The Stereotypical Kimmy Schmidt
Tina Fey’s newest television venture dresses a white woman as a Native American and may have introduced the world to Long Duk Dong 2.0. So how is it still so funny?
A SWAT team surrounds a heavy metal door implanted right in the ground. It’s opened, there’s shouting and gradually, as the dust clears, four women emerge from the dark depths, clad in outdated clothing and squinting wildly at their surroundings. This isn’t footage from a terrifying breaking news story. It’s not a scene from “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.” This is one of the opening scenes of “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” a new comedy series from Tina Fey and Robert Carlock that hit Netflix on March 6.
Following a doomsday cult survivor (the eponymous Kimmy, played by Ellie Kemper) in her transition to some semblance of normal life is hardly comic fodder. And when the show was announced last fall, some speculated whether or not Fey and Carlock, the masterminds behind “30 Rock,” could turn such a nightmare (especially when it became very real for a group of women in Ohio just last May) into the next sitcom hit.
Yet with the progression of each episode, both creators proved that they could balance the laughs (Kimmy doesn’t know what a laptop is!) with the biting reality of what life would be like after spending much of the first half of it trapped in an underground bunker. When trying to move to the “next step” with her British boyfriend, for example, Kimmy attempts to overpower him before admitting, “All the stuff I thought I knew was was wrong.”
Yes, it seems that Fey and Carlock approached the horrors of trauma with a nuanced touch. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said, many have argued, about the show’s relationship to race.
This might come as a surprise for those who have watched the show but missed the increasing chorus of internet backlash, due in large part to Tituss Burgess’ wickedly funny portrayal of Titus Andromedon, Kimmy’s gay black roommate. A failed actor whose outrageous forays into fame include the creation of a music video for a song called “Peeno Noir” (“An ode to black penis,” he states reverently), Titus “has achieved instant viral status as an icon of a gay black man even though, on paper, he seems like the most offensive stereotype of a gay black man possible,” writes Arthur Chu for Slate.
In a panel discussion of the show on Buzzfeed, staffer Ira Madison III agreed, comparing Titus to Tracy Jordan, the outrageous comedian played by Tracy Morgan on “30 Rock”: “Tracy was first introduced as one [a stereotype] and remained that way for the rest of the series,” he writes. “I’ve been more optimistic about Titus on ‘Kimmy Schmidt’ because I’ve seen him go through more character development in the span of a season than Tracy did throughout the seven seasons of ’30 Rock.’” Grappling with his racial and sexual identity, Titus is the show’s outlet to explore those issues in an interesting and compelling way. In one of the more heartbreaking yet hilarious plotlines, Titus gets a job at a horror theme restaurant and refuses to take off his werewolf costume upon discovering that people treat him better as a monster than as a black man. The problem then, comes as more tertiary characters are introduced.
Like Jacqueline Voorhees. Jacqueline (Jane Krakowski) is a rich socialite with an older husband and a stepdaughter named Xanthippe Lannister Voorhees. She has a refrigerator packed with FIJI water. She takes spin classes with a man with a ponytail named Tristafé. She is blonde-haired, blue-eyed and white. She’s also of Native American ancestry. Wait, what?
In the third episode, “Kimmy Goes on a Date!”, the series flashes back to Jacqueline’s past, revealing that she was once known as Jackie Lynn before she dyed her hair blonde and got blue contact lenses so she could better succeed in life. For many, something about this storyline was off. While the joke is supposed to be on Jacqueline, poking fun at the fact that she doesn’t know what a buffalo is, it doesn’t always come off that way, writes Libby Hill for Vulture. “The caricatures are so over-the-top, the show is clearly aiming for self-awareness,” she writes. “But self-awareness is often the pop-culture equivalent of prefacing a comment with, ‘I’m not racist, but…’─it doesn’t serve as an instant absolution.” Jacqueline’s backstory doesn’t serve a purpose for the larger story, Hill argues, and it’s not funny.
Here’s the thing, though. I laughed. I laughed a lot watching these flashback sequences, and I wasn’t alone. Aric5000, a commenter on Hill’s post who identifies as a “bleeding heart and culturally aware Native American” claims to have taken no offense to lily-white Krakowski portraying a Native American. “The reasoning being, as they (writers of the show) presented the subplot in such a way that it seemed to be such a generalized opinion that an ignorant populace sees Native Americans, which is so ridiculous, that itself is the joke,” the commenter writes, citing a moment in the flashback when Jacqueline’s father (Gil Birmingham, of Comanche ancestry) calls a plane an “iron eagle” before adding, “I’m kidding. I know what planes are. I was in the Air Force.”
This subplot also holds water as part of the larger narrative. The flashback-heavy “Date!” revolves around Kimmy trying to find someone to talk to about her past as a way to cope with what’s happened to her. As of this far in the series, Kimmy’s true identity as one of the Indiana “mole women” remains hidden to all but Titus─she goes by Kimmy Smith to avoid detection. In the same way, Jacqueline revisits her own forsaken history, one she has struggled to forget and has told no one about, but still remains very much a part of her identity.
All of this speaks to the larger issue of assimilation of racial groups in modern American society, which another Vulture commenter, pootiechang, touches on in a response to Hill’s piece: “As much as I appreciate Libby pointing out the inherently problematic issues of having a white actress play the role of a Native American woman, Hill’s taking the joke at face value. If anything, ‘The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’ sheds light upon a common non-white American issue.”
