Racial/racist jokes
Stercus Tauri
Shipmate
in Epiphanies
Moving on, I hope, from a juvenile blunder committed in the Bad Jokes thread, I wonder if it is valid to distinguish between racial and racist jokes? Racist jokes, demeaning a racial group are clearly never acceptable or funny, but I am thinking of such things as some hilarious, but occasionally risqué Jewish jokes in Mordecai Richler's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, as an example. Perhaps it works when you poke fun at your own community, which may be racial, geographical, linguistic, and so on. Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Or is the answer too obvious to be worthy of discussion?
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Doublethink, Admin
It's been over 35 years since I read that book in my intro CanLit class. The instructor told me that he probably wouldn't teach it if it hadn't been written by a Jew.
And I don't think he was thinking of the jokes, so much as the portrayal of chauvinistic attitudes among certain Jewish characters, eg. the businessman who justifies his non-concern for workers killed in accidents by pointing out what the goyim did to Jews in Europe.
(Richler himself was a pretty outspoken opponent of racism and xenophobia, and his Israeli travelogue has an entertaining exchange in which he tells an anti-arab cabbie that his views are similar to what Richler heard directed against Jews in 1940s Montreal. Richler ends up having to apologize to the guy.)
I believe that scene is on the first or second page of the book.
Simon Evans tells jokes about class, punching down but in a self-deprecating way. I always found his routine about Newcastle funny. Recently I've discovered he likes skewering the latte sipping left, pointing out double standards in the early attacks on Trump in one clip I've seen. He reminded me of myself, sometimes just so in love with argument that I wind up sounding like I'm supporting positions and people I don't like.
I’m a fan of the American sitcom Modern Family, which ran from 2009 to 2020. I remember the creators being interviewed at some point and saying there things they did in the early seasons that they could never have done a decade later. And there is definitely some stuff about race/ethnicity/culture in Modern Family that walks a very fine line. (Trump may have been responsible for making some of that humour not very funny any longer.) A key part of the premise of MF is the concept of different cultures being thrown together in a single extended family so there is no way its humour could be purely an “own group” phenomenon.
We own some books of bad translations of signs etc in foreign languages into English - including one that features Ms. Marsupial’s mother tongue. I admit to finding them hilarious but they may not be to everyone’s taste.
Whatever Richler's conscious intentions, I think Duddy Kravitz possibly makes sense as a metaphor for the flaws of zionism. Hear me out...
From listening to old Jewish men talking about the importance of owning land, Duddy becomes obsessed with acquiring land of his own, and screws over alot of people and wrecks his personal relationships in order to get it. At the novel's resolution, he is informed by his gangster buddy that
In the aforememtioned travelogue, Richler recollects going to zionist meetings as a teenager, and one time seeing another attendee get the cold-shoulder after raising the issue of Jewish atrocities against arabs. So, the nasty aspects of zionist colonization were something he was at least aware of from a young age.
(By the way, the 2009 movie Leaves Of Grass includes Richard Dreyfus, ie. the cinematic Duddy, as a racist Jewish tycoon who delivers an Us vs. Them tirade quite similar to the one delivered by the businessman in TAODK. I'm pretty sure that was a deliberate allusion. If not, a pretty neat coincidence.)
As an aside, is 'latte-sipping left' a phrase he uses? Just because it's funny to me since lattes nowadays are the mainstay of working-class women in provincial towns. The people who I assume he means by 'latte-sipping left' (who....aren't really a real thing, or at least not in opposition to 'real working-class people' who presumably drink nothing but ditch-flavoured gruel) all pretty much uniformly drink short black single-origin coffees, preferably from an Aeropress or via pour-over. Lattes are deeply unfashionable in the same way Cosmopolitans (the cocktail) were by the time Sex and the City had made them mainstream.
What's the issue with Merchant of Venice? Very common Shakespeare text for 14yos in the UK. Indeed, I would hazard a guess that modern 14yos would be far better equipped to discuss the more 'real' social issues with obvious modern parallels like in Merchant or Othello as opposed to something like Midsummer Night's Dream or Twelfth Night. Ime teens are pretty naturally drawn to Shakespeare's tragedies rather than the comedies - I remember being thrilled to be able to do Macbeth at GCSE because it seemed 'real' and more sophisticated than something like Twelfth Night, and I was very snobbish and dismissive towards what I saw as idiots in love in Romeo and Juliet. And also it meant I could write essays about Stuart witch hunting which seemed much more fun.
