I’m glad he eventually owned up to it. On the other spectrum, with regards to voice over, I don’t agree with Hank Azaria having to stop voicing Apu on the Simpsons. He does dozens of voices of varying nationalities for the sake of satire/parody. Apu’s character is certainly based on old racist stereotypes, but that’s what’s being purposely drawn upon and shown to be inappropriate in reality. It’s a strange disconnect.
I can see that one from both perspectives, but I generally agree. Simpsons suffers from some of the same issues as It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia that by trying to be bombastic and showcase the worst of American excess, sometimes folks don’t realize that the show is skewering those points of view, not treating them as valid. It has an even harder path because it started so much further back than Sunny. Sunny was more of a product of its era whereas the Simpsons was genuinely transgressive in being willing to make Marge and Homer both truly average and truly oblivious to a lot around them.
So thirty years later, what was once transgressive and seeming like it was looking forward can often come off as hackneyed or ill-considered. I mean, I’d say that happens to a lot of progressive television. People still rip on Archie Bunker, but the point of his character (and Marge and Homer, by extension) is that despite their flaws they can grow to be better people. Yet now, from the view of the modern world, a lot of people would see Archie Bunker as completely irredeemable, despite him being written as a character who was meant to reform and be redeemed to an extent.
By extension, Apu looks bad from here in the modern world, but was created with the intent to skewer racism at the time it existed in.
I’m glad he eventually owned up to it. On the other spectrum, with regards to voice over, I don’t agree with Hank Azaria having to stop voicing Apu on the Simpsons. He does dozens of voices of varying nationalities for the sake of satire/parody. Apu’s character is certainly based on old racist stereotypes, but that’s what’s being purposely drawn upon and shown to be inappropriate in reality. It’s a strange disconnect.
I can see that one from both perspectives, but I generally agree. Simpsons suffers from some of the same issues as It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia that by trying to be bombastic and showcase the worst of American excess, sometimes folks don’t realize that the show is skewering those points of view, not treating them as valid. It has an even harder path because it started so much further back than Sunny. Sunny was more of a product of its era whereas the Simpsons was genuinely transgressive in being willing to make Marge and Homer both truly average and truly oblivious to a lot around them.
So thirty years later, what was once transgressive and seeming like it was looking forward can often come off as hackneyed or ill-considered. I mean, I’d say that happens to a lot of progressive television. People still rip on Archie Bunker, but the point of his character (and Marge and Homer, by extension) is that despite their flaws they can grow to be better people. Yet now, from the view of the modern world, a lot of people would see Archie Bunker as completely irredeemable, despite him being written as a character who was meant to reform and be redeemed to an extent.
By extension, Apu looks bad from here in the modern world, but was created with the intent to skewer racism at the time it existed in.