Racial Satire Quotes

Never mind what you've heard. Halle Berry was not the first black woman to win an Academy Award for Best Actress. She was actually the 74th white one. And never mind all this talk about America electing its first black President; Barack Obama is actually the 44th white man to hold the job.

When I first started comedy, me and my friends were kids. I claim - although I know that it's a spurious and probably untrue claim - that we were the first generation of kids to act black.

Sydney Poitier, who said to Lester Maddox, Guess who's not coming to dinner? Never got a dinner!

Golf is a game where white men can dress up as black pimps and get away with it.

PIGMY, n. One of a tribe of very small men found by ancient travelers in many parts of the world, but by modern in Central Africa only. The Pigmies are so called to distinguish them from the bulkier Caucasians - who are Hogmies.

I want to be on a show that's not sensitive to racial jokes; I want to be on one where they call me everything and I call them right back. There's blatant racism going both ways. That's what we need.

I extract what I consider the best material from different sources. But often the material I perform comes from a very strange location in history, which are minstrel shows.

Just reading that - just reading that a person can be black and still perform in blackface, making fun of black people for a living, and at the same time be a genius and be an incredible entertainer and at the same time be extremely conflicted and feel like - just feel terrible for doing that, essentially, which is what Bert Williams felt, from what I gather, from what I read - all of that just made - was so incredible to me.

I said, 'Oh, I know. If the white folks is in Heaven too, then the black angels were in the kitchen, preparing the milk and honey.'

We are now the proud owners of a white boy. Now we have to shop in the caucasian isle and get sunscreen, mayonaise and mild salsa because the other ones really hawt!

One thing I hate in ethnic comedy is giving the audience the opportunity to laugh in a racist way at a thing. A lot of times dwarf comedians will do that, Arab comics, and gay comics will do it; everyone is laughing, but they're not laughing at the joke, they're laughing at this crazy character.

People are so sensitive about race that they can't hear someone speaking about their life in a very true way, or doing satire or political parody.

Barack Obama may be black, but John McCain is the first Albino presidential candidate: he's completely see-through!

Lampooning racism by reproducing brazenly racist imagery is a pretty dubious satirical tactic.

The first joke I got on the air I remember clearly. Dennis McNicholas and Robert Carlock wrote a sketch where they were evacuating the Titanic, and the last two guys on the entire ship were the two black guys, Samuel L. Jackson and Tracy Morgan. So Will Ferrell was running back and forth, saying, "All first-class passengers get in the lifeboat. All second-class passengers and third-class passengers get in the lifeboat. Let's get all the animals in the lifeboat. Let's put all the empty luggage in the lifeboat."

Once, I was doing Bon Qui Qui in Miami, and this black girl was in the audience, and she yelled out, 'That's not funny!' which was really funny because she sounded exactly like the character I was playing.

From 'Chappelle's Show' to 'Tosh.0,' there's so much race comedy. It's overdone.

America sometimes resembles, at least from the point of view of a black man, an exceedingly monotonous minstrel show; the same dances, same music, same jokes. One has done (or been) the show so long that one can do it in one’s own sleep.

I remember when I first saw Whoopi Goldberg doing standup, and she was wearing a sheet on her head, basically pretending to be this little white girl with long luxurious blonde hair. Everyone can relate to that. It's an oral history of black women's lives through laughter.

I adore 'Broad City,' but the one Latino is queer for jokes. You see queerness of Latinos in this emasculated with an accent or fez on a set '70s show. It's always like, 'Ha, ha, funny emasculated immigrants.'

I think when black performers performed in blackface, they were kind of taking back slave songs, but it was still a little bit iffy because they were performing, a lot of times, for white audiences who found it hilarious.

I have a pilot called The Re-Education of Oliver Cooper starring the white kid from Project X where follows a black girl to a black university, like in Legally Blonde. I have so many fun projects.