It’s a measure of how entrenched and militant the politically correct Stalinist goons have become that Gunman star Sean Penn is still getting pestered about that harmless little green card joke he shared at the end of last month’s Oscar telecast.

Before announcing that Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s Birdman had won for Best Picture, Penn said, “Who gave this sonuvabitch his green card?” — an allusion to Inarritu being from Mexico. It was typical wink-wink guy humor (i.e., one fellow describing or alluding to another in blunt disparaging terms that wouldn’t be cool unless they were friends) but the usual Twitter retards took offense.

“I have absolutely no apologies,” Penn has told USA Today‘s Cindy Clark. “In fact I have a big fuck you for…anybody who is so stupid not to have gotten the irony when you’ve got a country that is so xenophobic.” The joke, he said, was
“a little inside humor with he and I…I knew that [Alejandro] would be the first person in the room to know that his film won.”

The people who found Penn’s remark racially insensitive are, I suspect, related to the same concerned citizens who got upset last year when David O. Russell described Jennifer Lawrence‘s obligations to Lionsgate and the Hunger Games franchise as a form of slavery as la Twelve Years A Slave.

People who are still having trouble understanding Penn’s humor need to recall a confrontation scene in From Here To Eternity between Frank Sinatra and Ernest Borgnine, which is intensified when Borgnine calls Sinatra a “wop.” After the fight has been stopped and the would-be combatants are being separated Sinatra complains, “Only my friends call me wop!” Same difference.

Inarritu told me a day or two after the Oscars that “Sean and I have that kind of relationship that, as you said, only good friends have and [so] that joke was not insulting. Actually, I agree. They should not give me a green card. I still don’t have it!”

The Gunman, an Open Road release, opens on March 20th.