As a bone fide Youtube addict and a fan (mostly) of Jimmy Kimmel, who is the most effective Trump defiant late night comedian left standing, now that Stephen Colbert has been run out of town, the Phantom finds himself in a peculiar and disorienting position.
Kimmel is wonderful when skewering Trump, but he has this bizarre, disturbing twitch in the form of a short, portly, determinedly vapid "sidesick," whose range of responses whenever Kimmel turns to him and asks, "Isn't that right, Guillermo?" covers the space all the way from A to B.
Guillermo responds, almost no matter what the question, with a sprightly, "That's right, Jimmy!" and claps his hands and beams brightly as if he has just been told he has won the nursery school prize for precocious behavior.
What is most disturbing is the look behind his eyes which clearly tells you he has no idea what is going on and he is desperate to cover up that void of understanding with a laugh so pathetic it could deflate blimps.
When I first started watching Kimmel, years ago, I thought Guillermo was one of those Down's syndrome kids who load up groceries into cars outside supermarkets, but he clearly does not have Down's and most Down's kids function at an intellectual level way higher than Guillermo. And, in any case, those kids are doing useful service, and nobody feels sorry for them because they are doing a service, most often cheerfully, and we are all happy to see them thriving.
But Guillermo is an object of pity, or should be, and his incongruous laugh, as he clearly is almost never in on the joke, is so pitiable it is dreadfully sad.
It's as if Kimmel has found a really low functioning mentally retarded (--oh, sorry, politically incorrect--cognitively challenged) child and Kimmel is making him the butt of jokes by asking him if he gets Jimmy's point, which poor Guillermo never does, but then responds with a bright faced, "Thaaat's right, Jimmy!" and everyone in the audience laughs and claps and Guillermo thinks he's done good, and is very pleased with himself.
It is beyond cringe worthy, and it is completely baffling.
Why is Guillermo on that stage?
Why is it okay we are laughing at him, not with him?
On Reddit, people describe this as "racist," but the Phantom thinks they are wrong. We are not laughing at Guillermo because he is Hispanic, or because he speaks with an accent. He's not funny because he is representing some idea of a stupid Mexican. Spanish accents are not stupid. Sophia Vergara has a Spanish accent, but she is sly, funny and enormously attractive. Guillermo is not sly, or funny or even attractive. He is just lost at sea, every night, clinging to a stool on the stage, wondering when the roof will fall in on him. He is perpetually confused, and unable to get the joke. We are not seeing him as a representative of Mexico. We are seeing him as a representative of a person of no intelligence, but his dumb and dumber affect is not sharp enough to be funny.
He is more like a cuddly Labrador. No, he doesn't have a Lab's intelligence. He is more like an eager to please, anxious, child. So he desperately clings to Jimmy, hoping Jimmy will never turn on him.
We are asked to laugh at him because he is not smart enough to get the joke, which strikes the Phantom as simply cruel, the ultimate in what mean girls do to the outsider, as they all laugh as someone or something, and the outsider laughs too, hoping to be accepted as part of the group, but everyone can see the outsider hasn't the foggiest about what is funny, and can never be accepted as anything but the stupid kid. So the mean girls get to ridicule the object of their scorn and they get to ridicule the object which tries to join the scorn club, but never can.
Very disturbing.
No comments:
Post a Comment