[For this year’s
installment of my
annual April Fool’s Day series, I wanted to AmericanStudy some 19th
century humorists. I’d love to hear your humorous responses and nominations in
comments. I’m serious!]
On the fine line
between satire and stereotypes.
First and
foremost, it’d be foolish of me not to link to this
piece by my dad Stephen Railton, part of his award-winning website Mark Twain in His Times,
on Mark Twain and Bret Harte’s play Ah Sin,
a Play in Four Acts (1877). Dad has far more in-depth knowledge of the
play than I, and a great deal to say in that piece about the play’s complex relationship
to the era’s anti-Chinese prejudices (on which I focused a good bit of my
third book), as well as both the two authors’ public roles and reputations as
prominent humorists and the often razor-sharp line between the satirical and the
stereotypical (or, to quote one of the funniest works of
all time, between clever and stupid) when it comes to humorous engagements
with social issues.
That line is a
seemingly eternal element within humor, and one not limited to ethnic or racial
comedy. Take Amy Schumer’s sketches
about gender, sexuality, and rape—is she satirizing
our culture’s problems with those issues, or using stereotypes to gain laughs
and ratings (or, as always, some combination of the two, one dependent in no small
measure on the knowledge and perspective an audience member brings with her or
him)? But at the same time, ethnic and racial humorists seem particularly prone
to walking the fine line between satire and stereotype, and to prompting passionate
debate about where on that spectrum they fall. From Richard Pryor and Eddie
Murphy to Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle, and up to contemporary works like Key & Peele and Blackish, African American humorists have been at the center of
many of those debates in the late 20th and early 21st
centuries. But the same questions apply to any and all cultures and identities,
and Asian American comics and performers such as Margaret Cho and Ken Jeong have faced the same responses and
critiques.
Of course, Ah Sin represents another side to the
issue—a satirical yet stereotypical work about Asian American identities
created by two white artists, if ones who (as my Dad’s piece notes) were already
on the record in support of Chinese Americans (especially relative to their
very xenophobic moment). Yet while there’s no doubt that outsiders to a culture
or community have to tread the line even more carefully if they choose to
create humorous works about that group (and have to recognize that they’re
opening themselves up to justified critiques in the process, regardless of
their specific choices and work), I would argue not only that they have the
right to do so, but that doing so represents an important part of humor’s role
in a society and culture. Indeed, no other artistic genre can highlight in the
same ways the absurdities and myths that surround us—and humorous works can do
so whether they satirize those elements, deploy them as stereotypes, or, as is
so often the case and was for Twain and Harte’s play, do both at the same time.
March Recap this
weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other humorists you’d highlight?
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