… in which a 40something white guy tries to talk like a rapper, making fools of himself, his paper, his editors and the people who brought him into this world. Heads up to the Testy Copy Editors for flagging this atrocity.
See, da brotha had some phat new school playaz lined up. Cris was in da house but 5-0 came down hard, wit Macs an’ dogs sniffin fo’ bud so da peeps all bailed.
(The promoter had assembled an impressive lineup of popular hip-hop artists, featuring headline act Ludacris, but a heavy police presence, complete with guns and drug-sniffing dogs, deterred many would-be attendees.)
Home slice was gettin’ Cris at his crib when he gets a dime sayin’ there’s a sitch at the show. ‘Fo he gets back to the areous, all the boyz and shorties rolled. So he’s like, “This is wack.”
(A representative of concert promoter Mojo Entertainment, who declined to give his name, said he went to the hotel where Ludacris was staying to bring him to the fairgrounds. While there, he received a phone call indicating there was a problem. He declined to go into specifics, but said by the time he got back, the concert had been shut down and everyone had left. “We’ve done shows in many cities and never encountered a situation like this,” the nameless spokesman said.)
I’d love to hear the excuses for how such idiocy got in the paper. “But Boss, you told me to make it hipper and more relevant. You know, to get those younger readers.”
Someone on the TCE thread mentioned the “Old white lady translates jive” gag on “Airplane” … which was funny in the context of a movie spoof. In the context of a local news page, with the usual crime, corruption and PTA news, it might be acceptable to lampoon suburban teenage white kids acting like urban black kids … it’d be a lame, tired joke, but not outside the bounds for newspaper columnizing, which is lame and tired by nature (too many column inches to fill, not enough interesting material … a structural flaw evident to everyone except the editors of American newspapers).
There really isn’t much of a context, though, for white adults ridiculing black kids on the local news page. Maybe in 200 years when everybody’s gotten over the sins of the past 200 years, but we aren’t there yet. And junk like this isn’t helping us get there.
UPDATE: Oh, now I get it: Brent Batten is a humorist.
And he writes, now and then, in a self-deprecating manner which suggests we should not take his attempts at humor too seriously. In the interest of being constructive here, I’ll pass along this tip: If your humor columnist hands in copy that is absurdly unfunny, instruct him to go back and address the absurdity. Think of that nutty look Letterman gets on his face when his jokes fall flat. Hilarity ensues because a comic failing to be funny is humor incarnate. But the comic has to make himself the butt of the joke to make it work. (I doubt this would’ve rescued Batten here, but it might’ve helped him realize he was on a comic dead-end.)
UPDATE II: Batten explains himself in Romesko’s letter’s page, where the link to his column originated.