Ethnic humor: Tips for Dr. Laura

"Turn on HBO, listen to a black comic, and all you hear is "'nigger, nigger, nigger'," Dr. Laura Schlessinger observed on the August 10 program that provoked her departure from the airwaves. "I don't get it. If anybody without enough melanin says it, it's a horrible thing. But when black people say it, it's affectionate. It's very confusing."

When Dr. Laura said, "I don't get it," she was being facetious. Her role as a talk show self-help advisor is not to listen to her callers but to lecture them. "I don't get it" was her rhetorical way of insisting that she does get it— that she perceives a double standard that permits black people to use expressions that are verboten for whites.

But Dr. Laura was right in the literal sense: She really doesn't get it. As someone who has practiced journalism, humor writing and speechwriting for a living, let me attempt to set her straight about the rules of rhetoric, which also happen to be the rules of common sense.

The rabbi, or the minister?

Rule Number One: When you deprecate yourself or your group, it's amusing and endearing. When you deprecate other people or groups, it's mean and malicious. If you want to have fun, point your gibes in your own direction, not someone else's.

I once wrote a speech for a corporate executive who proposed to tell a joke about a rabbi. This particular joke would have worked just as well using any other clergyman as its butt, regardless of religion. So I persuaded the executive to joke instead about a Methodist minister— and to preface the joke by telling his audience that his own father was a Methodist minister (which he was).

The joke was well received. Had I told it, I would have used the rabbi.

Except….

Real Polish jokes

Rule Number Two: It's OK for underdogs to make fun of overdogs. Humor, after all, is one of the few tools the poor and the meek possess to make it through their otherwise gloomy days.

So, yes, it's OK for the poor to tell jokes about the rich and powerful but not vice versa. It's similarly OK for blacks to make jokes about whites, for women to make jokes about men, and for gays to make jokes about straights, but not the other way around.

This isn't a matter of political correctness; it's a matter of plain good sense. Among other things, this rule explains why Jon Stewart, who needles the pompous, is funny, while Rush Limbaugh, who tweaks welfare recipients, is not.

The "Polack jokes" that swept America in the late "'60s failed precisely because they ridiculed the ignorant poor. My antidote for this mean-spirited exercise was to collect real Polish jokes told by real Poles in Poland— jokes that were invariably directed not at people who neglect to wash their underwear but at Poland's Soviet and Communist oppressors.

Oppressed anti-Semites

Granted, reasonable people often differ as to who is the underdog in a given situation. Corporate executives making millions sincerely believe themselves the persecuted victims of greedy unions and power-hungry government bureaucrats. Jews and anti-Semites alike perceive themselves as oppressed by the other. Ditto for conservatives and liberals. Many white middle-class Americans sincerely believe themselves oppressed by blacks and the poor. (See, for example, publisher Herb Lipson's "Off the Cuff" column almost any month in Philadelphia Magazine.) Indeed, I am one of only 23 people in the entire world who don't believe themselves the victim of some malign persecution.

But still— most of us can smell nastiness when we hear it. Which brings me to….

"'General Betray-Us'

Rule Number Three: Don't criticize or ridicule people for things they can't control. Such characteristics include someone's name, age, nationality, race, family background, relatives and physical appearance. If you violate this rule, you'll merely engender sympathy for your target while reflecting poorly on yourself.

Case in point: In 2007 the anti-war liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org published a full-page ad in the New York Times that labeled General David H. Petraeus "General Betray-Us" because the general was allegedly "cooking the books for the White House." Whatever valid point the MoveOn folks might have made was undermined by their bad-mannered attack on the general's name. (Indeed, MoveOn subsequently erased all such references from its website.)

Surname abuse abounds on the left and right alike, as witness Rush Limbaugh's recent attack on "Imam Hussein Obama." Obama didn't choose his politically problematic name, and he deserves some credit for hanging on to it— unlike, say Ralph Lauren, who was born Ralph Lipschitz. (When your surname is Rottenberg, you're especially sensitive about this issue.)

Another case in point: The former Philadelphia Daily News columnist Pete Dexter once dismissed a young critic of Mayor Frank Rizzo with this put-down: "Noel Weyrich is 21 years old and in love with his mind." Years later, Dexter's 2007 anthology, Paper Trails, joked about his wife's "tiny titties." Ask yourself: Do these cheap shots endear you to Dexter or to his targets?

My publisher's lesson

I learned this lesson from one of the wisest people I've ever met: my first boss, Hugh Ronald, the late publisher of the daily Commercial-Review in Portland, Ind. When that paper's editor resigned to take another job in 1966, I was second in command in the newsroom. But I was only 23 and less than two years out of college.

In the normal course of affairs, Hugh would have searched elsewhere for a new editor. Instead he took the extraordinary gamble of promoting me to the editor's chair, making me for a while the youngest daily newspaper editor in the country.

"You know," Hugh told me on the night he offered me the editorship, "a lot of people in town are going to criticize me for doing this. They're going to say you're too young for this job— and they're right." Then he chuckled and added, "But that's not your fault."

It's a rule I've tried to live by ever since: Don't criticize people for things that aren't their fault.

So should Dr. Laura be silenced and/or removed from the airwaves? I wouldn't. She may be wrong, but she expresses views that are widely held; and by raising them in public she offers those who differ (like me) the opportunity to respond. If she really gets canned because of this incident, I invite her to take her provocations to Broad Street Review— assuming, of course, that she can tell me something I don't already know.♦


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