A lot of 30 Rock’s humor about race (Irish jokes excepted) seem to fall into that category. Edgy, but not really subversive. Based in stereotypes without really upending them. I agree with Alyssa that some of the jokes revolve around Tracy Morgan’s character (Tracy Jordan) trying to maintain a certain Black male image that’s not really him (pretending to be adulterous, or illiterate). But a lot of the jokes just come down to him being stupid or clowning around, him getting away with what others can’t, and more sympathetic characters having to put up with it.I think this is a really crabbed reading of Tracy's character, and a really limited reading of racial humor as a whole on 30 Rock. Tracy is black, sure, and the show is partially about that. But he's also a celebrity, and, as he explains in the pilot, and as demonstrated pretty consistently through the show, he's "straight-up mentally ill!" As a result, the show's racial humor tends to operate on a whole bunch of levels: it's a show about a racial minority in a majority-white workplace, it's a show about black celebrity and the media, it's a show about a guy who is crazy and unreliable but extremely talented, it's a show about white and black people's expectations of each other.
Let's take this contention: "a lot of the jokes just come down to him being stupid or clowning around, him getting away with what others can’t, and more sympathetic characters having to put up with it." First, Tracy isn't stupid, and I don't think the show portrays him that way. He believes a lot of crazy things, and his knowledge is certainly selective. But he's incredibly clever, whether he's commandeering a boat that isn't his to make it up to his coworkers after he joins the show against their will, designing a pornographic videogame that defeats the whole problem of the Uncanny Valley, or parsing the racial dynamics of the Little League team he's coaching. The scene where he delivers a monologue (around 1:05 in the video) after Liz, assuming he's illiterate, says he can skip work to take reading classes in "Jack-Tor," the fifth episode in the first season is a brilliant and self-aware mockery of Liz's assumptions: ""I can't read! I sign my name with an X! I once tried to make mashed potatoes with laundry detergent! I think I voted for Nader! NADER!" People who tend to assume that Tracy is stupid usually end up looking foolish.
Second, the show has gradually debunked the idea that Tracy gets away with more things than other people do. Whether it's in "Secrets and Lies," where Jenna acts out to get special treatment from Liz, only to find out that she's been getting it all along, or in "Believe In The Stars," where Tracy and Jenna switch racial roles, and require mediation from a teenager a drugged Liz mistakes for Oprah on a plane, they play exactly equal roles in making Liz's life hell. In "Flu Shot," Jenna and Tracy similarly create havoc when they team up to try to help out the ailing crew and end up being horribly condescending, and in "Cutbacks," they cause all sorts of trouble when they become convinced Kenneth is a serial killer. If anything, the show has moved towards treating Jenna and Tracy sort of like they're equally crazy sidekicks, and the third season had a whole bunch of episodes where Tracy is actually a helpful figure, particularly to Kenneth. To the extent that Tracy gets away with stuff like threatening to stab Conan O'Brien in the face, he gets away with it because he's famous, and the way the show satirizes corporate complicity in the absurd behavior of stars is pretty hilarious. I actually can't think of a single episode other than "The Natural Order" in the third season where Tracy inconveniencing someone else is the major subject of a show. In other words, I think Josh's description of the depiction of Tracy just isn't an accurate portrayal of the character's comedic arc, and I'm pretty hard-pressed to understand how someone could come to that reading. And I don't actually think that Tracy's character is the only path into racial humor in the show.
But before I get there, let's take Josh's other big contention, that the episode "The Natural Order" isn't funny. He writes:
What are they sending up in this episode? This is not a rhetorical question. Who or what is being satirized here? Is it satirizing people who believe that African-Americans are undisciplined? If so, why contrast that with the belief that hetero women object to being forced to strip clubs? Is it satirizing ostensible liberals who are willing to believe uncomplimentary things about Black people? Satirizing people who push for equal standards for everyone? People who push for special treatment for some people? Black people who “play the race card” to get out of showing up the work? Women who say they want to be treated equally but expect men to do the heavy lifting?Seriously, dude? There is a serious and substantial debate over business functions held at strip clubs (tax-deductable according to the IRS, at least as of 2006. Woo!), whether women should feel obligated to attend, whether it's sexual harrassment, and whether it's a sign of empowerment (or of a pragmatic sucking it up) to be able to go on a guy's-night-out events in order to ingratiate yourself in the workplace. I think mocking the self-deception of that latter motivation is pretty funny. There's a huge difference between equal standards for work performance and rigid equal treatment-and-experience feminism that refuses to acknowledge sexism and different styles, and it's pretty entertaining to watch that carried to slightly absurdist ends. But most importantly, the episode isn't really about race! It's about a famous person doing a non-famous person's work, about someone who's pretty quiet taking on the hard-partying identity that another person works to maintain. And ultimately, it's about the fact that everyone relies on certain kinds of privilege, no matter how vociferously we cast ourselves as disadvantaged.
"The Natural Order" isn't necessarily the best example of 30 Rock's consistent send-ups of the way we use our identities to get things out of other people. How about the utterly brilliant "Source Awards" episode, which features Wayne Brady as Tracy's business manager exploiting Liz's fear of being perceived as racist to keep him dating her, even though he's incredibly boring? Or "Generalissimo," where Jack tries to make his girlfriend's Puerto Rican grandmother like him by manipulating her favorite telenovela to fulfill her wildest dreams? Or "Cleveland," where Liz's then-boyfriend Floyd loses a promotion to an African-American guy in a wheelchair, which Jack later implies that he is only using to make himself unfireablely diverse?
The internal satires of African-American culture have always struck me as effective, too. The Black Crusaders arc, about a group of powerful black celebrities who enforce conformity among African-American media stars, gets at the self-consciousness both of somewhat sanctimonious stars like Bill Cosby, and ones like Tracy Morgan himself, who don't particularly want to live their lives as exemplars. The "Source Awards," with its send-up of the commercialization of hip-hop culture (Jack tries get an African-American entrepenuer, played by L.L. Cool J., to market a brand of poisonously disgusting champagne) and of beefs within the entertainment community, works well, too:
Then, there are the satires of how white people treat black people, and people of color period. Whether it's Liz turning her neighbor as a terrorist, mispronouncing an Indian-American intern's name, assuming that a black family to whom she gives toys at Christmas is scamming her, irrationally worshiping Oprah, assuming Tracy can't read, dating a guy she can't stand to avoid being thought of as racist, or insulting Tracy's wife's nails to provoke a fight, everything Liz does about race is wrong, no matter how sensitive she tries to seem. Ditto with Jack, who ends up fighting with Condi Rice during their relationship over her behavior at the movies, mismanaging a Little League team because he can't understand the racial and ethnic dynamics between the black and multi-facetedly-Latino players, and misguidedly trying to recruit Tracy as a Republican spokesman.
Not all humor is revolutionary. Not all jokes are going to change the world. But what I think 30 Rock does that is subversive and extremely effective is to puncture the idea that when it comes to race, good intentions will save us, that we can really understand what other people experience, and that race and sex can only be disadvantaging factors for people who are black or female. Is the show universally applicable? Of course not. This is a series about relatively wealthy, privileged people who work in an extraordinarily strange, distorting industry. But in 2009, are those truths that people have a hard time accepting? If the last couple of weeks have taught us anything, I think they've demonstrated that the answer to that question is an emphatic yes.