Oh my GOD! Did Eugene Levie just say, “You got me straight trippin’ boo.”? Oh man, that’s FUNNY! Because white people don’t use terms like that! And he’s so uptight, and . . .is that Steve MARTIN is an Enyce sweatshirt? . . .OH SNAP! I mean, that is rich!

In one month’s time, the unwashed masses were exposed to a trio of unabashedly commodified race-relations comedies: Malibu’s Most Wanted, Bringing Down the House and Head of State. All look bad enough to set you cringing in your seat. All are; I’m quite sure. I’ll never know for certain though, because I can’t imagine what possible set of circumstances could possibly arise that would lead me to see any of them.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not an angry white guy. A movie with Chris Rock laughing at waspy septuagenarians singing Nelly’s It’s Gettin’ Hot in here in lily-white, operatic fashion does not make me feel my heritage has been defamed. First of all, I’m a 4th generation American Euro-mutt—I don’t have a culture. Second of all, even if I was hypersensitive about a culture I don’t have, it would be a tad bit whinny for me to complain about how Caucasians are portrayed considering the cavalcade of stereotypes that populate these comedies: e.g., the belligerent, screaming Asians who run the convenience store, the bespectacled Japanese shutterbugs, the flamboyantly effete homosexuals and the swarthy, lecherous Central Asian brothers. In the end, the depictions of white folks in these comedies are not malicious or dehumanizing, like Amos and Andy or Little Sambo, but they are offensive. Offensively LAME.

Of course, racially charged humor, if done imaginatively, can be funny. Shows like All in the Family, Mr. Show and The Chris Rock Show have proved as much, but it does help if the jokes at least attempt to critique the reality of how different races act differently. I just hope that the author of the “Getting Hot in Here” scene was anyone but Chris Rock. Maybe it was a white guy trying to pander to an African American audience, while being innocuous enough not to alienate the honky contingent. I hope so, because I don’t like the idea that one of the nation’s funnier stand-ups was involved in a conversation that had him saying something like, “Yeah, and we’ll have them sing it—and they’ll enunciate all the words, like the won’t say ‘gettin’ hot’ they’ll say, ‘get-ting hot.’ That’ll be comic gold.”

Similarly, you have to wonder whether it was Chris’ idea to finish the scene with the DJ chanting “The roof, the roof, the roof is on fiyah!” causing the white people to panic thinking they had just heard a literal warning. This would make them not only completely out of touch, but also so unbelievably stupid that they wouldn’t understand that slang varies among separate socio-economic and racial groups, and that there was a chance the DJ was speaking metaphorically. Plus, the roof-is-on-fire joke was done, to better effect, in an Onion article about four years ago. I guess we could say it has been “played out.” (See, I know what that phrase means. AND I’M WHITE!)

So, accepting for a minute that Chris Rock, a funny person, contributed to this mess, we must come to grips with the fact that we have a real problem. And again, it’s not racism. The real issue is that no one is standing up and complaining about these lame-ass jokes, which are based on phony-baloney, over-Anglicized “white” behaviors that bare no relation to how white people really act. And more importantly, gifted performers, like Chris Rock, are actually perpetuating this particular schlock cycle by rehashing worm-eaten and politically correct stereotypes of white people. I know Chris could transcend these clichés and produce something provocatively funny, but that would mean risking the approval of those thin-skinned whites out there who actually do take their culture seriously. And so we get an unfunny Chris Rock and an undisturbed white audience. This sad state of affairs means that those Caucasians who didn’t attend finishing schools or this year’s Ascot races won’t get the roasting we deserve. Apparently, white guilt goes pretty far these days, but not far enough to allow us to be properly mocked. That is lame.