Friday, September 6, 2024

Hello! It’s Chris Grace!

First, I should say that while this statement is being released along with Dropout’s statement, my words do not in any way reflect any official position of Dropout’s. I don’t speak on behalf of them, I only speak for myself.

After my special Chris Grace As Scarlett Johansson was posted on Dropout.tv, I saw some comments criticizing me for using a slur. Until I saw these comments, I was not aware that this language was problematic. If I had known, I would not have chosen this word. I’m sorry I used it, and that I used it so casually.

But hey, now I know, and I hate the idea that someone who is watching my special would hear a slur denigrating them. A few commenters even stated they had to turn it off. I can totally relate to this. I’ve given up completely on projects I had affection for when I heard them refer to Chinese people or gay people with slurs. On top of that, I was more disappointed with these projects when they were informed of their problematic language and kept using it even though they knew better.

Thank you to the people who pointed this out; I know better now, and Dropout is going to help me do better. We have removed the occurrences of the word from the special.

Also, I will be modifying the script for the show for live performances from now on. Specifically, I’ll be saying this:

“... where he meets an Inuit family. The mother of this Inuit family was played by the American actor Kathy Bates. Through her warmth, honesty, and subtle brown makeup that made her look just a bit more… ethnic, I learned a very important lesson.”

(I may consider using “Native Alaskan family” here instead. I’ll be doing some research as to what’s best. Part of the problem is that the film North is pretty generic about what kind of background the family actually has.)

A few people have told me, “Why bother changing it? It doesn’t affect that many people.” I’m going to be honest with you here because I think it’s important and I think the situation is more nuanced than you might think.

I don’t think that comedians should automatically modify their language when they offend people. I think that the skill of a comedian is that we should be able to weigh the effects of the language we choose to use, and make decisions about that language based on the nature of those intended effects.

There could very possibly be a situation where I have written a joke that either intentionally or unintentionally hurts someone’s feelings, and then they tell me about it, and then I say, “That’s fine. The cost of it hurting your feelings is a cost I can bear because I still want to say the thing I’m saying.”

This is not one of those times! Do I really want someone to stop watching my special, or even bear the emotional burden of going along with feeling ridiculed while trying to enjoy watching something? Is keeping the joke the way it was written so important that I can’t change it to reflect the new information I have gotten since the special was filmed? Hell no. It’s one line in an hourlong special, and I think I can get just as good a laugh with a slightly modified line, and the new language won’t hurt people.

If I had built an entire ironic structure around that moment, where the use of that word was so important that I had to say it, or the entire chunk would fall apart, I might, as a comedian, decide that the cost-benefits tilted the other way, and I might not change it (although in reality not hypothetical, I’d probably consider removing the chunk altogether, or examining why I felt it was so important to say in the first place, and maybe I’d talk about that “why” instead of actually doing the chunk).

In addition, if that “so important” chunk was living in a special that was about speaking up about things like this, I’d probably think, “Man, this so much mirrors issues I talk about in this special that I should probably behave the way that I would want others to behave and actually listen and respond to the feedback.”

Finally, imagine if as a comedian I thought, “Welp, I can’t possibly write anything different or better than the way it’s worded now, so I guess I have to just live with using a slur because I can’t get a laugh without it.” What a disheartening perspective!

The bottom line is that some of you stood up and said, “Hey, this is not cool.” Given the themes and context of the special, it was obvious we needed to make this change.

Thanks for telling me how to pronounce “Tems”.

Chris