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Your Black Life: SNL’s Paterson Sketch ‘Blind’ To Plight Of The Visually Impaired
SNL’s Bigoted Paterson Sketch Falls Flat
By: Tolu Olorunda
Staff Writer – YourBlackWorld.com
In a highly distasteful Saturday Night Live sketch, depicting New York Gov David Paterson as a New Jersey-hating, wandering, drug-loving, blind buffoon, many found comedic value. As the studio audience applauded and cheered, even with the Paterson-impersonator equating blindness with “something awful,” the mock-fest increasingly drew deeper into the well of immorality. However, others were not so amused – including the Governor himself. In a Press-Conference Monday morning, David Paterson commented that, while he can “take a joke,” the SNL spoof came off more as a “third-grade depiction of [blind] people and the way they look.” Paterson was concerned that SNL misled its audience into thinking that “disability goes hand-in-hand with an inability to run a government or business.” [...]
In addition to Governor Paterson, the National Federation of the Blind also faults Saturday Night Live with pushing the envelope on satire [...]
More W/ Video At Your Black Life
Your Black Life: Sherri Shepherd Says Saturday Night Live Should Hire More Blacks
New York’s African American governor David Patterson was played by Fred Armisen, a cast member of Venezuelan, German and Japanese heritage who also plays President-elect Barack Obama.
Of the 90 or so actors to grace the “SNL” stage since its 1975 premiere, only eight have been African-American. And that’s an issue for “The View” co-host Sherri Shepherd.
In an AOL interview, she points out that there aren’t even enough African-Americans for a proper skit of her ABC daytime show. While Thompson portrays co-host Whoopi Goldberg, Shepherd’s character is simply left out of the sketch.
“Couldn’t they have gotten Maya Rudolph to play me?” Shepherd asked. “She is so awesome! They need more black people in their cast!”
“I agree with her,” Baron Vaughn, a black comic, told the New York Daily News. Diversity “doesn’t seem to be something that interests them [...]“
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