This Asian Slut has a Question, Yo!

I tell racist jokes. I also tell dirty jokes that are incredibly sexist. Sometimes I combine the two and tell jokes that are demeaning to both racial minorities and women. Yet, I don’t feel that this undermines my status as a full-fledged, card-carrying, feminazi bitch. I even own Birkenstocks! (I would mention here that I don’t shave my legs, but seeing as how there’s nothing there to shave it’s largely irrelevant.)

Do I find such jokes completely offensive and distasteful? Yes. Do I equate laughing at these jokes as a validation of the bigoted thinking behind it? Hell yes. I tell these jokes as a way of exposing how ridiculous such prejudices are – and how pervasive they are in our society. This depends entirely on the mindset of the person who is hearing the joke, however and has nothing to do at all with the telling. Not only is this completely out of my control, it is also incredibly difficult to predict.

Mary Beth Oliver (in a speech on Race in the Media, available for free download on iTunesU) talks about the incredibly popular TV show All in the Family. The intention of the show was laid out clearly in the disclaimer that ran before the pilot:

“The program you are about to see is All in the Family. It seeks to throw a humorous spotlight on our frailties, prejudices, and concerns. By making them a source of laughter we hope to show, in a mature fashion, just how absurd they are.”

Featuring an incredibly bigoted protagonist (Archie Bunker) who spent the better part of most episodes slinging around racial slurs and stereotyping the other characters in the show, All in the Family was an instant hit. It later became one of two shows (the Cosby Show being the other) to rank #1 in the Nielsen ratings for five consecutive seasons. Needless to say, the show had widespread appeal. In recognition of the show’s efforts to exposing bigotry, the NAACP gave All in the Family its Image Award. A couple of researchers were more pessimistic about the reasons for the show’s success. So they did what researchers do and conducted a survey. Guess what? There were two distinct groups of people who enjoyed the show. The first group loved it because it “show[ed]…just how absurd” such prejudices are. The second loved it because they viewed Archie as some sort of hero – someone who wasn’t afraid to “tell it like it really is”.

This is the same problem that led to Dave Chapelle abandoning a $50 million contract. In a disjointed interview with Oprah (which can be viewed at the bottom of the page here) he said that the impetus for his abrupt decision to leave the show was how someone in the audience laughed. Chapelle felt that instead of laughing at the send up of the stereotype, the audience member was instead laughing at the stereotype. It was when he realised that his audience had grown too large for him to accurately predict and control their perceptions of his sketches that he walked away from 50 million big ones.

This just calls to mind other comedians (Chris Rock’s Niggers vs. Blacks routine, for example, or all of Russell Peters’ material) who have similar brands of humour. I honestly wonder if they care about how their jokes are received in the wider world, and if they do, how they feel about people like my immediate family who use the Niggers vs. Blacks routine to validate their prejudice against Black people. To me, the worst part about minorities telling jokes that denigrate their specific groups is that the bigoted can take this as further proof that they should remain the Other. To quote my mother (re: Chris Rock), “See, even they themselves [black people] say so. It must be true.” (Her words echoed in my head the last time I heard someone sniggering at a misogynistic joke I cracked on public transit. I was telling it to my sympathetic friends. Like Chapelle, I wondered what angle of the joke the other guy was laughing at. Did he see a bunch of girls laughing at the joke and take it as further proof that girls are bubble-headed shopaholics?)

So, I still make light of the fact that I’m wearing heels because I look good in them, despite the fact that I can walk only if the ground below is perfectly level (and even then, only for a distance of 3m). I still think it’s funny that I’m an Asian, love MMORPGs, am insanely concerned about my grades and consider instant noodles nutritionally complete (as a bonus, my fiancé is White, making me one of those Asians). Now though, I only mention it aloud where I know exactly who is listening.

While you ponder the problem of send-up vs. reinforcement, please enjoy my favourite Dave Chapelle sketch: Clayton Bigsby, the Black White Supremacist.