What is the cultural context to "Cal Turk" (White version of Turk) joke in Scrubs?
This is in reference to Scrubs season 4 episode 2 - My Malpractical Decision. A conversation between the Janitor and Turk goes like this:
Janitor: I flunked gym, too. Didn't like the shorts. By the way, your number isn't "CALL-TURK," it's "CALL-TUR." It'd be easier if your name was "Cal Turk."
Turk: There's nobody named Cal Turk!
Inside Turk's fantasy: Insurance office. Turk is shown as a white employee of an insurance company.
Turk: [in whiteface] Cal Turk here! We don't sell insurance, we sell peace of mind! But only to white people. Would you like some milk?
Back to reality
Here is that scene:
It seems like a (perhaps racist?) joke about white people. Can someone explain this insurance joke along with the milk reference? What is the cultural/racial context to it?
Best Answer
There's a few potential meanings here.
First of all, the CALL-TUR might have been aimed at political pundit and former litigator Ann Coulter, who had just released her first book; a New York Times best seller called High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton when this episode aired.
Second, CAL-TURK was likely a play on the famous university, Caltech (California Institute of Technology).
As for his little fantasy sequence, it was actually quite racist. Whites are seen as largely boring guys with boring office jobs who love white milk. Imagine if the sequence had a black guy picking cotton, drinking orange soda? Holy Christmas, the Internet would have imploded. But yeah, it was Cal trying to imagine the whitest guy on the planet.
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