I can remember pre-O-level doing As You Like It and The Merchant of Venice. Actually I think Merchant gets a bad rap: there were no Jews (officially) in Shakespeare's England and there wouldn't be until Cromwell allowed them back 60 or so years later (only to be persecuted once more after the Restoration which of course we were taught in primary school was a jolly good thing and everybody was happy again). It's a play about a Jew in a virulently anti-semitic society who is treated abominably for going about the only trade he's permitted. I think Shakespeare was rather sympathetic to him. Even if he wasn't, there's a lot of scope for exploring the nature of anti-semitism while teaching the play or indeed producing it on stage.
Another problematic one is The Taming of the Shrew for feminists. Again, it depends how you play it. Years ago I saw a production at the Liverpool Everyman, never noted for its conservatism or respect of tradition, with Jonathan Pryce and Kate Fahy. I can't recall who the producer was but it was magnificent: Petruchio strutting about in an elaborate white wedding dress and Katherine in tight jeans and black leather. Jonathan and Kate first met in that production, they're still together 50 years on.
For the record: comedians or anybody else sneering about latte-loving lefties and similar really annoy me. I take my coffee very seriously, I have a De Longhi machine in the kitchen and I source my beans from a top roaster for making small, lethal shots in the morning like in an Italian bar. I do own an Aeropress but its for emergencies only, it makes wishy-washy coffee but at least it's better than any other method. Coffee has been my one luxury and comfort when I've been hard up. What does Simon Evans want us to drink? Nescafé? I'm from a working-class family, those that remain are fully paid-up Red Wall Brexiteers who have long resented me for abandoning my roots and going to university. I do hate inverted snobbery.
At the risk of extending the tangent- I think it’s hard to get around antisemitism in MoV - the 2004 movie attempt to modernize (with Al Pacino et al) didn’t quite work out for me and I suspect the reason is that it’s too structurally baked into the plot. Other people’s mileage may vary.
I haven't seen that film. Do you mean that the script actually tries to remove the antisemitic material that's in the play?
My daughter has just finished doing Romeo and Juliet for GCSE and has not enjoyed it at all. She understands intellectually something about the nature of tragedy, but is utterly out of sympathy with the behaviour of the protagonists.
She has wished all along that they had studied Macbeth instead, which was an available alternative.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen it, but for the most part, no. The result didn’t feel to me like what Shakespeare wrote, but I don’t remember now exactly why I thought that.
How do you produce a play about antisemitism by removing all the antisemitic material?
The problem with studying Shakespeare's plays - any plays - is that they're meant to be performed and enjoyed, not analysed to death in schoolchildren's essays. I managed to persuade my daughter to come and see a performance of Twelfth Night with me - she'd been put off Shakespeare by studying Romeo and Juliet - and she thought it was great, possibly because she hadn't been forced to examine it line by line.
The next day all the local library copies were checked out.
It was 1968 in Oz, after all.
"Latte-sipping Left" is defined quite well here. I'd add an element of an uncritical acceptance of the narrative of the day.
I'd like to say more, but the alarm for my Dr's appointment has gone off!!
But most people who live in the inner city are working-class and particularly people of colour. Or do you think the 'real' working-class people are all white bald men? It also doesn't change the fact that the kind of imaginary person talked about here 1) doesn't actually exist because 2) he doesn't drink anything as provincial and mainstream as lattes and 3) isn't left-wing.
Also, what do you mean by 'the narrative of the day'? Because in the UK at least the 'narrative of the day' is a hard-right anti-immigration narrative, for example.
But what if the thing you enjoy *is* examining a play line by line?
I enjoyed 'analysing to death' Macbeth at GCSE, it doesn't mean my enjoyment of Shakespeare is invalid. Literary analysis is also a legitimate academic field.
I agree. That whole populist "Why can't we just enjoy the books without analyzing them to death?" has always failed to impress me. It implies that not only literature departments, but ANY discussion of a work at or above the complexity of "Do you think Holden Caulfield is just a typical adolescent whiner, or is something more going on there?" is an absolute waste of time.
People who dislike something have to convince themselves it's entirely invalid in order to feel justified in their dislike. To wit: pineapple on pizza.
Maybe I should read it again, but life's too short.
Not here, they aren't.
That's all very well, but I've watched Shakespeare's plays and while the words are clearly English I generally can't figure out what the hell is going on. It takes me too long to translate from the obscure to the clear and then I've missed the next few exchanges of dialogue altogether. By the time I've parsed
"But how of Cawdor? the thane of Cawdor lives,
A prosperous gentleman; and to be king
Stands not within the prospect of belief,
No more than to be Cawdor. Say from whence
You owe this strange intelligence? or why
Upon this blasted heath you stop our way
With such prophetic greeting? Speak, I charge you"
To
"You what? The Thane of Cawdor's still alive and there's no chance I'll ever be king! And how would you know anyway, and what are you doing out here telling me about it?"
