Political humor~

While I’m probably not the most politically active person around, having been in the United States for over three months now, I have come to realize how prevalent the use of humor, especially irony and sarcasm is in both American politics and the media that discusses it. One would really find it hard not to become sarcastic about the whole thing after watching a few episodes of the Colbert report or reading a few issues of the Onion.

Politicians themselves often use humor to appeal to the people (clearly, most presidents of the United States do have a sense of humor, though not all of them have a good taste for it), or attack their opponents. Medias cannot pass a day without ridiculing or denouncing policies, ideas of certain politicians, events etc. that they do not agree with. Videos of lame campaigns, awkward speeches, mistakes, etc. prosper on YouTube. “Bush jokes” has become so widespread that it has become its own type of humor.

Compared the highly satiric and often incisive humor prevalent in American Politics, “Chinese political humor” is not a phrase that would normally appear in our daily lives. While people do pass satirical comments to one another and a touch of irony can occasionally appear in some small newspaper article, a solemn and official tone has always been the key characteristics of Chinese politics. Yet with the widespread use of the internet, with increasing transparency in government affairs and with more and more people eager to air their views and challenge the authority in these matters, forms of political humor are also beginning to appear in China, though in a somewhat different way.

An interesting case involves a car accident that happened on a university campus in Hebei Province. A car ran into to university students. One student was killed immediately and the other was severely wounded. Rather than stopping the car, the driver drove on as if nothing had happened. After the care was finally stopped by other passing students and security guards, the driver rolled down the window and told everyone around in an aggressive tone “Sue me if you dare, my father is Li Gang!” It turned out that his father Li Gang was the city’s Public Security Bureau deputy director.

The whole nation became furious after hearing the incident, for this was not only a severe case by itself, but also brought up many past cases of government officials covering up criminal actions of their relatives or themselves with their given power. Beside official criticisms, four days after the incident, an online poetry contest invited entrants to incorporate the sentence "My father is Li Gang" (我爸是李刚) into classical Chinese poems. The contest was created on MOP, a popular Chinese Bulletin Board System, and soon received more than 6,000 submissions.

As we laugh at these terribly incongruous poems created, we can feel a deep and bitter sense of sarcasm behind it. The current political atmosphere in China is still against the ideals of political humor and in a sense, freedom of speech (which I believe has both its advantages and disadvantages) has led political humor in China to develop in a more connotative fashion. Since it is quite impossible to make direct satiric criticisms against sensitive topics and issues, and also because Chinese traditions and beliefs have taught us to be comparatively mild and less direct, the emerging forms of Chinese political humor are often not as incisive and direct as that of American political humor. However, this does not make their creators or audience any less concerned about the issues such humor brings up. With this incident, and many others that are beginning to spread via internet and among a new generation of Chinese youngsters, we do see the increasing possibility of change to current systems in the future.

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.

Why do we love Tom and Jerry--part two

It seems to me that there are several explanations as to why Tom and Jerry still seems funny and acceptable with its level of violence. There is a strong touch of idealistic harmlessness to the basic settings of this cartoon. There is never any blood in any scene in the cartoon. Characters can be cut into pieces, smashed flat, but never would they ever bleed. , Immortality has also been bestowed upon all the characters in Tom and Jerry. There is also never any death, actually, never any actually harm done to the characters. No matter how blown up or how battered a character is, they will always be up and about again in less than a few seconds. And anyway, these are all animals we are talking about. Though we always talk about protecting the environment and loving the animals, when it comes down to it, the majority of us are still always more concerned for ourselves.

It seems that subconsciously, most human beings view bloodshed, long-lasting physical damages, death as important symbol indicating how violent and gruesome a scene is. The bloodier and the more deaths, the worse-off it is. By entirely eliminating blood and damage to the characters, and even their surroundings from the cartoon, it inevitably makes scenes of violence seem much less serious and severe.

These particular characteristics that help make the violence in the cartoon seem less severe has brought me to relate to the ideas of consequentialism. In a sense, the fact that we see Tom and Jerry as extremely funny rather than unbearably violent exposes us to a very consequentialist side of the picture. We feel ok to laugh at the cartoons because we are used to evaluating the seriousness of an event through its results. If all characters are all still up and about by the end of the cartoon, it’s all cool. What they had gone through, all the exploding, cutting, jamming all therefore harmless and funny. Since all is well, no thought needs to be put into what had happened. Beyond that, it’s a CARTOON for god’s sake, what can hurt? It’s all made up and not even acted out by real people.

With such thoughts that come to mind, it strikes me that we have a universal appreciation of humor in such “harmlessly” violent cartoons, from Tom and Jerry, Looney Tunes to more recent and more violent ones like South Park. I can see that these cartoons make violence seem less than what it is and more ok to laugh at through multiple ways, among which are the two methods I have mentioned above, but why do we like humor that is rooted in violence anyway? In our society, violence is severely condemned both by morals and law, and people do not hesitate to be terrified or condemn real life acts of violence. Then why is it that we paradoxically find joy and laughter in humor based on these evil deeds? Do we necessarily find more pleasure when our sense of guilt that rises and clashes with the irresistible impulse to laugh?

