No squinting at this one required – A coupla of Asian cavemen attempt to build an aircraft, fail, and the punchline is-- wait for it-- Two Wongs don’t make a Wright.
As Ray Sullivan, the publisher of a couple of papers who decided not to run the strip observed, “I understand trying to make a play on words, but it’s just stupid.”
Yeah, stupid. Stupid and juvenile. I remember conceiving of a stock buddy cop drama, in which a gruff, prejudiced veteran cop (eventually) learns racial tolerance and friendship after being partnered with an asian rookie, to be titled White and Wong. Then I turned thirteen.
The strip in question doesn’t seem to be online yet, but I can’t help noticing that the most recent strip that is up can also be described as “just stupid.”
In 7th grade, we had to write a story that the class had to guess the moral.
A la Too many cooks spoil the broth.
Mine was about a chinese couplenamed Wong who wanted to have a white child.
They kept trying, but no luck.
The moral? 2 Wongs don’t make a white.
I wasn’t picked to read it and have the class guess, but I saw and still see nothing wrong with it.
But then I’m not a famous cartoonist.
So a cartoonist finds humor in exploiting the similarity between a foreign name and a common English word. And? Where’s the problem?
Do you actually think that the cartoonist is implying that Asians are less intelligent? That the “Asian cavemen” were incapable of building a flying machine because they weren’t “Anglo cavemen?” Methinks you’re reading a bit too much into what is, in effect, a rather tired pun.
Would the joke have been less “offensive” if the foreign language were German or Russian? Or if the two Asian cavemen had succeeded, thus changing the punchline to “Two Wongs can make a Wright?” Where exactly is the problem?
There’s certainly no denying that the joke is old, tired, and not-very-funny. But that’s not sufficient reason to pull the strip. The OP is evidently of the opinion that the joke crosses the line of being racist. My argument is that someone is being a trifle oversensitive here.
How did you make that inference? I agreed with the publisher’s observation that it was “just stupid,” expanded the judgment to include “juvenile,” noted that “stupid and juvenile” is de rigueur for Hart’s recent work, and expressed curiosity as to why he carries the strip at all, if he has an aversion to “just stupid.”
You will further note that I mentioned an example of a similar lame pun with a specifically anti-racist context, which hardly supports an argument that a strip with such a pun is, prima facie, racist.
Watch who you’re callin’ a reactionary, bub. (Grrr, snarl! Fssssssst!)
Anyway, Creators Syndicate has got the strip posted now, so we can all scrutinize it and pick it apart. No asian cavemen in it-- it’s one of the “Encyclopaedia reader” strips.
Back to the editor:
What did he think would provoke hurt or protest? Well, maybe, since the “two Wongs” are shown up for having made a spurious claim to have flown the first airplane, he might have been concerned that folks would interpret it as an implication that asians are deceitful, which could be reinforced by the ambiguous ethnic and ethical dichotomy implied by linking Wright/Right and Wong/Wrong.
While I can understand his rationale for being cautious about something that his editors saw as a potential for offending people, I still think that the real offense lies in the strips consistent lack of ha-ha, especially contrasted with the great work that Mr. Hart was doing forty years ago. The continued publication of B.C. is like keeping the stinking corpse of a beloved pet in the livingroom.
Of course, the noticable lack of howls of protest from the massing coolies “in Chinatown,” reacting to the strip as carried in the more than a thousand dailies not published by Mr. Sullivan, seems to suggest that his concern was indeed out of proportion.
My apologies, Larry Mudd, if I have made any incorrect assumptions, as I seem to have misread the intent of the OP. I have a bit of a hair trigger when it comes to people being accused of racicm by the hypersensitive, since it tends to turn everyday conversation into a minefield and creates far more problems than it solves. I see that I have overreacted in this case.
Now, as to the actual topic of this conversation, I could make the same complaint about half the daily strips published in my local paper. Not that they’re necessarily juvenile, but they’re definitely un-funny. I haven’t gotten a laugh of of Healthcliff, Hi and Lois, Family Circus, Beetle Baily, or Marmaduke for years.
What’s funny about this is before I followed the link and saw the actual cartoon, I was all gung-ho to accept the fact that Johnny Hart put out another racist cartoon.
But having read the cartoon, I don’t think it is intentionally racist. Stupid, yes. Racist, not intentionally. You could go into a long rant about how Hart thinks that the only society on earth that would come up with flight would necessarily be white and European/American. But that’s only if you are familiar with Hart’s oeuvre. And I’m of the camp that the recent Islam debacle was intentional, no matter how much he denies it now.
So here’s how I think it is. Since Hart is such a weird fundamentalist fellow (and take into account the subject matter of his strip! Wheels within wheels, that guy), any perceived slight is going to be taken seriously. I think people just give the guy to much benefit of the doubt as far as intelligence. Simply put, he’s not really that clever. If he was he might actually put out some funny strips once in a while.
But of course I think the comics page is just a symptom of an otherwise sick society. I mean, look at what that little tramp Luanne does daily.
Thank you for pointing this out. The “B.C.” of the early sixties was a marvelous strip. Remember Peter standing on a big rock and discovering things, by virtue of his being the first to announce it? “Bear witness, B.C., to this, my discovery of the MUSHROOM!”
I suggest we ceases this bickering over whether the strip was racist and focus on what’s important: the fact that the strip sucks, and Johnny Hart should be cooked alive in boiling newspaper ink.
A newspaper is a business, and they have to think about the fallout from a potentially offensive cartoon… in my experience, nobody who works in publishing or PR is ever offended themselves, but they’re always "afraid it will be perceived as offensive…"They are just doing their job, and are looking out for the newspaper or organization more than looking to protect the world from being offtended. I find it a little annoying, and despist all forms of censorship, but I don’t disrespect their intentions.
I wonder if the people outraged that a bad cartoon didn’t get printed are outraged that CBS refused to air commercials by MoveOn.org and PETA during the Superbowl… but are running a Bush ad. That’s the “liberal media” for you.
