Unfortunately, in what will appear to be an ironic turn (but isn’t,) I didn’t find that post funny because it seemed to miss the target. A documentary with that title would be assuming an answer to question 2, not addressing it…
I thought it was funny.
Colbert puts an end to the controversy.
Pretty cute episode. He did his usual great job of roasting the ridiculous situation, although he was remarkably gentle towards the hashtivists who stoked the fires, IMO.
“People tell me I’m white and I believe them because I just devoted six minutes to explain how I’m not a racist.”
I thought she came off pretty badly in the interview. The host’s first question was “Why #CancelColbert? What did you hope to achieve with that?”
And her first response is “That’s a loaded question.”
Seems like a perfectly reasonable and open ended question to me.
I think the idea that satire somehow normalizes the point of view being satirized is hard to swallow. Suey Park seems to think that Colbert’s satire of a racist caricature of Asians to parallel the racist caricature of Native Americans indicates that people think caricatures of Asians are funny.
But the whole point of the bit is that no one in the audience thinks the caricature of Asians is funny. What’s funny is that there are people as clueless as Colbert pretends to be.
I’m not sure I agree with your last paragraph. Colbert is a funny guy, and when he did his caricature, he was giving it comic timing, hit his jokes well. He’s not like whatshisface from the office who deliberate makes all his jokes fall flat; he’s working the joke just like he works all jokes. I definitely get the discomfort with making the racist joke itself funny.
I’m not saying Park is right to object to it, but I get where she’s coming from.
Exactly. I forget who he was making fun of when he “introduced” the character in 2005, but I think it was O’Reilly.
That’s because his audience knows the Colbert character and knows what the joke is. They’re not laughing because “ching chong ding dong” is hilarious; they’re laughing because Dan Snyder is an asshole.
I see two different arguments being made around the net that there’s something wrong with the joke.
One argument is that the joke shouldn’t be told because it denigrates Asians. I disagree with that argument–with a kind of qualification, though, for which see below.
The other argument is that the use of this language “ching chong ding dong” viscerally triggers feelings of helplessness and fear (and other less dramatic but no less visceral and indicative of real injustice) when many Asians hear them, meaning that to use this kind of language is harmful no matter the intent. I find this argument more plausible. We certainly wouldn’t think Colbert was making a good joke if he’d used “nigger” in a similar way, and the reason we wouldn’t think this is a good joke is, surely, exactly because we know of the visceral feelings this kind of word evokes.
Having said that, one can only expect feelings to be accomodated so far, and only for certain good reasons. But whether “ching chong ding dong” crosses that line is certainly worth talking about, and I can’t justify simply assuming I know the answer to that because I know what I mean when I use the words.
As to the qualification mentioned above–I don’t think the joke denigrates Asians, but I also think that this fact relies on a shared understanding between joke-teller and audience that they all, together, assume that Asians shouldn’t be denigrated. If the audience has had their emotions “triggered” in the way described in the third paragraph of this post, predictably they may not be ready to assume that this assumption is shared by the joke-teller, and for this reason, for that audience, the joke may simply not work, and may in fact be best read from their perspective as denigrating.
If racial humor is deemed not-PC, you can pretty much toss out stand up as a thing. It’s over.
But hey, it’s OK to laugh at racist caricatures if you don’t really mean it. Has Dave Chappelle taught us nothing?
Why are you certain of this? Other people have made that comparison, they just don’t have cable TV shows. The joke isn’t that the racial slur is funny. The joke is that it’s unacceptable, and that Synder is using a racial slur in the name of his “charity” is a transparent but still offensive attempt to get people to stop criticizing him.
I’m uncomfortable with this reasoning because it eliminates the line between “I personally don’t find this funny” and “this joke is being told to denigrate me.” That’s not reasonable.
This isn’t racial humor. The joke isn’t about Asians, it’s about people who are clueless about racial slurs.
There are some good, thoughtful posts in this thread, looking at the merits of both sides.
And it pisses me off.
I think it is so certain that one side is wrong, and the other is right, that there shouldn’t even be this discussion.
On the other hand, I read that the girl who started it has received death threats. So that’s way worse than any opinion in this matter. The world is terrible.
This is rapidly becoming a distinction that almost nobody even considers possible anymore. “Blazing Saddles” could not get made today.
I agree that the joke presupposes that the slur is unacceptable. But even though that is true, I very much doubt that the same joke, but using “nigger” instead (and making other adjustments to the joke as necessary to make that word fit), would be received well by the same audience. Even in that case, the joke would still presuppose that the word “nigger” is unacceptable–but the joke itself would be rejected because precisely because it uses that word, no matter what the intent of the usage was.
Just to be clear, are you saying you don’t think the “nigger” version of the joke would be rejected by the audience that enjoys the “ching chong” joke?
“I’ve started the Nigger Joe Foundation for Racial Understanding Or Whatever”–if Colbert had made that joke, would everyone have found it just as acceptable as the joke he actually made? (One difficulty here is that “Ching Chong Ding Dong” calls back to a character Colbert had done several years ago. So for this hypothetical we’d need to pretend he’d done a “Nigger Joe” character instead…
The reasoning you quoted doesn’t end with the conclusion “so the joke shouldn’t be told.”
Wow, really? Annoyance, I can see… anger, maybe even disgust. But “helplessness and fear”? What do these many Asians think is going to happen to them?
What if you were to find out that for a great many Asians, “Ching Chong Ding Dong” feels just like “Nigger” feels to a great many African Americans. Would this change your opinion about Colbert’s joke?
If, in the real world, the two don’t “feel just alike” but are closer together on a certain continuum than you had supposed previously, would this change your opinion about Colbert’s joke?
Do you think it would be acceptable to make a joke using the word “nigger” in much the same way Colbert used the phrase “ching chong ding dong”?
It is always productive and sensible to question the appropriateness of the emotions felt by a large population of people.
Until you provide some evidence that a large population of people feel that way, I tend to see this as you making assumptions and appointing yourself to speak on behalf of groups you don’t belong to, who may not feel as strongly as you do or even agree with you. As we overzealous liberals are wont to do, from time to time.
That never would have been broadcast, nor would Colbert have played that kind of character. You’re correct that the offensiveness would have drowned out the point he was making, but that’s a discussion about the weight of the two slurs - not “Colbert is a racist and should be fired.”
That’s exactly where this “activist” is taking it, though.
Yup.
Well, as a guy whose girlfriend is Chinese who’s talked to her quite a bit about the Ching Chong Ding Dong thing in the past, she’s told me it brought up feelings of shame from memories of schoolyard taunts, so maybe a “visceral reaction of helplessness and fear” isn’t such a stretch. FTR, she still watches and enjoys Colbert and has no desire to see him removed from the air, but that particular character, even though she gets who’s being made fun of, instantly makes her feel small.
Right: I agree with every word of what you just said. My point has been that there is an argument for the view that the joke shouldn’t be told which I find more plausible than I expected–and that argument turns on an analogy between “ching chong ding dong” and “nigger.”
Well… that’s not relevant. I didn’t say or imply that the show should be cancelled.
It is highly doubtful that Woodstockbirdybird’s girlfriend is the only one who feels this way.
I am relaying to you the arguments I have found expressed by (people who at least say they are) Asians (on the internet) responding to this issue. Just go to any article anywhere online that deals with this issue, and read the comments. Of course it is always possible that the comments that reflect this kind of reasoning are nearly the only people in the whole country who feel this way. But that’d be extremely surprising, wouldn’t it?
(A set of comments that contains some examples of what I’m talking about is here.)
I am speaking on my own behalf, not on anyone else’s.