Trump gags booed, but rape jokes kill

Welcome to comedy in Donald Trump’s divided America.

A charity gig in Boston turned ugly at the weekend, with boors and jeers for a comedian who attacked the President-elect – with laughs and cheers for jokes about rape and Jews.

That’s according to local media, who have made front-page news from the run-in that Wanda Sykes had with the audience.

She flipped the bird to the crowd at the TD Garden as they booed her for saying: ‘This is not the first time we’ve elected a racist, sexist, homophobic president… he’s just the first confirmed one.’

As the crowd grew more vocal she said: ‘Fuck all y’all’ and told them: ‘The evidence is there. How can you say he’s not racist? “Grab em by the pussy?” how can you say he’s not sexist?’

The audience reportedly first turned against Sykes after she compared Trump to an orangutan, even though Denis Leary opened the show with a photo montage that showed Trump next to an ape.

However, right-wing comic Nick Di Paolo, who followed Skyes, went down a lot better, according to media reports which described his set as ‘pro-Trump rant filled with coarse language, anti-Semitic references, and jokes about raping women’.

But not everyone was happy. Nancy Rogerson, who was in the audience, said: ‘It was horrible. He joked about raping women on the cobblestone streets of Boston, and people were laughing. That is not something to joke about.’

Another audience member, George Hamblen, was upset by DiPaolo’s references to Jewish people, including calling Bernie Sanders ‘an old Jew’. ‘There is a fine line between comedy and hate speech,’ he told the Boston Globe.

Afterwards, DiPaolo retweeted comments from the audience that branded Sykes herself a racist, with typical comments saying ‘Wanda doesn't know how to talk without playing the race card’.

One raged: ‘Fuck these libtards’; while another said said: ‘Amazing how the Left claims we're the racists, yet they're the ones to project racism where it doesn't exist.’

Trump, who got the backing of the Ku Klux Klan at the election, has been criticised for branding Mexican immigrants ‘criminals and racists’ and questioning whether President Obama was born in the US. His property company was twice sued for alleged racial discrimination for not renting New York apartments to black people.

In an interview last night Trump told those behind an increase in racist attacks since his victory to ‘stop it.’

Ironically, the charity behind Saturday night’s gig, The Cam Neely Foundation for Cancer Care, advertised the show by appealing to those ‘in need of some post-election levity’

Published: 14 Nov 2016