It’s OK for Comedians to be racist, but not the Comedy Club, right?

I’ve seen many comedy acts, many live, some pre-recorded and others on YouTube. Almost always, the comedians throw in a racist joke, if not a whole segment dedicated to ethnic accents and taboo deeds of different cultures. To make my point, Chris Rock always makes fun of white people; Russell Peters always does the Asian accents and makes sexist comments; Anjelah Johnson is known for her Asian nail salon piece; and other guys like Larry the cable guy, Dane cook...

Now these guys are hilarious, I love them… I laugh and cry till my stomach hurts. Their chosen subject is often ‘racism’ but somehow I don’t seem to mind as much as I do when the comedy club itself is racist.

The other day, my friends and I visited a local comedy club on Friday night. We entered after the act had begun, but we were respectful and quiet. It was a mixed crowd of college students and older folks, and the comedian himself was OK, dry humor I would say. Every time the crowd broke into laughter, we did too. But every now and then we found something funny which was not in synchronization with the rest of the crowd. What do you do then? You laugh, cause its funny and you are there to amuse yourself! And every other table showed their own insensitive expression at different times. But our waiter was being a pain in the neck. He stood behind us and shooshed us continuously… until we were annoyed and decided to leave.

We got outside the show area and decided to speak to the manager about it. Of course we were being singled out… what right does the waiter have to ask us to not laugh in a comedy club?

(I am not mentioning the venue here, cause I don’t want to give the racist comedy club any more publicity – even if it’s bad. But I will say that in the following days, I made some angry calls to the club and voiced my opinion. I wrote some honest reviews on their website too. They eventually apologized. But I thought that it was an interesting paradox to write about.)

So yes, as unfortunate as it is, comedians can be racist, because they joke about stereotypical groups of people. But the comedy club that lets them perform should NOT.