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.