Racism in WoW

My guild’s mostly white.  Quagmire is one of our two or three black guys, and he’s our prized lead hunter.  He’s also really funny.  Most of his jokes are race-centered.  Example: we were trying new strats for Void Reaver and Mr. Moderate designated him to run around the circle with Aspect to draw the Orbs while everyone else grouped inside under Void Reaver’s feet.

“Oh I see how it is… pick the black guy to run, huh.”

Stuff like that, it’s pretty funny when he says it with mock outrage, I usually giggle.  The problem is, I think it really tickled certain people that he was so open to joking about himself, and they started jumping in with their own jokes, which aren’t quite so funny.

“Yeah, everyone knows how you guys run.”
“Just pretend you’re running from the cops.”

Some of the stuff they say borders on blatant racism, it’s just not funny at all.  When Quagmire mentioned how he’s not athletic, someone jumped in with, “Really? You don’t play basketball?  I thought all you guys played basketball. You sure you don’t play basketball?”  To me, this is obnoxious.  Quagmire just laughs this stuff off, or builds on it to make it more funny, and it’s usually him that starts it himself.  Because he does it so easily, and it’s usually so hilarious, other people who are less socially adept will throw in their awkward, thinly-guised real racist ignorance out there and I’m just cringing listening to it go on and on. 

There’s a thin line between being funny and really being offensive, and I feel like we keep crossing it.  It’d be better to just not make any racist jokes to begin with, even if they’re pretty funny, since people just don’t seem to know where to stop. 

Example: Once I was hanging around with some friends telling jokes.  Mine were, naturally, just silly puns (I swear Blizzard stole that “Duck said to put it on his bill” joke from ME), and everyone’s just LOLing, then this random guy walks up and starts telling some:

“What’s the difference between a n***** & a bucket of sh**?”  “The bucket.”
“What’s the difference between a dog and a n***** lying in the road?” “You’d stop for the dog.”

Who the HELL would laugh at a “joke” like that?????  What is remotely humorous about it???????  The jokes a certain few of my guildies tell aren’t quite that level of ignorant asshole, but they’re pretty fucking close.  It’s sad but I think some of them harbor real life ummmm misconceptions, and they’re just a little too tickled to be able to joke around with a black guy about black people. 

I made a more delicately worded post about it on the guild forum, hopefully not coming across as an anal ADL politically correct jerk, but I was getting pretty annoyed in vent last night, and it’s just gotta stop before someone really does get hurt.