Yesterday and Today It was hilarious whenever Fred Sanford of the hit series Sanford and Son used to fake his heart attack saying that famous phrase, “I’m coming Elizabeth” or what about him telling Aunt Ester how ugly she was. No one took that type of comedy to the heart and it was intended to hurt no one. It was all for a laugh. Now in today’s time there are new shows on television such as The Chapelle Show, which is hosted and directed by the comedian Dave Chapelle. The object of this show seems to be how much fun he can make of a different race. Times have changed and so have peoples’s ince of humor.
People went from the laid-back type sitcoms such as Sanford and Son, The Three Stooges, and The Little Rascals, which are all types of shows that people can watch with their entire family, to shows even adults feel turned away from. Some examples include The Chapelle Show and In Living Color. Fred Sanford never meant any harm by acting as if he did not understand Officer Hoppy’s (the white cop) way of explaining things. Officer Smitty (the black cop) would always have to translate it so that Fred was able to understand what was going on. In the episode “We ” ve Been Robbed”, Fred is cleaning up the place and accidentally knocks over Lamonts’ (his partner in business and thirty-four year old son) porcelain and glass collection.
Fred acts as if they had been robbed whenever his son gets home and he informs Lamont that the two robbers were white. (Ruben) This was probably overlooked by most of the viewers not thinking twice about it. People thought laughter was good and Fred Sanford made them laugh without using all of the cuss words he knew to do it. These days, people think that cursing and making fun of people of other races is funny and that is just what The Chapelle Show does.
The show comes on every Wednesday night at nine-thirty central time on comedy central with other discriminating shows such as South Park. South Park is a good example of racial discrimination because the only black character on there is a cook for a school. Boy that is one hell of a job. Chapelle tops them all though with skits such as The Racial Draft. In this skit he makes fun of every race there is. In most of his episodes he tries to depict the life of most white people by mocking the way they talk, the way they walk, and the way they live.
Fred Sanford never downed a person of a different color. In fact, he let a homeless white man stay with him in one episode. All the discrimination is meant to be funny, but a lot of people are offended by these racial gestures made today in shows that come on the television. There is no doubt that most people would be offended if they had seen the episode of The Chapelle Show where Dave uses the word “nigger.” (Lichter and Amundson) Fred would have never used that word in any of his work. Sanford and Son, which was originally aired on NBC, put 135 episodes together between the years of 1972 to 1977 before moving on over to TV Land. The man responsible for all the laughs Fred brought us was a man by the name of Aaron Ruben.
(Ruben) Dave Chapelle is just in his second season but is still making people bust a lung laughing, just in a different way than Fred used to do it. Chapelle made his television debut on a show called Comedy Central Standup in 1994, and he still calls Comedy Central his home. (Barnhart 2) Times have changed and so have the people. It is a new generation as well as a new outlook on comedy. Fred Sanford used to make people laugh by just being an average, everyday guy where Dave makes fun of the average guy and gets just as much laughter as Fred did back in his day. Works Cited Sanford and Son DVD collection.
Aaron Ruben. Red Foxx and Demand Wilson. NBC, 1972-1977 Lichter, Robert and Amundson, Daniel. “On racial discrimination on television.” 13 Jan. 1999. web Mark.
“TV’s Racial History.” The Kansas City Star 15 Jan. 2002.