This vintage comedy had plot and characters mostly as an excuse to string a bunch of jokes together, both verbal and visual, and most of the jokes worked, IMO. But some look like offensive clunkers now: the ethnic costume on the Air Israel jet seemed stunningly anti-semitic*; the mincing gay guy at the airport was a homophobic caricature; and the inflatable autopilot groping Lorna Patterson's breasts was classic misogyny. But some of the racial humor seems a bit more complicated, like both sides are in on the joke, or equally the butt of it.
Three examples:
1) The copilot Roger Murdock is played by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. A young white boy comes into the cabin and tells him he looks just like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. The joke is on the kid: silly white people think all black people look alike. But the kid insults Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's basketball career, and the copilot gets angry and says he really is the famous basketball player as he defends himself. So the kid's racial assumption is vindicated--or maybe Roger the copilot is playing into it and making fun of the kid to get rid of him. It seems like it can be read both ways.
2) Two black men are speaking in what the dialog later calls "jive*," in two scenes. The first shows subtitles below them, in an equally ridiculous 50s sitcom tone: "shit" becomes "golly" and so forth. There seem to be jokes going in two directions here: black people talk funny, but white people are pretty stupidly obtuse about it.
(A second scene picks up that same joke without the subtitles, as the flight attendant recruits an older white woman to translate as if it's a completely foreign language they're speaking. Here the humor seems to be an old white woman playing black. That joke seems less even-handed.)
3) Our hero, after his military career, works in the peace corps, setting up an athletics program for an African tribe. His voiceover is full of self-importance, and in the visuals behind him the black actors in movie tribal dress dunk and spin the ball like they've been doing it all their lives. There's a joke here about black people being naturally good at basketball, but also about the obtuse white missionary thinking his culture has something to teach people who have been just fine without him.
The international tv news sketch with the drums just seemed awful, though.
So... any thoughts? Did I misread these jokes? Am I giving the writers too much credit? Or not enough?
* According to this write-up, the two black actors helped write their dialogue, so they were in on the joke. And the film's writers/directors were Jewish, so the airplane visual gag must have been meant fondly.
tl;dr: Some of the jokes do seem offensive, but others went out of their way to play with race in a way that played with expectations without crossing over into racism. Did the writers succeed in telling racial jokes without being racist?
Submitted December 16, 2017 at 07:24AM by jaycatt7 http://ift.tt/2Bf24fV