Maybe there is an inevitable nature of violence deeply hidden in each of us.

Why do we love Tom and Jerry?

Since its creation in the early 1940s, Tom and Jerry has become one of the most popular cartoons, enjoying a wide range of audience all around the world. This American animated series that centers around the simple plot of a never-ending rivalry between the cat Tom and the mouse Jerry contains a pretty typical example of animated American humor. Not only does it include racist stereotypes typical to the American culture like the black maid and characters shown in blackface following explosions, it is also includes a lot of hard core violence.

Take the episode of the golf course for example, as I was watching and laughing at it for the millionth time last night, out of pure interest and randomness, I decide to jot down every violent event that happened during the 8 minute video. Tom was smashed in the eye with a golf ball and the ball got stuck in his eye socket; Tom strangled himself with a golf club; Jerry got crunched by a flying golf ball; Tom’s teeth were completely shattered by a golf ball; Tom’s head was cut off; Tom used Jerry as a golf ball and smacked him with his golf club; Bees swarmed into Tom’s mouth etc. The above are just some of the gruesome events that happened in this short 6 minute clip. And anyone who has watched Tom and Jerry would be aware of the similar violent gags that happen in every episode: Jerry slicing Tom in half, shutting his head in a window or a door, stuffing Tom's tail in a waffle iron and a mangle, Tom using everything from axes, pistols, explosives, traps and poison to try to murder Jerry, the frequent use of explosives by the both of them and so on.

Let us now consider the following scenario: if we were to take the words “Tom” and “Jerry” away and use the above paragraph as a true and realistic description of a TV series, how many people who enjoy Tom and Jerry would go and watch it? How many parents who have no problem with their children watching Tom and Jerry would allow their kids to be exposed to a TV series with the above descriptions? The answer is probably not hard to guess. Then why is Tom and Jerry so widely renowned and accepted? With any observant viewer, it is not hard to realize that the core of the humor in Tom and Jerry lies in these exact scenes of violence. Yet people who watch it would still burst into hysteric laughter as they see Tom squashed into the shape of a bowling pin, or sliced into pieces. Why is it possible for such a huge population of people laugh at such vicious scenes without any slight uncomfortable feelings or guilt? Why is it that someone like me who can’t even stand the lightest “dead baby joke” would be a big fan of this long running cartoon?

What in Tom and Jerry makes it acceptable to a wide range of audience worldwide? And furthermore, why do people enjoy this kind of violent humor? I will go into a detailed discussion in the next blog post.

How do you make a dead baby float?

How do you make a dead baby float?
Take your foot off its head.

I couldn’t help staring at the web page that I had just opened up with pure regret and disgust. Why would anyone find this sort of joke funny? Yet as I ran through the rest of the Google page, I found it hard to ignore the tiny line of words “About 63,800,000 results (0.17 seconds)” glaring at me directly below the search phrase “dead baby joke”. Ten seconds later, I rapidly typed in the phrase “Chinese humor” and pressed search. Google sent back “About 18,800,000 results (0.36 seconds)”.

While the jokes themselves struck me as bad taste, I found it amusing that these sorts of jokes flourish in such large numbers in the United States. Is it because only Americans are capable of comprehending dark humor? I believe not. Take out the revolting parts, the “joke” in the “dead baby” series isn’t really clever and requires only very basic common sense to understand. It would also be silly to say that it is of cultural or historical significance to Americans like many jokes about the American Dream are. The “dead baby” jokes appeal to only a limited proportion of the population, and it is not hard to find people in America who would dislike it as much as I do. So why is this sort of dark humor that is enjoyed by only a minority can be so well known and widely spread in the United States? As I came to this question, I couldn’t help picturing what the fate of such jokes would be had they originated in China.

Other than in philosophy or biology class where discussion of the topic is obligatory, people in China, especially the elderly, avoid talking about death. When such a topic becomes inevitable, we speak with full respect and politeness, always careful to use the words “deceased” and “passed away” rather than “died.” Under such conditions, you can probably picture the consequences a poor kid who happened to come up with a “dead baby” joke would suffer if the joke ever slips into the ears of his parents, teachers or other elderly. This would be dealt as a serious assault on morality. Even if the kid managed to sneak past the elderly and post the joke onto the web, the “super efficient” Chinese government online security people would probably list the joke into its filter system before it has the chance to spread and affect the morality of other Chinese youngsters.

The emphasis on individualism and freedom that constitutes an important part of American culture has not only produced distinctively American jokes, but has also to a significant degree, tolerated the existence and spread of particular types of humor that may not be accepted by the general public. Thus, the proliferation of “dead baby” jokes in the United States does not necessarily imply that its popularity is due to a lot of Americans who find the jokes funny. Is there a chance that the millions of youngsters in China who have become increasingly open to all sorts of culture and ideas would also enjoy the jokes? Possibly, but we won’t be able to find out, at least not for now.