Mad Tv Miss Swan

LOS ANGELES The Media Action Network for Asian Americans is urging the producers of Fox's "Mad TV" to pull the plug on a regular character on the show that MANAA says is "an affront to the Asian- American community."

The character, known as Ms. Swan, is a gibberish-speaking nail salon owner who the group says is "clearly intended to be Asian." Alex Borstein, a non-Asian who wears a black wig and eye makeup for the role, plays Ms. Swan.

"By making fun of the way (Ms. Swan) talks, `Mad TV' just mocks her ethnicity," MANAA president Guy Aoki said. "If you took the racially based humor out of her sketches, there'd be nothing to laugh at."

Aoki said dressing up white performers to ridicule Asian Americans is no different from putting blackface on white performers to deride blacks.

"Blackface went out in the 1940s and 1950s," Aoki said in a recent letter to the show's producer, Dick Blasucci. "Why is it still permissible to use `yellowface' in the year 2000?"

Blasucci rankles at the suggestion that the Ms. Swan character is racist. "She's not in `yellowface,' " he said.

Blasucci does not deny that the Ms. Swan character is Asian, but he noted that "we've never come out and said it, and we've never had any Asian-specific references. There is nothing that is stereotypical about the character in the Charlie Chan sense. We don't do stereotypical jokes. It's just someone who has a funny outlook on life. It's Alex's portrayal of a woman who happens to be called Ms. Swan. Alex has done such a great job making it an endearing and original character. I don't think it comes across to the audience as being racist."

Blasucci also said the Ms. Swan character is "one of our most popular characters. Our e-mail is 99 percent positive. This is the first time we've been doing this that people have complained about it."

In his letter to Blasucci, Aoki said "once again, the Asian image is being defined by non-Asian creators with little understanding of who Asian people actually are. In the past, Asian characters weren't even played by ethnically Asian actors: Warner Oland as Charlie Chan, Boris Karloff as Fu Manchu, Ona Munson in `Shanghai Gesture,' Mickey Rooney in `Breakfast at Tiffany's,' and more recently, Jonathan Pryce in `Miss Saigon.' "

This tradition of white actors playing Asian roles "has been hurtful" to Asian Americans, Aoki said, because "these caricatures became standards by which real-life Asian Americans were seen and treated."

Blasucci, however, noted that sketch comedy has a different tradition. "The history of sketch comedy, from `Your Show of Shows' doing a German character to John Belushi's samurai character on `Saturday Night Live,' has always been lighthearted, and audiences have responded favorably to them because they haven't been mean and they haven't been racist," Blasucci said.

Hollywood Reporter

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