On the Campus - March 24, 1999
Website Exclusives...
Chris Rock comes
to Princeton
A comedy-act full of politically incorrect
errors
by Nancy Smith '00
" Princeton. " With a chuckle and a
shake of his head, this is how Chris Rock began his February 18 performance
to a sell-out crowd in Dillon Gymnasium. The audience went wild, cheering
and shrieking as much out of pride for their university as in anticipation
of what the comedian would say in the next hour, and how the traditionally
conservative, serious, andat timesprovincial campus would react.
That is just about the only line of Rock's monologue that can be reprinted in a mainstream publication, much less the paw. Chris Rock's blatant, no-holds-barred, in-your-face humor can perhaps best be described as "off-color." Having made a name for himself as the African-American comedian who tells jokes about "niggahs," Rock has also made millions at it. The first joke he told in Dillon drew on his success, noting that while many members of his audience would hit the books after the show, Rock would drive away in a Porsche, having only attained a G.E.D.
Many might wonder how well Princeton students are able to relate to Rock, who draws on personal experience in the racially segregated ghetto and uses humor to illuminate de facto racism in American society. One comment, "I was the only black kid in my grade," drew cheers of understanding and solidarity from a segment of the crowd, causing at least this white student to pause and consider what that might be like, and what it might be like to be black at Princeton. But an instant later, riotous laughter snapped me back into the heady moment, as the row of plaid-shirted white guys sitting in front of me rocked back in their folding chairs under the weight of unrestrained guffaws.
Half of what makes Chris Rock so intriguing is how successfully he has defied entrenched racial taboos to appeal to white and black audiences alike. Where 50 years ago whites and blacks did not sit together on buses or use the same drinking fountains, today they sit shoulder to shoulder in crowded auditoriums, laughing together. Yet Rock's act resonates more than through the unison of laughter; that white people laugh and nod appreciably at his colloquial renditions of the "black-people mall" and the "ghetto grocery store" shows a deepening acknowledgment of the problems of segregated communities and the economic glass ceiling.
BOY DOES HE OFFEND
But another side of Chris Rock is his potential to offend. Reducing a woman's weighty decision to have an abortion to a simple choice between short-term medical costs, Rock distills the divisive issue this way: "It costs $5,000 to deliver a baby. It costs $1,500 to have an abortion. Face it: It's either Jimmy or cable." Further, his characterizations of male-female relationships center around graphic sexual dominance, putting the woman on her knees before her manin the physical as well as the psychological sense.
His humor oscillates between refreshing disregard for political correctness and a cold slap in the face of social dignity, and people line up for his performances, in the case of his Princeton appearance, as much as four hours before scheduled curtain time. Like moviegoers at a horror flick, people are excited and titillated by what they see and hear. Goodbye to the politically correct.
On the Princeton campus, where daily interactions are rooted in a firm middle ground of codified respect, Chris Rock found no exception, profiting from the fact that we literally have to buy tickets to witness anything different. Certainly very few would wish for a wholesale exchange of Princeton's norms for Rock's pejorative outlook; nobody wants their preceptor to ask them for the "redneck" point of view on slavery or how a "ho" feels about single motherhood. In contrast, a diverse community like Princeton presents all of us with the challenge of how to deal with other groups most respectfully, which is clearly positive. But when this challenge is taken too far, as many have argued in the case of the political correctness movement, many are dangerously tempted to give up on the whole concept of multiculturalism out of frustration. The all-consuming questions of whether to say "blacks" or "African-Americans" or whether it's acceptable to use "he" as a gender-neutral pronoun have become a source of anguish and awkward embarrassment; a dangerous result of all this sensitivity is that many have come to consider respect too much of a burden.
What Chris Rock shows us is that it is possible to break down our oversensitivities through humor. Even those who grimaced at many of his sexual references or whose first impulse was to become indignant at his "racist" or "sexist" comments couldn't help but smirk a little too. Rock brings us closer to reality by removing the politically sterilized terms that we use to inoculate real societal problems. Whether we call it a "ghetto" or an "inner city" does nothing to change the reality of a run-down neighborhood; it only alters the frame through which we perceive it.
CAN WE LAUGH?
As I left Dillon Gymnasium a few weeks ago, I pondered what life would be like, on campus and off, if we could give each other the freedom to laugh without constantly worrying about offending each other. In our use of hyphenated labels, whose wordy precision has permeated our language and our precepts, we are sending each other a message that every joke must by definition be at someone else's expense, and that there is no such thing as laughing with someone instead of at him (or her). In a multicultural society, it is admittedly a fine line to draw, and the stakes are high. And in the case of Princeton in particular, it is probably too much to ask that an Ivy-league community not overanalyze everything. Still, the simplistic idealist in me sometimes wonders if we're only making things worse by our hypersensitivity, and if the world might be a little more harmonious if we could only laugh at ourselves once in awhile.
