As you’ve probably heard to death by now, the hit film Tropic Thunder has stirred up a little hornet’s nest in politically correct circles. (I would say wasp’s nest, but the PC folks would probably object to offending White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Those Saxons can be a gnarly bunch.) To promote Tropic Thunder, actor/writer/director Ben Stiller created a faux ad for a faux film, Simple Jack: “Once upon a time… there was a retard.”
The use of the “R word” totally pissed off the chairman of the Special Olympics, who called for a boycott of the film. (Oops, can I use the word pissed? That’s a bad word, isn’t it? And maybe I should say “chairperson” instead of “chairman”…) Since the film opened at #1, dethroning hardcore champion The Dark Knight, this boycott flopped harder than a diving competition at the… never mind.
Now, as my loyal reader knows (hey, Doug!), I also champion political correctness here and there, including my diatribe against Unilever’s hypocrisy. So I’ll let others opine on the validity of this brouhaha. Rather, in order to help y’all avoid offending the folks at the Special Olympics in the future, I’d like to point out my personal PC term for referencing something so silly or lame that it’s dysfunctional:
The word was obviously inspired by the onesie that makes pretty much anyone look ludicrous. I coined it back in April in the Urban Dictionary. And I’m willing to let anyone use it freely, without royalties, permission or even attribution. That’s the kind of neologist that I am.
Speaking of unitards, I now have to come up with a better term for “that ass clown John McCain”… Any suggestions?
these boycott campaigns almost always end up backfiring. Passion of the Christ, Farenheit 911 and now Tropic Thunder all benefited immensely from the added publicity that their detractors created. The only time a boycott actually worked may have been on a movie I worked on at Fox. Turistas was viewed by the Brazilian travel commission as presenting a potentially negative picture of the safety of Americans traveling to their country. They were right. The Brazilian goverment put out the word that the movie should be boycotted and you know what? Nobody came to see it. Could it have been that the movie was no good? That the title of the film was unpronounceable? That the marketing was unremarkable? That the web campaign blew? Of course not. It was the boycott. Duh.
The term we used at dinner is still hilarious: McCainanite. So continuing on that theme – McCain UnAble?
I like it!
And btw, I subscribe to your blog in Google now so I can actually see it. (I also have a subscription on my yahoo page that I never read but it ups your numbers.) Would you click on my damn ads already?!
I saw this movie and thought that it was absolutely hilarious. People take too much offense over such silly things.