On Tuesday, the director of conservative activist group Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk, complained that HBO host Bill Maher is receiving preferential media treatment to Roseanne Barr.
Kirk’s contention is relevant because Barr’s television show was canceled by ABC on Tuesday after the actress tweeted that President Barack Obama’s former adviser Valerie Jarrett equates to … “Muslim brotherhood and planet of the apes had a baby.” Kirk sees this as no worse than Maher’s repeated jokes that President Trump was fathered by an Orangutan.
Wait, Bill Maher makes comparisons to Trump being a gorilla all the time?
They get classified as “jokes” by the media and he is of course allowed to keep his show and not have his life ruined
The difference?
Bill Maher is a liberal, Roseanne is a free-thinking Trump supporter
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) May 29, 2018
But Kirk is wrong. There is very little comparison between Maher and Barr’s comments. Most obviously, Maher’s comments are a joke designed to reference the president’s slightly-too-orange tan, in the context of orangutans orange hair color (note, Charlie, that while orangutans and gorillas are both great apes, they are distinct animals).
In contrast, Barr’s comments played to traditional racist stereotypes of black people and apes. These stereotypes are not simply a caricature of appearance in the same vein as Trump’s tan color, but a metaphor for the racist belief that black humans are subhuman, encouraged by slave owners and later by the Nazis in their propaganda against music by blacks and Jews.
Trump has too many tweets (evidence of human higher thought processes) and far too little hair (evidence of ape genetics) to be credibly regarded as the child of an orangutan. Nor are orangutans typically associated with a specific racial or ethnic slur that might apply to Trump.
In short, Maher’s joke and Barr’s tweet are not comparable.
