.
I would push back on that a little. There are different responsibilities when you only have one instance of a character of a certain demographic verses a multitude of characters. For example, no one would complain if one of the East Asian characters on Fresh Off The Boat was a stereotype (I don't watch the show, so I'm not sure if there is one) because the cast is full of East Asian people are therefore the show is in no way implying that they all fit that stereotype. Apu was the most prominent and sometimes the only South Asian face on television for years and therefore there is extra pressure not to make that character a stereotype. There are so many white people on TV that presenting some in a bad light doesn't lead to stereotyping.
The problem is that our culture doesn't really agree on whether it's the responsibility of the speaker to avoid offense or the listener to "suck it up" or whether it varies based on the relative identities of the speaker and listener in a hierarchy of identities. I'm fine with expecting courteous speakers and charitable listeners, but running it through an identity matrix is inherently racist (and/or sexist, and/or etc).
Yet Blazing Saddles used epithets and parody as weapons against racism, ultimately, with all races unifying to fight the racists and building a new town together.
Blazing Saddles was a comedy. Django is acceptable because it's a drama, but Mel Brooks' style of humor is no longer socially acceptable. We can take issues like race and anti-semitism deadly seriously, but we aren't allowed to laugh about them anymore.
Which is unfortunate because bigots often take strength from projecting an air of dignity and respectability in an attempt to legitimize themselves in the public square. It's why modern white supremacy and anti-semitism have been reframed as science and philosophy, merely a skeptical form of racial and political realism questioning the mainstream narratives of progressivism and the Enlightment.
Using humor to debase those ideologies and humiliate those who hold them could be a powerful weapon, robbing them of their potency.
Of course, not all such humor has noble intent. The difference between Mel Brooks using racial and religious stereotypes for comic effect and, say, /pol/ doing the same is who the target is, and whether the joke is "punching up" or "punching down." Punching up is funny, punching down isn't. For all of the crass and racial jokes he would make, he, as a white man, still refused to make a joke out of lynching[0].
> Blazing Saddles was a comedy. Django is acceptable because it's a drama
That's not at all true; except perhaps for extremely historically-grounded drama (which Django is not), drama tends to get less license than comedy.
> but Mel Brooks' style of humor is no longer socially acceptable
Mel Brooks style of humor was never “socially acceptable”, it’s was always transgressive. It's probably not as commercially acceptable in the mainstream film industry as it once was, but that's more because transgressive video entertainment has other outlets and the mainstream film industry is a more mature and more narrowly-focussed industry than it once was.
> We can take issues like race and anti-semitism deadly seriously, but we aren't allowed to laugh about them anymore.
My experience of currently successful (both live and distributed on major video platforms) stand up and other comedy suggests that, yes, we are very much still allowed to laugh at those things. The particular currently successful forms may not look exactly like Blazing Saddles, but while the latter isn't stale, it's also very firmly grounded in the time it was produced (which seems generally true of Brooks’ comedies).
