The Palace: Like Stuff It, White People, Chapters 9 and 10

Previously on The Palace: Bushism

Revisit previous chapters of this Palace arc:
Chapter 0
Chapter 0.5
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8

The Palace: Like Stuff It, White People, Chapter 8

Previously on The Palace: Numa's own

The Palace: Like Stuff It, White People, Chapter 6

Previously on The Palace: Cable channels that look like they were named after Jewish aunts

The Palace: Like Stuff It, White People, Chapter 0.5

BicoastalBitchin bitchslaps racist hipsters

The best post I read this week comes from the Asian American blog BicoastalBitchin. Their March 27 post about the only kinds of Asians who are represented in Vice magazine ranks with King of the Hill's "Lady and Gentrification" episode, the SuperNews! "Hipsters in Space" short and My Boys' "Douchebag in the City" ep as a great and inspired moment of hipster-bashing:

1. Hot Asian girl.
2. Asian girl of any look, as long as she's coked out and sweaty next to a white guy in an abandoned warehouse party.
3. Asian dude who may or may not be recently Fresh Off the Boat or in some crazy, embarrassing situation. Or an ultra-uber-super hipster dude (see #19 for an "Asian dude rockin' a marching band jacket" DO'S). But mostly losers getting a DON'T.

Please click through each category to get a link to the pic/caption. It won't take you long to figure out that Vice writers are all mid-twenties, hipster-geek, Asian fetish having, small east coast liberal arts college alumni from New Haven/Palos Verdes with tons of family money wasted away on blow and PBRs in their Williamsburg/Echo Park studio apartment shared by 4, but only until they're sick of NYC/LA and decide to take over their dad's multi-million dollar ad agency.

The Renfrew character in my webcomic The Palace is based on these pretentious, skeevy and yellow fever-afflicted douches who--as the BcB folks note in other posts--enjoy racist hipster eyewear (or tees) that they defend as "ironic" and dress like they don't give a damn.

Jim Gaffigan, the whitest cat u'know

Throughout this year, I'm posting older material--like non-Blogspot stuff from a few years ago, unpublished writing I've kept buried in my computer and transcripts of interviews from A Fistful of Soundtracks' terrestrial radio years.

Here's another one from my archives, an alternate version of a 2006 plug for Jim Gaffigan, who's gotten me hooked on bacon again, and whose latest Comedy Central special, King Baby, premieres this Sunday night.

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The moment you hear the words "airline" and "peanuts," you know you're trapped in a room with a bad observational stand-up (or an ancient Evening at the Improv rerun full of 10 of them). On the other hand, a really good observational stand-up is someone like Indiana-born Jim Gaffigan.

Like other observational comics, Gaffigan fixates on food, but not on exhausted food-related topics like peanuts, Taco Bell or that other '80s classic, Grape Nuts ("What is the deal? It's neither a grape nor a nut!"). His favorite punching bag is Hot Pockets, which are like calzones if they were made by a crackhead and come complete with a jingle that makes "By Mennen!" sound like Kid A ("Hoooot Pocket!").

Gaffigan frequently beats up on his own appearance, like another self-deprecating paleface, Conan O'Brien. He's turned his whiteness into the key gag for a series of cheapo and very funny superhero cartoon spoofs created for Late Night with Conan O'Brien. In Pale Force, a buffed-up Gaffigan and his cowardly sidekick Conan (both voiced by Gaffigan) strike fear into the hearts of evildoers with their pale skin and laser-firing nipples. The next episode of Pale Force ought to be a celebrity deathmatch between the melanin-challenged men of steel and those albino twins from The Matrix, with Powder as the referee.

In an avclub.com interview, Gaffigan said he doesn't curse anymore onstage. "Clean stand-up comedy" are three words that often scare people away, though not as badly as "Kevin Federline rapping." What's unique about Gaffigan is that he got funnier as he did away with the profanity, which is like Richard Pryor in reverse. At about the same time as the F-words vanished, he developed a falsetto "inner voice" character--an unamused, prissy female audience member commenting on Gaffigan's jokes. It's become an audience favorite. With his clever riffs on junk food, religion and Tom from MySpace-style yellow fever ("I only dated one Asian girl, but she was very Asian. She was a panda"), Gaffigan proves that curse-free observational humor doesn't have to suck like, well, a Hot Pocket.