Off White
A couple of weeks back, the Melbourne Herald Sun published the results of two polls that gave a fascinating glimpse into the minds of its readership. The first showed that a staggering 78 percent of Herald Sun readers want Australia to reintroduce the death penalty, while the second showed that 79 percent of them would definitely be watching the Hey Hey it’s Saturday reunion. In other words, if you were to assemble 79 Herald Sun readers in a room to view an episode of ‘Red Faces’, all but one of them would be just as happy to watch a man being put to death.
Especially if that man were Harry Connick Jr, apparently. A further Herald Sun poll on Saturday revealed that 91 percent of its readers believe that ‘political correctness has gone too far’, largely because of Connick’s response to the now notorious ‘Jackson Jive’ blackface routine. Among the 1700 comments posted on heraldsun.com, Judy McClelland of Blackburn North says, ‘Hey hey, Harry, you have just lost me as an admirer of your work’. Harry of Melbourne declares Connick to be ‘just another uptight American with no sense of humour’, adding, ‘I would not be offended if five black men appeared on “Red Faces” with white paint on their faces’, while Lisa Blackmore says to Connick, ‘Your reaction was racist. Remind me not to go to any of your shows’. And, believe it or not, these are among the saner comments posted. Don of Dandenong thinks that the skit was justified because ‘when Heath Ledger was on the David Letterman show David told jokes about sharks eating people at a Perth beach close to where Heath once lived’, while Paul White of Newcastle asks, ‘Is Harry Connick “as an American” also going to say sorry for the murder of innocent civilians in Iraq?’ My guess is no, and that even if he were, he probably wouldn’t choose to do it on an episode of Hey Hey it’s Fucking Saturday!
What these loopy communiqués reveal about the average Herald Sun reader is a) their inability to understand why whiteface isn’t offensive (several can’t believe that there wasn’t widespread anger when the film White Chicks was released. In fact there was, but it had nothing to do with racism); b) their continuing bullshit sentimental attachment to all things Heath Ledger, despite few of them giving a single shit about the bloke when he was alive (how many Herald Sun readers went to The Brothers Grimm or The Four Feathers or The Order or The Lords of Dogtown or Candy or Casanova or I’m Not There or even Ned Kelly? Where were these mewling babies when Ledger actually needed them? Doubtless nodding off in front of The Footy Show or banging on about ‘political correctness gone mad’); and c) their belief that Connick should fuck off back to the ‘humourless’ United States and take his uppity Negro band with him.
It’s Ms McClelland’s comment that is, to me, the saddest. While most of the others don’t seem to be Connick fans at all, she identifies herself as an ‘admirer’. And yet, all it took for her to rescind completely her devotion to the man and his entire body of work was one rather chivalrous (and actually quite funny) comment on the ‘Red Faces’ panel, partly delivered with the sensitivities of his longtime band, who McClelland presumably also ‘admires’, in mind. Thank God he didn’t offer to, say, escort the aging Jackie McDonald to her seat. McClelland would probably be organising a bonfire of his albums and burning him in effigy out front of GTV9.
As to whether the offending routine was ‘racist’ – and let’s keep in mind that Harry Connick at no point said that it was; those flames were fanned, as usual, by the Herald Sun itself – it seems to me that the perpetrators were a harmless, if misguided, bunch of dags who presumably had no idea what was about to happen as they slathered on the shoe polish. And while the show’s host – a former ‘man of colour’ himself, at least in the jumper department – may be guilty of a string of affronts to taste, comedy, music, and, most notably, humility, he has never, to my knowledge, behaved in a manner that could be termed racist, and neither has Hey Hey, assuming that the overweight, homosexuals and women cannot be classified as ‘races’.
But while the performance itself was not by intent a racist one, its effect surely was. The image of five blacked-up ‘golliwogs’ cavorting, however well-meaningly, to a syncopated rhythm, could not help but echo footage of the most shameful Uncle Tom work of the previous century. It was like watching a Charlie Chaplin impersonator attempting to entertain a crowd at the Holocaust Museum; he’s just trying to be funny, but everyone’s thinking about Hitler.