I've missed the next scene.
It also helps to see a lot of them. The bit you quoted is easy for me to parse at normal speed because I've been immersed in that sort of English for maybe 20 seasons of Shakespeare at the Park by now. But I'd never blame anyone who preferred not to (like my husband).
Well, for the record, I wasn't expressing an opinion on TCITR, just using the overall debate as a discussion you can have about a book.
As for the "whining vs. something deeper" debate, my own current view is that Caulfield does serve as a mouthpiece for a particular philosophical view of human nature, beyond simply "adultz suck". My views on this might have been disproportionately influenced by a theology textbook which contrasted Salinger's book with Lord Of The Flies, ie. children in Catcher are inherently good; children in LOTF, umm...not.
My dear librarian wife couldn't stop laughing when I read that out. That is one of the things librarians live for.
Yeah, but the discussion wasn't about Australia so that's irrelevant.
not in Australia
It's my phrase describing the people whose argument he was attacking on the clip I saw on youtube. The clip was from the early days of the Trump Administration, and the issue under discussion was Trump's engagement with North Korea.
At the time, I would have been appalled at Evans' position and making some of the arguments he was attacking. I myself drift in and out of the latte sipping left, and am influenced by prevailing opinion.
But watching the clip from 2023, I realised Evans set Trump's approach in the context of the history of the engagement with North Korea. He made a good case for his position, which was that people were hyperventilating about Trump's approach to North Korea, and blaming Trump for a nasty situation that he inherited.
At the time, Trump was building engagement with North Korea into a great foreign policy triumph, when really it was a triumph for Kim Jong Un. But now, in the wake of Charlotteville, Jan 6, and his indictment for obstruction, it seems unimportant.
I'm sorry to go into the detail of American politics, something I'm trying not to do. It seemed necessaty to clarify things.
Louise
Epiphanies Host
I never saw the show. I know of it, and would have called it the Archie Bunker show. It appears to have the same intent as Love Thy Neighbour or Mind Your Language. Here the equivalent was Kingswood Country. Racist tropes abound.
I have heard it argued that parody can reinforce existing racist tropes, even if ridicule is the intent. It strikes me that all four shows did that. But where the effect is unintentional, the use of racist tropes to try to bring about positive social change seems laudable.
All In The Family was based on the BBC's Till Death Do Us Part. But it definitely took on a totally American identity of its own. The iconic armchair is now in the Smithsonian.
I once skimmed a book by a Black TV critic, about Black viewers' attitudes toward various racial-themed shows, and apparently, alot of them were uncomfortable with Bunker so openly mouthing racial slurs. But the book later said that The Jeffersons, the spin-off show about Archie's upwardly mobile Black neighbours, was more popular with the community, precisely because of Mr. Jefferson's obnoxious but always entertaining rants against whites.
(In fairness, anti-white bigotry among African Americans is punching up. Plus, it was made clear that the other Black characters, including Mr. J's own family, considered his tirades offensive.)
Do you think All in the Family achieved its goal of promoting understanding?
Yeah, I think there would probably be at least a plurality of critics who'd agree that the show definitely jumped the shark when Archie adopted a Latina orphan.
Mad Magazine once did a special xmas parody of the show called A Christmas Carroll O'Connor, in which various ghostly characters from the show's early years, among them George Jefferson, appear to Bunker/O'Connor, advising him that the new format was boring and he should take the show back to outrageous jokes about bigotry.
Tangential memory...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Stivic
And was occassionally the butt of the writers' jokes as well. That article mentions the classic episode Everyone Tells The Truth(which is the same story told from three different perspectives), in which Mike's paternalistic stereotyping of the Black character is as ridiculous as Archie's hostile characterization.
That episode(which I've mentioned here before) is screenable on YouTube. Great performance by Ron Glass, essentially playing three extremely different characters.
Fair point, but by the same token you don't get to say my appreciation of Shakespeare is invalid because I don't want to examine it line by line.
And yes, literary analysis is a valid academic field, but for some (many) people it takes all the fun out of literature. It certainly did for my daughter, and I am speaking of a girl whose favourite book at the age of 12 was 'The Three Musketeers.' Unabridged.
But where did I say that your appreciation of Shakespeare is invalid?