The cliche about free speech is apt for summing up the American approach to it: that freedom of speech is there to protect the speech you DON’T like, not what you do like. As such, we can’t and won’t make it against the law simply to express an idea or opinion, no matter how wrong or reprehensible. The easy dismissal of that approach is that it’s based on a logical fallacy of a slippery slope. The flip side of that, though, is that allowing the restriction of speech does allow for the government to allow for the restriction of speech it simply doesn’t like. Framed in one way still sounds like a slippery slope, but due to our constitutional structure, it becomes a legal reality. 

That said, there are extenuating circumstances at play that I think would allow for something like what France has in regards to Nazi imagery, support, etcetera. You can’t, for instance, display a drawing of a minority being murdered across from said minority’s home. That’s a hate crime. So there is room and precedent for such a law. The reason we haven’t passed it is because unlike France and many other countries in Europe, we weren’t occupied. Our closest encounter with the war domestically was in Pearl Harbor. Had we been in France’s position and German tanks had rolled into our streets and taken people out of their homes, you can guarantee stuff similar to what Le Pen was jailed for would be against the law.

I also haven’t watched a French comedy in…a long time. They usually don’t work for me. Foreign comedies in general, really.

I’m not sure exactly what I’m saying here, except that the things you’re saying about The Artist seem typical of the filmmakers, and I wonder if your reaction would be different were this not a universally celebrated, Oscar-nominated film, and it were just a French exercise in style and pastiche (which is what I imagine they set out to make).

Nah, it’s rooted in some real criticism over the last couple decades, including but not limited to recent concerns about the hit Intouchables, the embargo on black VO actors performing white characters, the way they portray Africans in “The Triplets of Belleville” and “Asterix and Obelix,” etcetera and so on.

It wasn’t meant as a dig really on the French being racist so much as that there’s what is perceived to be a real gap between American/British cinema and the French and others as it pertains to the portrayal of race, stereotypes, and the employment of racist caricatures. Ditto with Australia.

Oh come on now, you are baiting me here…
So, may I say: WOOT?!