The Clouseau Question

Breakfast at Tiffany’s streamed over Turner Classic Movies this evening. It includes a bizarre character, Mr. Yunioshi, an irritable and clumsy Japanese photographer played by Mickey Rooney, who delivers a crass cross-cultural performance that has been excoriated as being stereotypically offensive. I completely see the point in the criticism, but it makes me wonder why the equally crass cross-cultural stereotypical performance that Peter Sellers (an Englishman) gives as Inspector Clouseau (a Frenchman) in the Pink Panther films does not get criticized for being bigoted and offensive.

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