At a panel at the Television Critics Association, Carlock pointed out that the show had some writers of Native American descent that were interested in exploring a character’s relationship with that heritage, to maybe “reconciled with it,” he said. Hill takes issue with this, calling it essentially the same as saying, “Well, I have Native American friends”─an argument pulled out when someone defends a potentially insulting or racist statement with the mere fact that he or she is close to a person of that race. “Basically,” she writes, “they wanted to give her [Jacqueline] a sympathetic background.”
Again, this doesn’t seem entirely fair. Giving a character a struggle related to their heritage is a plot line that sitcoms rely on and many different audiences can connect to. In NBC’s “Parks & Recreation,” Indiana City Councilwoman Leslie Knope faces ire and discrimination after the town discovers that she wasn’t born in Pawnee, but the neighboring Eagleton, which is full of rich, snobby people who want nothing to do with the unsophisticated people of Pawnee. Although Leslie’s is not an issue of race, it’s treated as one. “You should go back where you came from!” one disgruntled Pawnee resident yells at Leslie after the truth comes out.
It’s easy to see Jacqueline’s subplot as the natural consequence of having people of Native American heritage in the writer’s room. Depictions of Native Americans on television in any genre are few and far between. In the last 10 years, major Native American characters could be seen on Fox’s “King of the Hill,” NBC’s “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” and “Hell on Wheels”─which, as a drama about the construction of the first transcontinental railroad, pretty much necessitates the presence of a Native American or two. Perhaps these writers were interested in creating a stronger representation of their culture within larger American pop culture and perhaps we, so unused to seeing Native Americans in popular culture, took a reactionary stance.
In an Indian Country Today Media Network interview, Native Max Magazine co-editor Johnnie Jae said she kept waiting for the “cringe-worthy” moment after the subplot was introduced, but that it never came. “The conversations that Jacqueline had with her parents reminded me of some of the conversations that I had with relatives when I took an interest in doing things that you don’t normally associate with Natives,” she said, such as when Jacqueline would rather have keys to a new car rather than the keys to her father’s tractor.
“The show is also addressing the white privilege afforded to those same white-passing Natives,” Jae adds. “It’s not trivializing these issues, it’s bringing them out in the open.” She even endorses the choice of Krakowski cast as a mixed race woman, saying that a Native woman in Jacqueline’s role would have an entirely different experience than the one the show portrays now, of a Native woman attempting to pass as white.
And the race issues that Fey and Carlock are tackling are not only those of Natives, but of many different races. As much as the show focuses its attention on Native Americans in “Date!”, it also spends a lot of time lampooning everyone else throughout the rest of the series. (“What white nonsense is this?” Titus asks in an episode toward the end of the season when he sees a white woman being a bit too affectionate with her dog.) Jacqueline Keeler said it best on the Daily Dot when she writes: “When I hear Fey is writing a character who is a ‘secret’ Native American, I read into it her own critique of her hidden Greek identity, just like I read my own experiences [as a Native American passing for white] into her Greek American experience.” Fey is interested in outsider humor, Keeler says, setting her sights on just about any identity out there without discrimination.
Which is why Dong Nguyen, a Vietnamese delivery boy who becomes Kimmy’s love interest by the end of the season, is such a disappointment. He speaks in broken English. He’s constantly on the watch for the immigration police, urging Kimmy to marry him to keep him in the country. He’s excellent at math. Weirdest of all is the Asian-sounding flute music cued up whenever Dong has a romantic moment with Kimmy.
“Every single other important character on the show … is a grotesque cartoon who is lovable despite the fact that in real life they’d be intolerable for all kinds of reasons,” writes Chu. “This only makes Dong, who would be a bland character on a ‘normal’ sitcom, even more of a misstep.” While the other characters embody stereotypes only to shatter them, stretch them, flip them inside out, Dong is simply defined by them without putting up much of a fight─or, at least, that’s what it seems at a superficial glance.
While Dong is a stereotypical character hedging on boringness in a world of otherwise colorful characters, writes Kat Chow for NPR, he’s also, like Jacqueline, just another foreigner in a TV landscape that celebrates foreignness. “And when it comes to Dong and Kimmy─and their budding romance─I think we’re meant to root for them to bond over their shared outsiderness, not spite of it,” she writes. She largely eschews comparisons to the “cringeworthy” Asian exchange student Long Duk Dong in “Sixteen Candles,” arguing that, unlike in that film, the audience is invited to see things through the Asian outsider’s eyes in “Kimmy”─such as when Dong chastises Kimmy for crossing her fingers at him, apparently an extremely rude gesture in Vietnam.
The larger problem with Dong, and perhaps with Jacqueline and the other outsiders, Chow writes, is not a problem with representation in the world “Kimmy” has established, but rather with representation in general. “Maybe in a perfect world, with plenty of sitcoms with Asian-American romantic leads, it’d be possible to read this character without the weight of everything that came before,” she writes wistfully. Recent talk of problems with representation in an entirely different way make it hard to argue with that assessment. Characters like Dong and Jacqueline might work to dismantle racial stereotypes by pointing out their inherent ridiculousness. But for some, when one of the few representations of diversity on television is an Asian-American character who works at a Chinese restaurant or a Native American woman played by a white actress, it’s harder to laugh along.
