So a Chinese Guy Walks into a bar and says he's Irish--Get it?

Wall Street journal article: So a Chinese Guy Walks Into a Bar, and Says He's Irish—Get It?

Well, I don’t. 

A few days ago, while surfing the internet, I came across the article in the aboe link about a 40-year-old Chinese chemist, who is enjoying tremendous popularity as a stand-up comedian in USA but fails to entertain a Chinese audience. It interests me how a Chinese born and Chinese bred person can make Americans laugh but not the Chinese. While we have been talking quite a lot about inside jokes, cultural barriers etc. in class, Mr. Wong’s situation here seems to undermine our understandings of humor and its characteristics. The article itself concludes it as that Chinese people do not appreciate humor that pokes fun at themselves, are too sensitive about many topics, and moreover, Chinese people don’t really have a sense of humor.

THIS IS WRONG.

Not only is the article biased against Chinese people, after watching a couple of videos of Joe Wang’s shows online, I want to say that many examples of his “Chinese” humor that makes Americans laugh are themselves seem in a sense biased against Chinese people. It is based on self-mocking of the American understanding of Chinese stereotypes. Take this joke for instance:

“I was just amazed by the birth of my son. You know, I was in the delivery room, holding my son, thinking to myself. Whoa, he was just born, and he is already a US citizen. Then I said him: ‘do you know who’s Benjamin Franklin?’”

This joke is playing on how many Chinese people used to be frenetic about getting US citizenship and see it somehow as better than their original Chinese citizenship. While this was in a sense true for some Chinese in the past, for a new Chinese generation that is becoming increasingly confident and patriotic, they are likely to take some offense for such jokes rather than appreciate the humor in them.

This is the case for many of his jokes. Americans find Wang funny because of a combination of his stereotypically Chinese accent, awkwardness, grammatical errors, and his mimicking and exaggeration of Chinese stereotypes, many of which they may still believe to be true. But for the Chinese, while our appreciation of comedy may not be as prevalent as that in the USA, we do enjoy humor and can be sarcastic and self-mocking. Yet when it comes to a Chinese person making fun of old and sometimes even wrong Chinese stereotypes aimed at entertaining a foreign audience, we are likely to find it offending and kind of racist rather than funny.