6 Things That Feel Controversial, But We Aren’t Really Sure Why

6 Stuart from MadTV

When the Michael McDonald character Stuart walks on-screen, he delivers a right hook to every alarm bell in my brain. It’s not like there aren’t other characters from MadTV that have truly aged horribly (looking at you, Ms. Swan), so the benefit of the doubt is already mostly gone. A grown man, dressed as a child, covered in pancake makeup and doing a weird voice? Nine times out of ten, that's going to get bad. Breaking it down, though, Stuart is just a child. A highly unsettling child, yes, but outside of the visually upsetting portion of it, there’s really nothing to clutch pearls about, even if your hand is already raising to your collarbones.

5 The Word Bugaboo

Surprising absolutely no one, a lot of antiquated slang has racist and/or generally horrific baggage. Anyone who's ever googled “rule of thumb” can tell you all about that. I’m just trying to give friendly advice, and suddenly, I’ve accidentally brought government-approved domestic abuse into a work email. As an enjoyer of jaunty-sounding old turns of phrase, whenever I’ve wanted to include the phrase “bugaboo” in a piece of writing, I’ve double-triple-quadruple checked that it is, in fact, not as racist as it sounds. I don’t know if it’s just the vibe, or the fact that the silliest phrases always seem to be the horrific ones, or the similarity to an actual slur that I won’t include here, but I clench my jaw every time I read it — even though it just comes from an old Welsh word, bwg, for a goblin or ghost.

4 Mike Myers Playing Dieter

Again, we’ve got a bit of aged sketch comedy. Dieter, host of German talk show Sprockets, is, as far as I can tell, making fun of no one except the high art world and Germans (who really don’t have a leg to stand on in terms of discrimination). Still, something about the whole thing would make me think twice before telling someone, “Hey, you know who’s a really funny character? Dieter, from old Saturday Night Live.” 

Like Stuart, the sketches featuring Dieter are, first and foremost, incredibly stupid in a good way. By the time he yells things like “your story has become tiresome, now is the time on Sprockets where we dance,” you can rest easy knowing this whole thing is probably fine.

3 Wheels from the BK Kids Club

Disabilities were handled so overwhelmingly poorly by much of media for so long that if you’re looking at anything from the ’90s featuring a character in a wheelchair, your asshole clenches hard enough to hold fishing line. When that character is named “Wheels,” hoo boy, you’re ready for things to go sour. But Wheels, from the Burger King Kids’ Club, is maybe the most positive representation you could hope for in the 1990s. Even the questionable nickname seems to be approved by the character, with Wheels customizing his wheelchair with big Ws in his early designs.

2 Silvio Berlusconi’s Hobbies

Saying something like “The Italian Prime Minister is probably more worried about cheating on his wife than running the country,” would definitely FEEL like you were making fun of Italians. It would also be a completely reasonable criticism of the late Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. The man was basically a walking caricature of stereotypical assumptions of a womanizing Italian man. “How does he find time to consider legislation when he’s so busy hosting his Bunga Bunga sex parties” is another sentence, that, despite sounding like something an oversauced uncle would say under his breath at Thanksgiving, is just an accurate reference to something Berlusconi was known for doing.

1 Street Sharks

I couldn’t even tell you who or what should be angry about these guys, but somebody should. Maybe all of us? They just look so horrible that it feels like showing them on television is inconsiderate of the Street Sharks themselves.