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"Last night\u2019s Academy Awards broadcast was a three-and-a-half-hour peyote dream that ended, mercifully, with Leo finally winning his Oscar. (HIT A VAPE.) The night was mostly a plodding, dull circle jerk\u2014featuring The Weeknd performing the same song for the 407th time on national television\u2014save for Chris Rock. The host did a masterful job of dismantling the #OscarsSoWhite controversy with brutal and unrelenting precision. It was like watching someone pull off a successful neurosurgery with a chainsaw. \n\nEDITOR\u2019S PICKEntertainmentOscars 2016: All the Internet Magic That Happened After Leonardo DiCaprio Finally Won\n\nBut there was a joke that didn\u2019t land quite right, and it was when Rock trotted out a trio of Asian kids with suits and briefcases as accountants. \u201CIf anybody&amp;#39;s upset about that joke,\u201D he said, \u201Cjust tweet about it on your phone...that was also made by these kids.\u201D\n\nhttps://twitter.com/cjzero/status/704151676416974849\n\nDuring the broadcast, I didn\u2019t really even notice it; I was maybe too busy shoveling Papa John\u2019s into my mouth and making some click-y Hot Content for the Cond\u00E9 Nast pageview gods. But I did start noticing the backlash on Twitter...\n\nhttps://twitter.com/PGourevitch/status/704151516173611008\n\nhttps://twitter.com/ConstanceWu/status/704184318222954496\n\nhttps://twitter.com/angryasianman/status/704154887899058176\n\n...and decided to rewatch it a few times to process how it made me feel. \n\nNow, grievance politics tend to be tricky (and mostly mushy and bleh), and nowadays I tend to be allergic to the Hot Take economy. But here I feel like it&amp;#39;s worth unpacking why Rock\u2019s joke was so unsuccessful.\n\nOn a night all about progressive identity politics, a night dedicated from the outset to exposing how unfair Hollywood can be, it\u2019s maybe telling that a joke invoking the laziest phylum of Asian stereotypes landed with a thud. The three (super adorbz!) kids were reduced to wordless and literally aimless props\u2014ornaments to sell a joke woefully lacking in imagination. \u201CAsians are good at math!\u201D is a bad joke mostly because it is an uncreative joke. The \u201CAsian model minority\u201D is a myth; there are many of us, for example, who received D-minuses in high school calculus and never told our parents because we were too busy skipping class and smoking weed at the beach. (Sorry, Mom. But we really do contain MULTITUDES.) \n\nHearing the joke from someone as influential and brilliant as Rock felt odd, but I can understand why he felt comfortable making it. Asian-Americans tend to be privy to, as Jay Caspian Kang perfectly put it in the Times Magazine last week, an \u201Cadjacency to whiteness\u201D that is unique. Maybe Rock considered the joke punching up. Or maybe his abject target really was American technology giants that over-rely on overseas manufacturing.\n\nEDITOR\u2019S PICKEntertainmentOscars 2016: Every Time Chris Rock Brought the Hammer Down on Hollywood Diversity\n\nI tend to think the joke&amp;#39;s failure speaks to the same problem Rock sought to highlight last night. Hollywood\u2019s glaring lack of diversity is more than a black-and-white binary: Asians account for a mere one out of 20 speaking roles in Hollywood, according to a study out of USC&amp;#39;s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. When it comes to leading roles, that percentage plummets to 1%. That&amp;#39;s beginning to change in a substantial way. (See: Fresh Off the Boat; Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.) But we still live in a world where Jet Li never got to kiss Aaliyah, and for that I will forever be salty. \n\nReally, it&amp;#39;s hard to imagine Rock&amp;#39;s joke working if Asian-Americans were better represented in Hollywood (maybe even with a seat at the table!), considering how expertly Rock manages to navigate thorny issues like race. Tellingly, it wasn\u2019t even the worst joke made at the expense of Asian-Americans on Oscar night. That honor belonged to Sacha Baron Cohen as Ali G, who, in an ode to 2003, made a joke about \u201Cworking yellow people with tiny dongs.\u201D\n\nNot gonna lie: That one was garbage.\n\n\n\nUp Next\n\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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