That is, unless they’re of a certain age, as I suspect many of the Herald Sun Connick-haters are. I too am old enough to recall a time when it was perfectly acceptable for the whole family to sit down together and enjoy a cork-faced medley of riverboat showtunes on the BBC’s Black and White Minstrel Show. But, at some point in the late sixties, actual black people started to appear on television and it all began to look a tad dodgy. You couldn’t help but notice that Shaft was played by a cool-looking black man, not a boggle-eyed, lacquer-faced, ‘mammy’-spouting idiot in a colourful bow-tie and boater. He had lines like ‘Cut the crap, man!’ rather than ‘I seens a ghos’!!!’. Almost overnight, the Minstrels were pensioned off, the golliwog was sacked from Play School, and ‘blacking up’ became acceptable only in a satirical context; no one seemed too offended when Robert Downey Jr was nominated for an Oscar for his role in Tropic Thunder, because he was playing, not a black man, but a misguided white Australian attempting, ironically, to win an Oscar. No one, that is, except for several Herald Sun readers, who seemed to think that Downey was being ‘racist’ about white Australians, that notoriously persecuted group whose human rights have been so steadily eroded by ‘political correctness’ that they can barely switch on their enormous flat-screen TVs without being mortally wounded by another ‘satirical’ broadside.
Of course, it wasn’t long before the ‘PC Police’ (or ‘moral arbiters’ as Sam Newman called them, in a statement that proved nothing other than he had discovered the word ‘arbiters’ in his famously well-thumbed dictionary) had dug out some footage of Harry Connick himself in what may or may not have been satirical blackface. Then it was claimed that Whoopi Goldberg was soft-pedalling her comments because of her own ex-boyfriend Ted Danson’s infamous appearance at the Friars Club, although surely Goldberg’s own Oscar-winning performance in (I Seens A) Ghost did more to wind the clock back to the pop-eyed era of Stepin Fetchit. By the weekend, film of Gene Wilder in Silver Streak, Dan Aykroyd in Trading Places and Billy Crystal as Sammy Davis Jr, to name just three, had pundits wondering whether there were any comedians over the age of forty who hadn’t blacked-up at some point.
Well, not this little white-pretending-to-be-black duck, that’s for sure.
That’s right, we’ve reached the part of the story where yours truly fesses up to his own disgraceful history in this department.
In the 1987 D-Generation sketch ‘Dubbo Olympics’, I can briefly be glimpsed playing the UN delegate for Botswana. And in another sketch filmed a year later for the same program, I can be seen sporting ‘tinted’ make-up and affecting an ‘Indian’ accent as a waiter in one of the seemingly compulsory restaurant sketches. In the first instance, the ‘villain’ of the sketch is a boorish, racist white man, while in the second, the waiter is the ‘hero’ of the piece, forcing a table of ignorant whiteys to pronounce unassisted complexly worded items on his menu. Nonetheless, twenty-two years later, neither of these casting decisions would be acceptable, and in hindsight, both sketches would have been considerably more effective had an actual Botswanan or Indian actor been employed. The truth is, in those days I’d do pretty much anything to get my head on the telly.
My most inglorious performance came in 1989, when, in a doubly offensive ploy, I appeared in both blackface and drag as ‘Venetta Fields’ in the John Farnham section of the Logie-nominated ‘Five in a Row’ video. Fortunately, as was always intended, I am barely visible and certainly not recognisable, appearing only in a wide shot. The intent was neither to shock nor satirise – we simply couldn’t afford to employ any other actors and I drew the short straw. As a rightly appalled Charlie Pickering said when I related this story, ‘So you were racist for budgetary reasons?’
Three years later, the times had changed and so had I. For the 1992 series of The Late Show, I wrote a sketch set during an Australian naturalisation ceremony. This required an entire roomful of people of every imaginable race and nationality. One of the show’s ABC mandarins thought it would be ‘twice as funny’ if all the migrants were played by the Late Show cast, blacked-up or sporting ‘slant eyes’. When I said that it would be ‘more real’ if the inductees were played by un-made-up extras, this man (who kept a copy of The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick on his desk at all times) became hysterical, saying, ‘Well, what is reality, anyway? As soon as you cut within a scene, you’ve destroyed reality!’. When I replied, firstly, by pointing out that every documentary ever made included cuts and, secondly, by saying, ‘What the fuck would you know about reality? You work for the ABC!’, it was made clear that the only way the sketch would be shot with ‘real’ people was if we, the cast, were to finance and shoot it ourselves. Which we did. It cost us $3000 to avoid appearing on national television as ‘jigaboos’ and ‘ching-chong Chinamen’.
Coincidentally, in the very same episode, Rob Sitch did do a pretty good Harry Connick Jr. And this time the black guys in his band were played by real black guys. Although, come the 1993 Logies, we were beaten in the Best Light Entertainment category…by Hey Hey it’s Saturday.
That’ll learn us.
Tony Martin is the Melbourne-based author of ‘A Nest of Occasionals’ and ‘Lolly Scramble’. Podcasts of his radio show ‘Get This’ are still available for free download at iTunes (type in: ‘Get This: Richard Marsland Lives’). He is currently directing new episodes of ABCTV's ‘The Librarians’.
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