A sense of humor

Two muffins are baking in an oven. One muffin turns to the other muffin and says, "Boy, it sure is hot in here." The second muffin looks at the first muffin and yells, "OH MY GOD! A TALKING MUFFIN!!!"

(Is anyone laughing but me? Can you visualize the 2 muffins baking in the oven and the look of horror on the second muffin's face? Still nothing?)

I open this post with the above joke to give you an example of the kind of humor I find funny: dumb kid jokes. The kind that is both inoccuous and (for most adults) not funny. Or at least not side-splitting, laughing so hard I cry funny. I don't know why I find dumb kid jokes so hilarious--and it's not all kid jokes--it's what I would call the IRONIC dumb kid jokes (if there is such a genre) and I place the muffin joke at the top of that list (do I have to break down why it's ironic that the second muffin is horrified that the first muffin has talked to him?)

Anyway, for most of the other adults reading this blog, humor is probably something that runs the gamut of visual slapstick to subtle irony--with stand up comedians probably falling somewhere in-between. And on the Racialiacious blog I found this news piece from The Boston Globe about a documentary called Crossing the Line which looks at 18 different multi-racial comedians (click here for the article link).

So this started me thinking about ethnic humor and racial jokes and Comedians of color (like Dave Chappelle and Margaret Cho) and what happens when their humor is misconstrued and/or taken out of context and/or when people don't find their brand of racial humor funny. I have seen Cho do live performances and I have seen her DVD's and find her to be pretty funny for the most part (although I think her best work was on her first DVD, I'm the One That I Want). But I have to admit that I get uncomfortable with people imitating Margaret Cho imitating her Korean accented Korean American mother. One acquaintance, a gay, white man, felt entitled to own Cho because she was a fag hag exemplar and thus as one of his "people" he felt he could own Cho.

But his imitations of her imitating her mother made me uncomfortable--and I think claiming one "marginalized" or "minoritized" status as a way to claim affiliation or, even more problematically ownership, of a different marginalized identity is, well, wrong. I don't get to make gay jokes or black jokes or Latino jokes with impunity just because I'm Asian American. Heck, I don't even think I get to make Asian American jokes just because I am Asian American.

I'm guessing this is all part of what Crossing the Line deals with--that very line of racial humor and when you can laugh at things and when laughing feels oppressive. When are you laughing with someone and when are you laughing at someone? And the thing is, race is such an absurd entity in our midst (as one astute commenter pointed out in the Scrubs post), that I do think we have to be able to see, and laugh, at the absurdity. I just wonder what the limits and costs of that laughter are...