Christopher Hitchens Calls Wanda Sykes “The Black Dyke”

Wanda Sykes has been the subject of a lot of lame pathos over the last few days: did she cross the line by hoping Rush Limbaugh would die at the White House correspondent’s dinner, and did Obama endorse that by laughing? Did Jonah Goldberg cross his arms and frown hard enough at just how boring and unfunny all this was? I honestly have no idea, beyond not much caring.

So, leave it to Christopher Hitchens to drunkenly put the whole thing in perspective:

By the end of the night, Christopher Hitchens was of course the last man (barely) standing, and he had some choice words for the evening’s headlining comedian, Wanda Sykes. “The president should be squirming in his seat. Not smiling,” he said. “The black dyke got it wrong. No one told her the rules.”

This has got to be the most inspired bit of performance art I’ve encountered in a long time. It’s at once: b) offensive, b) making light of the idea of being offensive, like comedy often does and c) being deadly serious about how inappropriate it is to make light of being offensive.

I honestly wish that, instead of days of cable news kvetching over this completely predictable and ridiculous non-issue, that we instead would simply feature a clip of Hitchens mumbling this all on camera, then cut to a startled, speechless broadcaster, and then simply change the subject to something actually important without any further comment on the matter whatsoever.

Speaking of which, what planet is Jonah Goldberg living on? Here he is complaining that Wonkette’s report on the NRO table mischaracterized their reactions to Sykes:

I did really like this bit:

During Wanda Sykes, they literally sat there holding their disapproving, shaking heads in their hands. I would’ve thrown my wine at them if I didn’t need it to keep my buzz going. In retrospect, I should’ve just kicked him in the nuts.

Anyway, this is not true either. I didn’t have my shaking head in my hands. Kathryn did as she was legitimately upset with the course of the evening. Me? I was mostly bored because Sykes wasn’t, you know, funny. To the extent my head was down it was probably because I was looking at my iPhone or leaning in to whisper to Kathryn or Ramesh so as to not bother others at our table.

So wait, what exactly does Goldberg mean by “this is not true either?” He straight out agrees that it was true for at least one member of his party, and then proceeds to propose an alternate theory of the crime for his own downy, shaky head. The folks at Wonkette may or may not be, as Goldberg puts it, “mouthbreathers,” but geez, guy, cut them some slack if you’re going to basically cop to acting out exactly the scene they described.

~ by Drew on 2009/05/14.