Let the Randy Rainbow world apology tour officially begin!
“Comedian” Randy Rainbow has apologized after 60 plus of his old Twitter posts containing racist and transphobic language were discovered.
More than 60 offensive tweets from Randy, dating back to 2010 and 2011, told The Advocate that he was “incredibly sorry” for the posts.
Personally, I have never been that big of a fan of Randy. Just not my cup of tea.
Rainbow stated that the 10-year-old tweets had been written as part of his “maiden quest to be funny” during a time when “this kind of edgy shock comedy was not only acceptable but the prevalent style.”
Um. Those tweets were not “edgy nor comedy,” they were just plain offensive.
Here is his statement to The Advocate:
“Twitter has recently reminded me about 10 years ago, in my maiden quest to be funny, I tweeted some jokes that were completely offensive and insensitive to look back on them now, especially with no context or nuance and through the prism of where we are in 2020 with racial inequality and the fight for social justice, which I’m proudly a part of,” he begins. “In light of issues that are now at the forefront, which I’m passionate about and have spoken up about over the years, these tweets just sound racist and awful. I’m embarrassed by them. They make me sick to my stomach, in fact, and I deeply apologize to anyone I offended.”
“The comedy landscape was completely different back then. This kind of edgy shock comedy was not only acceptable but a prevalent style. I was an aspiring comedian in my 20s working the stages in gay nightclubs where we said the most outlandish, raunchy things we could think of. I was searching for my comedy voice, my persona, and I was emulating styles and jokes of people that I was seeing in the mainstream.”
“Any jokes that I tweeted out around this time were meant to be read in the voice of this character I created, and the intention was always that my forced ignorance would be the butt of the joke,” he says. “Now, comedy is not evergreen. Jokes have timestamps and reflect the times you’re in when you wrote them. Our world has shifted dramatically over the past 10 years and it’s moving even quicker.
“I am incredibly sorry. I would never intentionally do anything to hurt anyone,” he continues. “I learned many years ago, over the last decade, that there are things that you must be sensitive about. There are issues that I was not aware of back then. In 2010, we weren’t anywhere near where we are now. Right now, systemic racism is killing people, anti-Semitism is on the rise, Black trans women are being murdered at a horrifying rate. And the insensitive words of those actually in power are actually killing people. I continue to educate myself, I continue to listen and learn.
“I am in no way a racist. I am in no way transphobic,” he adds. “I’m a gay Jew who was brought up in a very open, accepting family. There is not a racist or intolerant bone in my body. When I say that I have evolved with the times, I mean that my comedy has. I did not need to be taught not to be racist or transphobic because I never was.”
“… This scandal I’m going through might seem a little more scandalous to some because I now have this voice in the political world. I am known as the guy who calls out bigotry and racism, which is what I want to do. That’s how I want to use my platform. That’s what’s really in my heart. So these recent tweets resurfacing are not skeletons in my closet; they’re crappy jokes in my shoe box from a decade ago.”
