Let’s start this off with a very simple premise: Jesse Watters isn’t funny. He’s a racist.
If you’re not completely caught up as to why, here you go. Watters, a frequent guest prank man on Bill O’Reilly’s show The O’Reilly Factor, decided he needed to get the Chinese people’s opinions about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. So naturally he headed to the most logical place to help himself find such a perspective -- Manhattan’s Chinatown. You know, because if this segment was about Trump talking about Italian people, Watters would hop onto the Subway for Staten Island instead.
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What ensues is almost five minutes of cringeworthy and tired Asian stereotypes. Think about that for a second (which incidentally, is a second longer than Fox News did before approving this sketch): five minutes. That’s five minutes of Watters asking an Asian woman if he’s “supposed to bow to say hello.” Five minutes of Watters insulting elderly Chinese people. Five minutes of him insinuating an Asian-owned shop is full of stolen goods. Five minutes of asking people on the street if they knew karate -- a Japanese martial art -- and then appropriating it in a tae kwon do dojang -- a Korean martial art. Five minutes of talking down to a masseuse while getting a foot massage. Five minutes of Carl Douglas’s corny song “Kung Fu Fighting” spliced with badly-yellowfaced actors.
And to the people who let this entire segment go through editing: You’re part of the problem. Despite example after example in your industry showing how demeaning and unpleasant segments like this are, you decided to push through with it. Just how blind and ignorant does an entire show’s staff need to be to let a segment through editing without one person saying, “Hey, maybe this might be a just a bit offensive? Should we tone it down a bit? No? So the gong music in the background is good then?”
But of course, Watters and O’Reilly confirm what we all know these two were thinking at the end of this segment. It was all “in good fun,” Watters says. Sure, if your idea of “fun” is dehumanizing an entire race -- which by the way has been done before -- then well, I have a channel you can watch on basic cable for you.
After the onslaught of angry posts on social media, Watters was forced to apologize. Just hours after his “news” segment aired, he took to Twitter to explain himself.
“As a political humorist, the Chinatown segment was intended to be a light piece, as all Watters World segments are,” he wrote in a post.
Political humorist? Never mind, I take that back. This dude really is funny.
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