I have an old south african piano… it sounds great but is hard to play, as all the white keys are at the top, and the black keys are on the bottom… (Ba Dum pah!)
Is this joke funny? Where is the line between racist humour (which I don’t approve of), and humour making fun of racism? Is it “OK” to use racist terminology in a joke that makes fun of racism?
FML
Like all of humor, you can’t define it all that well. I didn’t think your joke was racist at all. It sounded like it was making fun of what South Africa used to be which is anti-racist. OTOH, it wasn’t that funny either. Someone like Dave Chapelle or Chris Rock (both hysterical black comedians that do a lot of racial bits in case you don’t know) can do the most blatantly racist sounding humor on the surface and yet it pokes fun at all of it and undermines the whole thing. Very racist speech can be turned into parody by someone, black or white, that is unusually skilled at the art while the exact same joke or skit can be done by someone else and have the opposite effect.
This is what some people might not understand about Borat. The sketches on his show would not be funny if people did not actually believe that foreigners act like Borat. He is not just doing racist jokes to be funny, he is doing racist jokes to expose and mock the racism that is ever present in this world.
*I *think it was (a little) funny, so that’s one South African who sorta chuckled at it (I mean, it’s not the greatest joke ever, is it?). I didn’t see where you used any offensive racist terminology, anyway. The joke uses the idea of Apartheid but doesn’t celebrate it.
I take the joke as a pleasant one that mocks racism or possibly whites without mocking blacks. To the extent that it makes fun of whites for putting themselves on top to the exclusion of all reason, then it actually is racist, against whites - but then even that might be permissible.
It does have, though, some capacity to offend just because it makes humor of a racially charged and sad situation. So I can imagine people resenting it for that reason. Perhaps some would say that if the jokester can comprehend the horrible situation he is joking about, he should be doing something more worthwhile about it.
There’s an old joke about a black man trying to vote in the segregationist South, and they keep putting obstacles in his way, and he keeps clearing them. Like, they give him a history test: what were the middle names of all the members of Jefferson’s cabinet, and so forth. Finally they hand him a newspaper and ask him to read it, for a literacy test. The newspaper is in Chinese. So they ask him if he knows what it says, and he says yes, and they are surprised and ask him what it says. He answers, “It says I’m not voting today.”
What do you call a black man who flies a plane?
A pilot, you frakking racist!
I don’t have a cite on this, and I could be totally wrong, but my HS history teacher told us that “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” offended a great many Southerners. Basically, they couldn’t handle the truth; they felt they were being slandered. (And now I’m picturing John Wilkes Booth onstage at the Ford theater. “This is a fictitious war! Shame on you, Mr. Lincoln!”)
There’s no racist terminology in that joke, it’s just mocking racism in South Africa. But the broader question is very hard. A new kind of racial and ethnic humor has become very popular in the last couple of years, and I understand it’s mocking racism - or was at the start - but I wonder where it’s going and about some of the audience. That’s basically what troubled Dave Chappelle, I think…
I pondered the same question when I heard this joke (which I loved, by the way)…
Linford Christie is visiting South Africa in the 1980s for an athletics competition. On his day off from training he decides to have a game of golf to relax. There’s a golf course just across the road from his hotel, so he walks over to the clubhouse. Before he can go in, though, a doorman appears and shouts: “Hey! This is a whites-only course. You can’t come in here. Coloureds’ place is ten minutes up the road.”
Linford is put out by this. “But don’t you know who I am?” he says. “I’m Linford Christie – European 100 metres champion!”
“Oh right,” says the doorman. “Five minutes up the road then.”