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1. For the past three years, every Thursday night or Saturday afternoon I’ve played pick-up basketball at a local high school with a group of the same 15-25 guys. We gather up, try to split teams evenly, play for a couple of hours, and drink beer in the coaches’ office when we’re done. It’s basically a basketball version of everything that happens in a Brett Farve Wrangler commercial.

Now, out of those 15-25 regulars, I’m one of maybe five black guys — 5½ if you count one of my biracial buddies. As you can imagine, there are many opportunities for good-natured racial humor, and most of this can be categorized as just typical male-on-male locker room banter. (For instance: A few months ago, I got stuck in traffic and I ended up being 15 or so minutes late. When I finally got to the gym, one of the guys joked “You know we’re not on CP time, right?” Hardy har f*cking har.)

But, one of the regulars occasionally — and intentionally — pushes the appropriate banter envelope. Not a hateful guy by any stretch of the imagination, his jokes are more a product of his social awkwardness than any type of venom. He says off-color things because, well, he’s expected to say off-color things and he wouldn’t be him if he didn’t. In this sense, he’s merely filling his expected role, and we all deem him to be pretty harmless.

Still, one of his particularly off-color (and particularly flat) jokes about watermelon or chicken or black booty or something a few months ago prompted me to pull him aside later and advise him of the importance of humor. Basically, I reminded him that off-color and borderline offensive jokes about any subject are cool…as long as the joke is actually funny.

This brings me to “The Bride of Blackenstein,” a skit/parody of blaxploitation horror films that ran on Saturday Night Live last weekend. The six minute long short — which featured the increasingly ubiquitous Nicki Minaj in a parody of “The Bride of Frankenstein”– has been racked across the internet coals in the days since it first aired; accused of everything from racism to blatant misogyny. (In an especially biting, especially funny, and typically hyperbolic critique, Gina Mccauley of What About Our Daughters remarked “Nicki Minaj’s goal is to make sure she’s at the top of the bottom of the totem pole.”)

But, after finally getting a chance to sit down and watch it yesterday morning, it seems like the only thing this skit was guilty of was making an uninspired attempt at humor. Seriously, I’ve seen tree limbs and air conditioners with more wit than this skit. This matters because borderline offensive comedic material becomes just plain ole’ offensive sh*t when it’s completely devoid of comedy.

“The Bride of Blackenstein” offends and insults me, not because it’s racist or sexist or anything but because it’s offensive and insulting to think about how much better that skit could have been — especially when considering the outstanding comedic writing chops of the people on the SNL staff.

2. Thing is — and this is probably going to contradict everything I just said in #1 — the only way to tell if a joke works or not is to actually try it. To make edgy humor you need to step on the edge, and sometimes you risk offending people. But, as long as you’re an equal opportunity offender, I don’t see a problem with taking a couple jabs at black women or black men or homosexuals or Aboriginal midgets or whoever. No one is above occasional ridicule, and while there’s a time and a place for safe humor, 12:30 am isn’t that time, and SNL isn’t that place.

In my opinion, “The Bride of Blackenstein” skit was a bad effort at humor, but that’s just my opinion. Humor’s inherent subjectivity makes it so that there’s no inherent wrong in the actual effort, though.

3. A term coined by uber-popular ESPN columnist Bill Simmons, “The Tyson Zone” describes what happens when a person becomes so known for their outrageous behavior that nothing they do can surprise you. I bring this up because between her outrageous outfits, equally outrageous body, and surprisingly lucid verbal schizophrenia, Nicki Minaj has officially reached Tyson Zone territory.

Seriously, you could tell me that Nicki Minaj’s ass cured cancer yesterday and the most you’d get out of me would be “Word? Cool.” My Minaj surprise quota has been completely exhausted. Sh*t, she could be sitting in my bathtub while rocking a dolphin suit and reading “The Things They Carried” right now and it still wouldn’t shock me.

With that being said, I think she’s extremely intelligent (Yes. Extremely intelligent. She has us all thinking she’s Pinocchio when she’s really Geppetto.), extremely shrewd, and extremely self-aware, and I still think the music industry is a much, much better place with her in it.

4. I don’t think I’ve ever been on the fence with a comedian more than I am with Keenan Thompson. Yes, his comedy tends to be wrapped in a not so subtle tinge of, for lack of a better term, “coonism,” and yes, he’s probably rocked more dresses and pumps in the past year than each of the Mean Girls of Morehouse combined. But, he does occasionally crack me the hell up, and I’ve been known to sing “What’s up with that?” to myself at random times during the day. I really can’t call it with Keenan.

Speaking of black comics…

5. I’ve had my cup of “Jay Pharoah is the next black comedy superstar” lemonade sitting on my dining room table for four months now. Hopefully I’ll be able to drink it some time soon. I really, really, really want him to be the next Eddie Murphy, but I’m not sure if SNL is the right place for that to happen.

6. The funniest part of this skit occurs at the 5:10 mark of the video, when a song starts playing in the background and Jesse “I’m going to tell you one last time. I am NOT Michael Cera!!!” Eisenberg claps so offbeat that it looks like he’s trying to kill a gnat. He’s either the best young actor on the planet, or concrete proof that “the average white man” and “rhythm” goes together like “Cromartie” and “condoms.” No in-between.

7. I guess this is where I’m supposed to end this piece with 150 or so words about the many virtues of Nicki Minaj’s gravity, sense, and nature defying ass. In fact, I’m sure those who remember my Anchorman-influenced ode to Erykah Badu’s ass are expecting it. Surprisingly, though, I’m completely unmoved by her hindparts, and I can’t exactly figure out why. I mean, I’ve let the whole “artificial or not?” thing slide before when appreciating certain magnificent booties, so I know it’s not that. I’ve also gone gaga for the backside assets of women who weren’t nearly as blessed as the black barbie, so I know it’s not that either.

I think my problem with Minaj’s ass is that it just seems like an excessively ostentatious and useless accessory, like an Olympic diving board attached to the trunk of a Bentley. Sure, it’s amazing, but it doesn’t really entice because it doesn’t seem to serve any practical purpose other than amazement.

While Badu has “the perfect three baby booty,” Minaj’s can best be described as “the perfect 3-D booty.” Great to look at while at the theater, but disorientating and distracting if you tried to watch at home. (Champ’s Note: She’d still get it, though)

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—The Champ