Damon Wayans
Michael Richards wasn’t being funny when he used the “N-word” on the stage at the Laugh Factory in mid-November. On Sunday night, December 3, 2006, another television star stepped onto the stage and used the same word as part of his routine, and got very different results:
Comedy, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and there was a rather prominent six-letter hole in the air at the Laugh Factory on Sunday night. It was the West Hollywood club’s weekly showcase of mostly African American comedians — the first “Chocolate Sundaes” show since the club banned the N-word after Michael “Kramer” Richards’ now-infamous vocabulary malfunction.
At least there was a hole until comedian-actor Damon Wayans took the stage.
“Give yourselves a big round of applause for coming down and supporting ‘[N-word ]Night,’ ” Wayans said, using the word itself, to gasps and laughs. The producers “tried to prep me backstage — ‘Don’t say the N-word.’ They’re going to fine me.” Wayans sprinkled folded bills across the stage floor, green confetti at his feet. “How much you want?” he asked, looking at club owner Jamie Masada, who sat with his head in his hands at his table in a back corner of the intimate room’s main floor.
Anger bubbled just beneath the surface.
“I’ll be damned if the white man uses that word last,” Wayans said, then he went on to use the word 15 more times during a 20-minute routine that suggested Richards apologize personally to O.J. Simpson — “If I Killed Michael Richards, This Is How I Did It” — envisioned Jesus Christ as ethnic stereotypes, cracked offensive jokes about gays in church, lambasted the Iraq war as another fight by whites against dark-skinned people and mocked white celebrities who adopt black children. If they really want to help, he said, “give the … father some money” to improve the family’s life.
It’s ok for black people to call themselves the n-word and disrespect each other but when someone else says it, it’s a tragedy. I realize what Richards did was wrong and all. however, if you want people not to use the word why use it yourself and then get angry when someone else uses it? It’s not like Richards was around during enslavement whipping black people with a belt because they’re not doing their work.
The theory that if the “in” people use the word, the sting gets taken out of it. Still women of a certain age bristle at the word bitch, and all people should bristle at the N-word. Why can’t it be taken out of the lexicon so we can begin paving a road forward, linguistically, on which someday the end of racism will travel to its very needed end.
The fact is, the “N” word is not going anywhere. It is here to stay. No one loves, but everyone admires it. Something so negative becomes mocked in the face of the creators of it, and yet a controversy when white people use it. That is the real problem. Who cares what Oprah or Jesse Jackson opinions are, when the rest of of the world of color has embraced the word. If you are a black person, I believe you can carry it around like a policeman with his gun, just be careful and mindful who you aim it at, because some people might shoot back.