Notes on Ethnic Humor

on Sebastian Maniscalco, Andy Cohen, and Marcello Hernandez

Marcello Hernandez

I became an avid SNL fan back in high school during the late 2000s generation of cast members (including greats like Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, and Fred Armisen). While I know most SNL old heads will insist that the show had reached its peak before that point, I’ll always have a special place in my heart for skits like the Bronx Beat, Vinny Vedecci, Regine, and Penelope.

I continued to watch as the new generation came in during my college years. As much as I enjoyed new cast members like Bobby Moynihan and Aidy Bryant, it was clear that the show’s standards for writing and acting were on the decline. The decision to address the lack of diversity of cast members in 2014, though noble and much needed, was for me the straw that broke the camel’s back. It seemed as if the pressure to hire non-white-passing cast members was so intense that the casting department was too afraid to take their time to find actors that were actually qualified for the position.

The same standard seemed to be held for new white-passing hires, who lacked the talent and wit of previous cast members. Further, the kinds of race/ethnic related humor devised by the writers took a turn toward cheap tropes from the woke cultural script, which lacked comedic depth and cultural nuance.

The minute a comedian follows a predictable cultural script, it’s a sign that they lost sight of their prophetic vocation to approach controversial issues obliquely (just turn on a Netflix comedy special to see what I mean). A good comedian, following in the path of the court jester, forces all audience members—of all different political persuasions—to laugh while simultaneously feeling uncomfortable, provoking them to see the nuances of said issues from a more human light.

Thus my surprise when I happened upon SNL’s latest diversity hire: Marcello Hernandez. Born in Miami to a Cuban mother and Dominican father, he first garnered attention from a series of viral TikToks. In addition to having excellent charisma, comedic timing, and a knack for physical humor, Hernandez has a way of making jokes about his ethnicities that is insightful and genuinely funny…thus deviating from the current status quo at SNL. Hardly relying on flimsy Latino stereotypes or standard wokisms, his humor demonstrates that for him, being Dominican and Cuban doesn’t constitute belonging to mere identity categories. Rather, it speaks of his rootedness in a rich cultural legacy.

Unlike the current trend of proclaiming one’s pride in belonging to a particular identity category on the surface while adopting the mentality and social imaginary of the globalized, neoliberal homogeneous [WASP adjacent] monoculture du jour, Hernandez comes off as ethnic through and through. Unlike the flat, monolithic senses of humor of his castmates, Marcello is the type of comedian who can get deep belly laughs out of audiences while making them think deeply about cultural phenomena. Hopefully he will set a new trend at SNL.

Andy Cohen

I find Andy Cohen to be a thoroughly wretched human being…which is part of the reason I love him. As I’ve written elsewhere, reality television’s exaltation of artifice taps into the diabolical—it is deceptive, presenting that which is fake as if it were real, that which lacks substance as if it contains substance.

Reality show creators like Cohen must be in touch with the tension between the sacred and the diabolical in order to create the shows they create. Take figures like Mark Burnette or Trump himself, or Chris Beha who excellently depicts this tension in his novel Arts and Entertainments.

Andy Cohen has created an empire the celebrates the basest, most vulgar impulses of the human condition…and does so with wit, precision, and a deep understanding of the human psyche. This is why I admire him, despite finding him to be a morally atrocious person. He doesn’t hide the wickedness of what he does. He is a classical decadent dandy, in the vein of Oscar Wilde, who doesn’t attempt to pass off his deviance as normal or morally respectable, but plainly make clear his true intentions. He fits the archetype of what the hosts of the Red Scare podcast calls a “sinister homosexual,” or what Andrew Sullivan called (in reference to some of the characters in HBO’s The White Lotus) an “evil gay.” He defies the new narrative of the neutered, unthreatening bourgeois LGBT person, who is “just like everyone else” and a victim of hatred and bigotry. Cohen is more victimizer than victim.

His stint hosting CNN’s New Years Eve special epitomizes the cognitive dissonance of America’s puritanical impulse to combine both decadence and respectability, amorality and the virtue of tolerance. He and his cohost Anderson Cooper—who perfectly fits the mold of the tame, bourgeois, WASPy gay—symbolized the conflict between pre- and post-Stonewall narratives of homosexuality. Despite Cooper’s continued cautions, Cohen was determined to inebriate himself and “spill tea”—that is, throw respectability out the window and speak his mind about a variety of topics, including some choice words about New York City’s former mayor De Blasio.

Cohen refuses to cover the debaucherous, Dionysian impulse inherent to the archetype of the sodomite. Unlike Cooper, who symbolizes the Apollonian Anglo need to maintain a facade of normalcy and respectability, Cohen—tapping both into his sexual inversion and his Jewish cultural heritage—is a prophetic truth teller. Even when he was forbidden to drink alcohol during the 2023 NYE special, Cohen bemoaned the restrictions refusing to “behave” and put on a happy face. In a world of Pete Buttegiegs and Anderson Coopers, Andy Cohen is one of the last vestiges of the traditional archetype of gay man as Dionysian deviant.

[for more hot takes on NY Jewish humor check out my review of Bros]

Sebastian Maniscalco

Like most other Netflix original comedy specials, Sebastian Maniscalco’s latest is not particularly funny. With Dave Chappelle as on obvious exception, Netflix comedians usually don’t take seriously the prophetic dimension of their vocation. Comedians are called to be equal opportunity disturbers of the peace. Their routines should arouse discomfort and provoke deeper thought for all people, regardless of social class, political persuasion, and ethnic background.

The trend for Netflix comedians who identify as minorities is to substitute insightful comedy with crude virtue signaling that reads off the standard neoliberal left script. Sebastian Maniscalco finds himself in a strange position: despite having a distinctive Italian-American comedic sensibility and mannerisms, his persona is fueled by his awareness of his more “privileged” identities, namely that he is a cisgender male, heterosexual, and what we would call “white.”

The cultural climate, which gives precedence to the dialectical power dynamics implicated in more abstract identity categories rather than more comprehensive and deeply rooted ones like ethnicity, places of origins, and faith/worldview, requires someone like Maniscalco to put out a brand of comedy that is utterly plain and safe, lest he run the risk of getting publicly demonized and having his career destroyed.

I cannot deny that Maniscalco has the potential to be funny. His Italian roots come out in his diction, mannerisms, and way of construing social interactions in his jokes. And yet, he never actually “says” anything. The bland safeness of his humor never risks to pierce public consciousness and arouse deep questioning that the great comedians have always done. As a straight white male, he knows his place. His Italianness can only be a mere afterthought, sprinkled on top of his jokes like seasoning, but never really allowing it to act as a real foundation or source of inspiration to dig into the decidedly un-Mediterranean, suffocatingly Anglo-Saxon cultural norms du jour.

photo taken in Rome

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