Thread drift, joke analysis.

Mingulay's intro didn't bother me -- he was just trying to be polite/ironic by referring to the thugs as "gentlemen," which is OK.

However, the whole thing breaks down over the "half of a name" issue.

1) "Motherfucker" isn't half of any epithet I know -- it's the whole deal, both halves.

2) "Coon" is indeed a rude and derogatory term for black folks, but it's the whole word. If it's half of anything, it's half of "Coonass," a term which refers *not* to people of color but to Cajuns (Acadian French) -- a white ethnic group. It is a formerly derogatory term which has become generally acceptable and sort of humorous. (Cajuns, to their great credit, refuse to get uptight about much of anything.)

My friend Armand "Tiger" St. Martin wrote and regularly performs a disaster ballad about an incident several years ago at Jefferson Island, Louisiana, where an oil-drilling drew bored a hole into the top of an underground salt dome (a huge empty space), causing an entire lake to disappear like water in a sink when the plug is pulled. Fishermen in their boats on the lake were understandably terrified, but fortunately no one was sucked below the surface.

The chorus of Tiger's song quotes the local sherrif:

"Poo-yah, it's the Coonass Mount St. Helen's!"

One time when he was performing in a bar, a young black woman, obviously not a local, jumped up and left all in a huff, insulted. Other patrons tried to convince her that she had no reason to be offended, that Coonasses are indeed white people, but she would hear none of it.