Comedian refuses to back down after ‘most offensive Aboriginal jokes’ sketch
An Australian comedian is refusing to back down over a crass sketch on First Nations people that he dubbed 'the most offensive Aboriginal jokes'.
Newcastle-born comic Isaac Butterfield declined to apologise after the clip from a recent show went viral for all of the wrong reasons.
People absolutely lost it in the comments section, with one user saying: "You deserve to be cancelled. Racism has never been, nor will it ever be funny. Do better."
Another added: "The jokes were unoriginal and not funny. It was boring, low effort and just outdated. Like a six-year-old wrote them."
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A third chipped in with a thinly veiled threat: "Do a show in Townsville, I dare ya."
As a result, Butterfield did another, far longer video to address the furore, explaining the jokes were designed to be 'deliberately bad' and that was the 'whole point of them'.
See the full video below, but be warned: racism dead ahead.
The 29-year-old added he was 'horrified' if he 'genuinely' hurt anyone, but stopped short of apologising for the gags.
"We are not laughing at Aboriginal people here, we're laughing at how f**ked up the joke is itself," Butterfield said.
He went on to argue that the TikTok clip lacked the context of his whole performance.
If you'd prefer not to watch, here's what he said in the now-deleted social media clip.
Butterfield started off my claiming it is 'easy to write Aboriginal jokes'.
"They write themselves," he said. "The most Aboriginal word in the world [is] 'Corroboree' [and it already] has the word 'robbery' in it."
The audience laughed and groaned as Butterfield went on to liken 'Aboriginal pornography' to the magazine National Geographic.
"White people in Australia never really culturally appropriated Aboriginal culture because there’s nothing that we really wanted," Butterfield told the crowd.
"Except for the kids," he added to hoots and further groans.
He continued: "Let's be honest, we never looked at tapping sticks and thought 'oh, f**k, we need those'."
Butterfield then told the crowd his - in his own words - pièce de résistance.
"Have you ever seen a transgender Aboriginal? Of course you haven't," he said. "They're hard to spot because the ladies already look like blokes."
Unsurprisingly, that one elicited the largest gasps from the crowd as well as laughter.
He shared the clip to both Instagram and TikTok, with the latter account now deleted.
Links to the short-form video app now come up as a dead end from his website.
And it's not the first time he's copped heat for his close-to-the-bone humour.
A bit in 2019 saw him cop serious flak in the wake of the horrific Christchurch massacre.
But that doesn't deter him, with the comedian stating: "I've been cancelled three times before and I'm sure it'll happen again in my comedy career."
Yikes.
Rachel Lang