Wed 27 Sep 2006
Living with the undead is hard.
Posted by Chris Griswold under Arguments, Holidays, Oakland, Uncategorized
[5] Comments
54C, Craig Street, Oakland:
Girl on cell phone: —I understand. No, I understand. I’m trying to talk to her, but I’m not on vampire time.
— Overheard by Ka-CHANG
Why do you always include the race of people that are being overheard, particuarly non-white people. Does it really matter to the humor?
are you referring to her being a vampire? because there’s clearly no race mentioned in this entry.
Sometimes it does matter. Take this one, for instance: I don’t think “white person time” is as funny as “vampire time”, although the more I sit here repeating “white person time”, the more I’m thinking it might actually be a funny thing to say, perhaps as some sort of battle cry.
The fact of the matter is I probably remove race from more submissions than I include; I am a little surprised by how often that seems relevent to submitters, when perhaps it might not be. As I have said before, on occasion errors or features inherent in submissions may slip past me and make it to page because I edit these when I have had about three hours of sleep in two days. This is how we arrive at comedy gems like, “It’s hard to live with the undead,” which, to be honest, is a little thin on humor.
I think your question ought to be, “why are you such a great person?” because I might enjoy answering such a question. You have my permission to use that as a follow-up.
…Did I leave race on that three-piece suit submission? I’m not really pleased with “Black Guy” as a character name in this case. Yeah, I’m going to go edit that one again, and you’ll see that I won’t even use the euphemism “urban.”
“It’s white person time!” – Ben Grimm, Fantastic Four.
Please note that the inclusion of race by a submitter should not be taken as racist or prejudiced in any way; often, submitters try to provide me with as much detail as possible to make my job easier, and often, I try to cut as little of the information as possible out of appreciation for the time and effort someone spent submitting.
I just need to re-focus my attention on race modifiers. This sort of thing is difficult for me because I don’t see colors like black or white; I just see shades of awesome.
If you have any other entries in mind that you feel use race inappropriately, please send me an e-mail at the address on the main page, and I will take a look at them again.
May we cease the political correctness banter on overheard, please? I come to this blog for candid humor, not an over analytical synopsis of the event. This is Pittsburgh, not D.C.! I expect collectiveness of ‘Burgh outta you people. Chris, your character descriptions are excellent.