When Do Jokes Become Racist?

Not too long ago, I was accused of anti-Semitism.

It didn’t bother me too much. The letters were obviously written in anger and I suspect even the authors might reconsider their judgment. But maybe not.

The accusations came from a couple of readers outraged by a column criticizing the Stephen A. Wise Temple for naming its high school in honor of the Milken family. A trust founded by junk bond king Michael Milken and his siblings had donated $5 million and the temple wanted to express its gratitude.

Many readers, including some temple members, questioned the wisdom of a high school bearing the name of Michael Milken, who went to prison for his Wall Street crimes. Others thought the family’s philanthropy made up for the felonies. Only a couple accused me of bigotry.

How does one respond to that? One doesn’t. Any denial would sound too defensive.

Besides, what if Eddie Kahn stepped forward? He could have sunk me. He could have told everybody about the Jewish jokes I used to tell.

*

This confession is offered now as a note of commiseration for Randy Mehringer. He’s the 27-year-old West Hills man whose dreams of following in his father’s footsteps to a career with the Los Angeles Police Department have been waylaid because he gave an honest answer to a question from an LAPD interviewer.

The question concerned racial jokes. Mehringer, who is white, volunteered that he had told a joke to some friends about last fall’s “Million Man March.”

The full text has been deemed not fit for print. As The Times’ Jodi Wilgoren reported on Saturday, the joke “implied that many African Americans are unemployed.”

Yes, that’s bad taste. It’s demeaning and hurtful. But should such a joke, alone, be enough to torpedo somebody’s career? And, alas, there’s no denying the premise: Many African American men are unemployed, in disproportionate levels to other racial and ethnic groups.

Context is crucial in making moral judgments. I heard the joke from an old, close friend, a decent guy with a hyper sense of comedy, regardless of taste. “Remember,” he often jokes, “bad taste is timeless.” That’s certainly true. And we all know rotten people who hide behind a veneer of good taste.

At any rate, Randy Mehringer’s poor judgment--and by that I don’t mean the honesty of his answer--led to a rejection letter saying that he failed the LAPD’s standard of “respect for others” because of his “racially derogatory comments.”

By the available evidence, it would be a shame for the expansion-minded LAPD to lose Mehringer to a more tolerant police force. He finished third in his academy class and had logged more than 2,000 hours as a reserve officer at Rampart Division. Most tellingly, several LAPD veterans have written in protest of his rejection, among them his former supervisor at Rampart, a sergeant of Asian Pacific heritage. In Sgt. George Hoopes’ view, Mehringer’s “character was cut from the highest moral and ethical fabric.”

The good news is that the Mehringer case prompted the City Council’s Personnel Committee on Monday to reconsider ways in which police applicants are screened.

The LAPD, meanwhile, is left to struggle with its own policy toward such humor. Pat Patterson, chief of the Personnel Department’s public safety division, told Wilgoren “there’s just absolute zero tolerance for this type of stuff in the Police Department.”

Does that mean you can’t tell your partner about the movie you saw the night before, or a joke from Leno’s monologue? Our society is infused with humor based on racial, ethnic and religious stereotypes, from the benign to the malignant.

Funny, but the same people who say we should “celebrate our differences” are often hard-liners on such humor. Just how do we celebrate our differences if we don’t laugh about them now and then?

*

I wonder if Eddie’s forgiven me. There were four of us riding in the back of somebody’s mother’s station wagon to the district-wide orchestra practice. Eddie was first-chair violin. I was last-chair cello.

I was maybe 10 years old and moving beyond elephant jokes. I didn’t really “get” the new jokes my junior-high-age sister was telling, but I knew they were supposed to be funny, so I laughed. I now doubt that Bobby and Ricky got them too, but they laughed. Eddie, meanwhile, just stared at me in silence.

I really thought he’d get it. After all, my sister learned the jokes from Eddie’s brother.