Humor & Life Quote by A. Whitney Brown

Brown’s joke detonates in the space between moral clarity and comic cruelty. He opens with a stark, documentary-sounding sentence: racial murder in apartheid-era South Africa. Then he lands the plainspoken verdict - “That was wrong” - performing the expected stance of liberal condemnation. The trapdoor is the next line, a sudden pivot into professional prejudice: don’t kill him for being black, kill him for being a lawyer.

The specific intent is not to endorse violence but to parody the way people try to launder bigotry by swapping in a “socially acceptable” target. Lawyers, in American comedy, are a safe repository for resentment: powerful, slippery, billable. Brown exploits that cultural shorthand to expose how easily moral outrage can become a rhetorical costume. You can hear the satiric voice saying: look how quickly we’ll congratulate ourselves for opposing racism, even as we keep the appetite for dehumanization intact.

The subtext is nastier and smarter: violence isn’t the only problem; the logic that makes violence feel justifiable is the real contagion. By offering an absurd “better” reason to kill someone, Brown spotlights the perversity of ranking prejudices, as if hatred can be made ethical through better branding.

Context matters. Coming from a comedian in late-20th-century American media, it’s a critique delivered through a familiar format: the edgy, deadpan reversal. The discomfort is the point. The laugh, if it arrives, comes with an aftertaste: you’re laughing at the mechanism of rationalization, and recognizing how easily it runs on autopilot.