For those who don’t know, here is the clip:
Only problem is that the Xhosa phrase he quoted actually means
“White people don’t know I’m lying”
Personally, I think it’s funny.
If nothing else, it’s a very bold joke. In order for it to work, the few people (especially in the US) who do know Xhosa have to be able to spread the word to everyone who doesn’t about what he actually said. Which of course will happen, today, but it wouldn’t have even a decade or two ago.
Hehehehe, I think it’s pretty dang funny.
“Xhosa is spoken as a first language by 8.2 million people and by 11 million as a second language in South Africa, mostly in Eastern Cape Province.” (From Wikipedia)
So the joke would be more correct to say “99.75 percent of all people on Earth don’t know I’m lying”
Reminds me of the Western (IIRC, A Distant Trumpet, with Troy Donahue, Diane McBain, and Suzanne Pleshette) where they had Native Americans speaking their own language during peace negotiations with the US Cavalry. While the subtitles read such crap as “… And there shall be peace as long as the rivers flow,” they were actually saying things like " … You lying-ass white sonsabitches!" When the film was shown in places with a sizable NA population, the audience would laugh heartily.
(This probably happened more than once when Westerns were in vogue, but that’s the movie I remember.)
It happens enough that there is a trope for it. A recent example is from the animated series Adventure Time, where a “ranicorn” speaks a language that is actually Korean.
I’m pretty sure Noah has made that joke before, maybe several times.
It goes back to the silent film days. Occasionally, actors would mouth lines for the lipreaders in the audience.
The Oscars get a much bigger and worldwide audience, though. He must have known he’d be busted quickly.
Well it doesn’t make sense, given that even most black people in South Africa won’t understand it, it just seems like a pointless dig at whitey. The man is a laughter black hole.
Zulu speakers understand it fine, which means that yes most black South African’s did understand it. Plus all the south Africans of other flavours who understand Xhosa.
On another level, considering the English bit that comes before the Xhosa, it is also a dig at people who obsess over Black Panther and the fictional country of Wakanda. With the added bonus that Xhosa was the language used in the film which ads yet another layer of funny.
An I say this as one of the umlungu he was talking about.
I thought it was funny and well-played. If anything, the butt of the joke is anyone who was offended by it; it’s not like he called anyone a rude name in Xhosa.
To overanalyze it to death, he comes from a background that has historically been underprivileged in most of the developed world, especially the US. Then a hit movie comes out, and everyone wants to be Wakandan. But he really is Wakandan, or at least the closest thing to it one can be. So now it’s his turn to make fun of the “outsiders”. But he needs some easy shorthand way to refer to the “outsiders”, and the most obvious way also just happens to be an inversion of the way he and others like him have been traditionally referred to as outsiders. And thus, the joke works.
There is quite a power in the way he uses Xhosa:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baEiWB2aM9Y&feature=youtu.be&t=82
It was completely fucking hilarious.
And digs at whitey are bad, why? Especially coming from a person whose very existence was a crime in his country and had to be hidden from whites lest they arrest his mother?
It’s slightly amusing, making fun of people who think Wakanda is a real place. The thing is, as far as Americans go, I doubt that the percentage of black people who think that is much different than the percentage of white people.
Whitey here, and I thought it was hilarious.
So the point of the joke is white people think Wakanda actually exists? Seems like a cheap way to make him feel better about making fun of whitey.
The rest of the bit is funny. The Mel Gibson part is actually quite funny.
While this is technically true, and makes for some nice humour, it’s *also *true that this was only the case for the first year of Noah’s life.
Man wypipo are such snowflakes. Maybe Noah should have used the Xhosa word for snowflakes instead of whitey, that would have been even better!
Mostly because it was a Mad-Lib - fill in your own punchline. 