Entertainment Industry Needs to Wash Out Its Mouth with Soap
I am definitely the last person who should be saying this, but yeah, Samantha Bee was over the line when she called Ivanka Trump something that is euphemistically called “CU Next Tuesday.”
Since my third year of college, which is close to half a century ago, my own mouth has been regularly in need of a good scrubbing. I clearly fell into bad company. First it was the rowdy profane hippies who turned my education into one long protest. Then I graduated–barely–and found work on a newspaper full of rowdy profane reporters, where dropping the F bomb was so common the only way to gain prominence was to work it in four times in one sentence. I never achieved that distinction, but I’ve heard it done.
I’ve tried from time to time to clean up my language, but it still erupts, the last time a couple days ago when a light drizzle turning into a cloudburst while I was struggling with an armload of groceries and the key. Why do I still cuss? Because it has become so common that it takes effort not to do so.
That brings me back to Samantha, who landed in hot water when she called Ivanka a “feckless c***.” I saw the skit, and I heard the audience laugh so hard I had trouble hearing what followed. And that right there is why she said it. It gets laughs. Eighty years after Rhett Butler shocked Hollywood with “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” it takes the C word to get a rise. It shouldn’t, because the word is not funny. Neither is all the other foul language that peppers the otherwise excellent monologues. It’s a cheap laugh that keeps getting more expensive because words lose their shock value after a while, and you keep having to come up with worse one to get the same effect.
That’s a shame, because in all the outrage expressed at the poor choice of words, Samantha’s message got drowned out like the tail-end of her tirade. Here was the point. The Trump admininstration is enforcing a heartless policy of separating illegal immigrants from their children. They don’t even have to be illegal immigrants. A woman who went through all the right hoops in applying for political asylum still had her baby taken away from her for four months.
In all the controversy over this practice, Ivanka could not have been more tone deaf in posting a picture of her loving embrace of her own child. It was a lovely picture, really, but it needed a caption, like, “Look, Daddy, mothers and babies belong together.”
Apparently that didn’t occur to her, and it really needed to be pointed out. But there are other words that would say the same thing, like “airhead” or “unthinking dolt.”
It wouldn’t have gotten a big laugh. But it would have made it harder for the Trumpites to completely trample all over the message on their way to lynch the messenger.
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