Hey, it’s not all bad for redheads in Britain! Sometimes they are offered jobs that involve nothing more than copying the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Of course, sometimes the job is just a ruse to aid in a bank robbery, but, you know, nothing’s perfect. 
It’s the extra “u”. Americans think it’s unnecessary, so we only have “humor”. Claude Shannon proved that redundancy is the key to robustness in the face of error, so your “humour” is more robust.
Don’t you mean Clade Shannon?
There was a series of ads recently taking the piss out of redheads in Oz.
It doesnt amount to ‘racism’ and the responses were an overreaction but it can get old at times. Part of it over here is the ‘easily sunburnt so cant go to the beach’ aspect, ie the implication that you’re a social outcast.
Not so much an issue in the UK. I would put most of it down to holdovers about being scots/irish where the original reason has been mostly forgotten.
Edit: Lot more to it than that historically:
Otara
Before the Segway’s name was officially announced, it was referred to as “Ginger,” (after Ginger Rogers). Could that be why the Segway never become “more important than the Internet,” as had been announced?
As someone that lived the first twenty five years of his life in the UK and is a Ginger, let me tell you that you could not be more wrong. To be honest people like you, that dismiss it is light-hearted fun, are a huge part of the problem. Us gingers are expected to just accept it and taking any offence is a sign of our own lack of a sense of humour.
Interesting article from the BBC about gingerism, from a couple of years ago.
Ginga, with a hard G, was very common in the 80s and 90s. My theory is that it makes the word easier to spit out with a sense of hatred
Wow, that is funny. Bullying is hilarious is all its forms!
Bull dust you should meet my ex wife and my daughter! Both scorpios as well.
Huh. Anne of Green Gables is from the same era as Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, and I clearly remember Rebecca’s friend Huldah Meserve, who was a total social butterfly and boy magnet, and who had striking red hair. The impression given was that she had decided to own it, wearing bright, solid colors to showcase it, and wearing it in a style not unlike '80s mall bangs, IIRC. A bit over the top, but not “ugly” by any means. (Although it was also noted that overuse of whatever ghastly curling device was state of the art at that time was starting to turn the front of her hair pink. :eek: ) I think Anne was kind of a drama queen anyway. Rebecca calmly accepted that she was not beautiful, and worked on presenting a good personality. If Anne had been blonde, she’d probably have wished she was a redhead. 
Ginger? or Mary Anne?
It’s common in Scotland - makes the phrase “ginger minger” into a handy rhyming insult. (minging = revolting, dirty, disgusting)
When I was at school in the '80s, red-heads were seen as ugly (particularly the boys), and called names like Duracell, carrot-top, etc.
Not particularly pleasant, but yes, the prejudice is true, and has been happening for decades before the Southpark episode. I think it’s connected to the prejudice against the Scots of Irish ancestry, anti-Catholic sentiment, or the older belief that red-heads are more likely to be witches, in league with the devil?
Bullying is always hilarious for the bullies, and they enjoy holding the victim at fault if anyone complains. Classic behaviour.
We used to make fun of redheads when I was a kid but I always assumed that it was just some ironic joke - that we were “ostracizing” someone due to something of no importance at all.
Mind you I don’t recall anyone ever doing this to a redhead. And in Australia it had nothing to do with national origins. It was many years later before I discovered that it wasn’t just my social circle that made 'ranga jokes.
The only thing I have against redheads is that, like blacks, they can wear the most exotic colors and look good in them.
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My understanding is that anti-Irish prejudice was strongest in areas like NYC where there were high concentrations of recent Irish immigrants that would work practically any job for low wages, leading some of the “old blood” white Americans to take a “they took our jobs!” attitude.
Down here in the US South, there is no significant anti-redhead sentiment that I can see, and I’ve been here for 20+ years. We have Irish down here, and there is, in some areas, still a lingering anti-Catholic sentiment in bible-bashing Protestant fundamentalist towns, but they (fundies) are generally anti-racist (some overtly) and discriminate on religion only - it doesn’t matter two figs to them what you look like or where your ancestors came from.
The anti-redhead sentiment is one of the things that confused me reading Anne of Green Gables - I didn’t understand why Anne wouldn’t like her red hair - to a teen boy in the South in the 90’s, red hair was CUTE!
Interesting. I’ve never read Rebecca, so I didn’t know that. But we have a family story about my g-grandmother–they lived out in the country somewhere, Nebraska probably, and one day they were getting ready to go to town, which was just as big a deal for them as it is in Little House in the Big Woods. They couldn’t find her when it was time to go, until they looked behind a door, where she was hiding and hacking off her braids, saying “I won’t go to town with this ugly red hair!” She was probably around 8.
So I always figured that Anne was a reflection of a very general perception that red hair was unattractive. It was still hanging on when I went to Scandinavia as a teen in the late 80’s, until dying your hair red became fashionable. There was this one really cute red-headed girl, and everyone thought of her as unfortunate to have that awful hair, which really puzzled me.
Here’s a question. Surely red hair must be fairly common in the UK, right? How often does it occur?
It’s actually pretty common here in our town for some reason–my daughter’s friend had 4 or 5 redheads in her class last year (out of ~30), and our children’s group at church has 5 or 6 out of 50 kids. I don’t know if I live in a weird statistical anomaly or if that’s usual in a mixed but mostly-white population. It’s not like we’ve had generations of the same population; I live in California–people move around a lot and I know that none of those redheads are related to each other.
When someone levels a particular critcism related to an inherent trait, hopefully their sense of humor is robust enough to withstand getting their teeth knocked down the back of their throat with extreme prejudice. It’s all in good fun, you know.
Missed the edit:
This isn’t directed at you, MK VII; I’m not assuming you engage in that behavior…