(illustration by Chris Brooks)
Jacketgate
Another president survives a scandal
By Daniel A. Grech '99
An incautious president. A zealous independent investigator. A leak
to the press. Scandal! A non-apology. Constituency outrage. A vote with
a predictable outcome. An embattled yet enduring president.
No, not Bill: Grace. While Clinton fought for his political life, Grace Maa, the president of the senior class and chair of the Honor Committee, was embroiled in her own scandal -- over a beer jacket.
Early in the new year the Class of 1999 voted online for its Reunions beer jacket. On Friday, January 15, Maa announced by e-mail the winning design: a jacket with 99 bottles of beer on the back, playing off the drinking song.
Seniors were shocked by their collective bad taste. "Upon hearing the news of our senior jacket design, my stomach began rumbling painfully, my hair straightened, my blood boiled, and my entire body quivered in disapproval," wrote Emanuel Orlando in an e-mail to Maa. "'99 bottles, take one down and pass it around' is the most obnoxious, juvenile, inelegant, ludicrous design I could possibly imagine. I know equally obnoxious, meathead students voted on this, but c'mon Grace, how did you let such a travesty occur?!!"
J.B. Wolcott II was so embarrassed by the result that on Saturday night he started an e-mail petition contesting the design. In 36 hours, 485 seniors -- 40 percent of the class -- signed it. Among the objections listed on the petition: the design is "tacky," the beer jacket promotes drinking, and the online vote was insecure, so that a single student could vote multiple times.
At 4:53 a.m. Monday, while a bleary-eyed Wolcott was still counting names, Maa sent an epic, 1,500-word e-mail to the senior class. The third paragraph announced a beer-jacket revote. The other 14 paragraphs explained in laborious detail that the class officers had disregarded the original online vote and chosen the winning jacket themselves. Maa sent the e-mail after learning The Daily Princetonian was leading with a story on the rigged vote.
In Monday's Prince, a disgruntled member of the jacket committee leaked that the actual winner, with 190 of 560 votes, was a military-style black jacket with a vertical orange stripe and a large Princeton shield on the back. Not only did "99 Bottles" not come in first, it didn't even finish second; it came in third out of five designs, with fewer than half the votes of the winning jacket. The senior-class fashion police breathed a sigh of relief.
Maa declined comment about the rigged vote in the Prince article, leaving it to a jacket-committee member to explain. It was all just a big misunderstanding, he said: Students were wrong to assume they were actually choosing a jacket when they voted. In fact, as Maa noted in her e-mail, the vote only provided "a guide source" for the class's jacket preference.
In her early-morning e-mail, Maa sounded a "positive note" by lecturing on alcohol abuse: "We must begin to realize that irresponsible behavior affects not only ourselves but also those around us. We must individually and collectively take responsibility for our actions." These bizarre lines, lessons more appropriate to the class officers' abuse of power than the senior class's drinking, replaced the apology that Maa never offered.
She did emphasize, though, that the beer jacket is trivial: "People should step back and see this jacket as just a jacket. Pieces of inexpensively designed fabric. Won't win any fashion awards, won't make you look more attractive to members of the opposite sex."
So trivial, in fact, that 485 seniors -- more than had elected Maa president -- signed Wolcott's petition, mostly because they thought "99 Bottles" was in bad taste. Wolcott guesses that if students had known the vote was rigged when the results were announced, stomachs wouldn't simply have rumbled. Blood would have been spilled. "They would've come knocking on Grace's door."
The class held another vote, this time on paper, and the black jacket won handily with 203 of 493 votes. Last in the field of five was "99 Bottles," with 26 meathead votes. The scandal was over.
Or so we thought. On Tuesday, February 2, the day of the revote, the Prince irresponsibly published an open letter to Maa written 10 days earlier by four seniors. The letter's critique of Maa's abuse of power and her condescending e-mail was undercut by its use of adjectives like "pathetic," "disgusting," and "nauseating." The letter ended on the "one good thing" coming out of the scandal: "[Maa] single-handedly united a fractured senior class around a mutual disbelief in the utter incompetence of our class administration."
The letter-writers were half right. We united, but not in disbelief. It was pure aesthetic revolt. Two-fifths of the senior class rallied under the banner of "How tacky!" This in an era when students have next to nothing to be angry about, at a university where, two weeks later, only 250 students took part in a protest against other pieces of inexpensively designed fabric -- university-licensed apparel manufactured using sweatshop labor. "The jacket is trivial and that's why it's easy to rally around," Wolcott explains. "If it's trivial, you feel like you can do something about it, that you can make a difference."
Daniel A. Grech's e-mail address is dangrech@princeton.edu.
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