Hasan Minhaj on Ashton’s Brown Face

May 8th, 2012 [ Tags: , ]

I had this whole thing I was gonna write about Ashton doing the brown face, but Hasan Minhaj is totally on point in this video. Never had much of an opinion of Ashton before, but I am giving him the wave of my finger and the People’s Eyebrow. As for PopChips, they never really had my money to begin with, but now I will actively go out of my way to avoid their product.


  • http://twitter.com/DrezzRodriguez Drezz Rodriguez

    I see this segment taking off for Goatface. Hasan’s commentaries are awesome and he’s exactly on point.

    Until guys like Ashton Kutcher, Kunal Nayyar and Russell Peters stop with the ‘herpy derpy indian brother’ imitations, white folks won’t stop laughing. Although, his point about not being able to get away with making fun of African Americans isn’t true – execs are still finding ways to exploit ‘black humor’ at the expense of their ethnicity.

    Just look at the Chappelle Show. Sure, we all laughed at the sketches because we felt it was Chappelle making fun of himself – but when he revealed that the network execs were killing themselves at the most racist bits, he knew something wasn’t quite right.

    Obviously – you have to draw the sensitivity line somewhere, but plain mockery of an ethnic minority (who will probably be a MAJORITY in a decade from now!) is just stupid.

  • Kyle Wright

    Didn’t even know about the Ashton thing until this…It’s kinda pathetic…

  • awesomemvs

    What did the commercial actually have to do with the chips? From what I see, the flavor is…chili lime potato. I’m sorry, which chiles? “Chili” is a dish made in the United States for the Super Bowl. “Chile” is a hot pepper, of which there are unimaginable varieties throughout the world. I’m trying to connect the commercial’s use of brownface to an Indian infused flavor on the chips (which would be outdated and dumb anyway) and I’m not succeeding because ‘chili lime’ is generic. Some regions in some countries have historically used limes and lime leaves instead of lemon–it’s hard to find lemons in some countries but it’s very easy to find limes cheap–and also have a culture of hot pepper and spice usage, and one of them is called Mexico. I don’t think there was a need to mention Bollywood or use purple velvet at all. I think this was a silly gimmick and advertising departments are stupider than I think they are. Even if it was an advertisement for chips with yellow curry flavoring, because potatoes in curry is an actual thing you would eat in parts of India, it would be dumb.

  • http://kryss-labryn.livejournal.com/ Kryss LaBryn

    Oh, fer… *Facepalm* I can’t believe anyone thought that that would be a good idea. Gods. Look, I’d like to deeply and sincerely apologize on behalf of all non-moronic Caucasians everywhere.

    I just can’t even what the hell, dude. NOT cool. ><

  • Kat Smith

    I remember when I first saw that commercial, I felt sick to my stomach. I’m about as ginger as someone with Native American blood can get, so I’m rocking the Caucasian look pretty solidly. Still, I remember watching old Westerns where white people were in “redface” pretending to be “Indians”, talking in broken English… and even at 8 and 9 years old, I remember being really offended. I thought we were past this kind of crap. I don’t know what kind of person is actually amused or entertained by this sort of thing but they need to take a good long look at their behavior. They probably won’t like what they see. As for Ashton? It bothers me to see a man who is genuinely quite intelligent constantly debasing himself to play the fool on television and commercials. I mean, cripes, he was a biochemical engineering student just 15 years ago. Has acting like a stoned idiot on That 70′s Show really reduced him to this?