In the face of accusations that Donald Trump was holding a rally at Madison Square Garden that echoed a Nazi rally at the same site in 1939, one comedian took it upon himself to tell jokes about Latinos, Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and Jews, making the job of the Harris campaign much easier.
Every cycle, we get presidential candidates pledging that despite the stark divisions in the country, they will be “a president for all Americans.”
In his convention speech, Trump pledged, “I am running to be president for all of America, not half of America.” In her convention speech, Harris made the same pledge: “I promise to be a president for all Americans.”
If you want to be a president for all Americans, and if you want to win votes among Latinos, you should not have one of the opening speakers at your Madison Square Garden rally — a “comedian” named Tony Hinchcliffe — tell a so-called joke like, “These Latinos, they love making babies, too, just know that. They do. They do. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside, just like they did to our country.”
Watch it for yourself, if you don’t believe me.
Residents of Puerto Rico are U.S. citizens, and roughly 6 million Americans living in the U.S. have Puerto Rican heritage, including quite a few in Pennsylvania. If you want to be a president for all Americans, and if you want to win votes among Puerto-Rican Americans, you should not feature a speaker who “jokes,” “I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah, I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”
The Trump campaign made the bare-minimum effort to distance itself from that particular joke. “Late Sunday, senior Trump advisor Danielle Alvarez issued a statement saying, ‘This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign,’ in apparent reference to Hinchcliffe’s comment about Puerto Rico.” If only Trump himself could denounce that joke with one-quarter of the emotion he denounces, say, Taylor Swift.
If you want to be a president for all Americans, and in particular, if you want to win votes among African Americans, you should not feature a speaker who “jokes,” while pointing to someone in the crowd, “It’s cool, black guy with a thing on his head. What the hell is that, a lampshade? Look at this guy! Oh, my goodness, wow. I’m just kidding, that’s one of my buddies, he had a Halloween party last night. We had fun, we carved watermelons together.”
Watermelons, get it?
There are quite a few Americans who care about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthi, and Iranian attacks against Israel.
“Ukraine versus Russia, Israel versus Pal — it’s like bad soccer games. Who even cares?” Hinchcliffe “joked.”
“We’re all thinking the same thing,” he said. “Settle your stuff already. Best out of three, rock, paper, scissors. You know the Palestinians are going to throw rock every time. You also know the Jews have a hard time throwing that paper, you know what I’m saying?”
Note that while the crowd wasn’t exactly loving Hinchcliffe’s routine, they didn’t boo him off the stage, either.
Those of us who object to these “jokes” will be told that we have no sense of humor, that we’re all just a bunch of dour scolds. Or we’ll be told that we just don’t get Hinchcliffe’s edgy comedy, and that we’re stodgy snobs. Or someone will point to some other comedian who supports Democrats and makes ugly, unfunny “jokes” and say that because those other jokes didn’t get a sufficient level of denunciation, anyone who denounces Hinchcliffe’s routine is a hypocrite.
We’ll be told that declaring, “These jokes are unfunny and offensive and belonged nowhere near the stage of Madison Square Garden” is a form of “cancel culture.”
But we all have our own internal sense of what’s over the line. And I don’t think you should joke in any circumstance that Latinos “come inside, just like they did to our country” (note that two-thirds of Hispanic Americans were born in the United States), or that Puerto Rico is an island of garbage or that blacks like watermelons or that Jews love money, and even if you are dense on the level of osmium and can’t grasp why those jokes are offensive, you really shouldn’t do this at a political rally for the candidate you want to elect.
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