Where is the Line When a Sketch Gets Preachy

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The Guy Who Over-Pronounces Foreign Words — YouTube

Sketches are contested spaces today in the culture wars. When past members of SNL disown the show for being too political, while others think the show errs by having certain guests on, a whole new can of worms is opened.

Watch this sketch closely!

The set-up is that Mike is the funny man: He over-pronounces a number of foreign words and the sketch does a good job escalating Mike’s habit to the extreme. Patrick and Adam (who would soon become famous for his hit show “Adam Ruins Everything” which mixed intellectual analysis with comedy) react to the Mike as the straight man.

But Mike’s oddball behavior has a political component because he is engaging in the taboo of cultural appropriation. But is it really taboo? I would argue that cultural appropriation being bad is something only a small fraction of people of a certain generation believes — the problem is they occupy a loud corner of cyberspace.

However, the character that Patrick plays in this sketch emphatically calls him racist and horrible. The problem with this in terms of preachiness, is that these are character choices that go unchecked within the universe of…