Amy Winehouse Redeems Herself (For Now)

-- Gina Vivinetto from AfterEllen.com

 

Amy Winehouse was among the many stars performing at a tribute last weekend in honor of  former South African president Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday. When she was finished, according to reports, Winehouse simply bowed her head.

During another part of the concert, 24-year-old Winehouse sang lead in a multi-artist rendition of  the Specials’ early 1980s anti-apartheid anthem “Free Nelson Mandela.”

For all of Winehouse’s drama, she got this show right.  She took to the stage on time and sang beautifully.

 

 

But some may wonder why Winehouse was at the event at all. Earlier this month, a video surfaced of Winehouse and a friend singing a racist ditty. In the video, which was filmed last year by her husband Blake Fielder-Civil,  Winehouse appears disoriented. She’s near a coffee table filled with drug paraphanelia. She is prodded by Blake to sing a slur-filled song to the tune of the children’s ditty "Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes," and does so only after he promises he isn’t filming her. It’s testament to Winehouse’s state of inebriation that she believes that someone aiming a video camera in her face is not filming her.

The same day the video leaked, Winehouse told paparazzi and anyone else standing around her London flat that she was sorry. She said that anyone who knows her and knows of her lifelong love affair with black music , can testify that she is not a racist. (Incidentally, the song included epithets for several ethnic groups but not the dreaded N-word).

Does Winehouse’s quick apology and her appearance at the Mandela event show her true feelings? Do you forgive her?

Ethnic humor is some touchy stuff. Comedians use it with varying results. When Richard Pryor poked fun at white people, it was the comedy equivalent of taking a group, putting them in a gentle headlock and giving them a noogie. Pryor was saying, “Dig yourself. Y’all are some silly people.”

 

 

When Sarah Silverman makes racist jokes, she is understood to be creating an alter ego, she’s poking fun at the kind of people who hold those stereotypes. Of course, not everyone thinks she’s funny. Silverman was infamously lambasted for using the work “Chink” on an episode of Late Night With Conan O’ Brien.

 

 

Margaret Cho’s outsider status as an Asian, sort-of-queer person gives her some space to make comical  observations on different ethnic groups and their wacky ways. Cho also makes fun of her fellow Koreans. But, like Pryor, who Cho calls her hero, her comedy is more about illumination, not condemnation. In other words, Cho’s not mean.

 

 

Unlike Michael Richards. We all remember the fiasco of Seinfeld’s Kramer repeatedly screaming  the N-word in a bizarre tirade at a L.A. comedy club.

When is ethnic humor funny? Who does it right? Is it better to leave jokes like that untold?

Where do you fit in? Do you laugh at jokes that poke fun at different ethnic groups? Do you tell them?