2 Broke Girls just stood and and yelled, “Bingo!”, frustrating fellow racist bingo players Tom & Jerry, Academy Award voters, and American Sniper fans. The cause for their most recent five-in-a-row victory, each square of which is awarded when the show manages to offend a different racial group, stems from a recent episode. According to The Sydney Morning Herald, the show is being criticized for making a joke at the expense of Australian Aboriginals—and even the former Prime Minister of Australia has criticized the program for the bit.
The offending line was uttered by Han, the Asian-American diner owner who, in a super-fun piece of additional trivia, is a bit of a racist caricature himself. Han, in complaining about needing access to the Internet, says, “I’m in a casual flirtation with a woman in Australia! She’s part Aboriginal, but has a great personality!” See, it’s funny, because the joke is that all Aboriginals are ugly! It’s that kind of smart, “oh-no-you-didn’t” humor that has led in the past to creator Michael Patrick King explaining that it’s fine to be racist, because he’s gay. No word yet on whether he uses the same argument to explain why it’s fine to make an unfunny sitcom.
The series, which is all about how Michael Patrick King has trapped Kat Dennings in the sitcom equivalent of a Jeff Dunham ventriloquist act, hasn’t responded to the criticism yet. (Though presumably it’s had time to think of a response, given that the episode originally aired in the U.S. back in early January.) But Kevin Rudd, Australia’s former PM, seems to feel an apology of some sort is on order:
2 Broke Girls continues to scare CBS Monday nights at 8 p.m. ET, its lowest-common-denominator bones haunting the television landscape like the Ghost of Racism Past, shrieking laments about how black people are lousy tippers and Asians can’t drive. And what’s not funny about that?