It Takes a Lot to Laugh
Using humor to deal with racism.
JENNY ZHANG
Three years ago, when I was going to grad school in Iowa City, I went to see MeltBanana, a Japanese noise rock band, and while we were waiting for the band to set up,
this drunk girl grabbed my arm and asked me, “So, are you with the band?” Maybe she
didn’t mean anything by it. Maybe it was just a harmless, drunk question. Maybe I didn’t
need to read anything into it. And maybe the time when my friend E., who is TaiwaneseAmerican, visited me in Iowa City, and we started to get this really creepy feeling like
everyone who saw us walking down the street together thought we were either foreign
exchange students or related to each other—maybe that time I was just being paranoid
as well. And maybe the time when I took a shuttle van to the Cedar Rapids airport and
was subjected to 30 minutes of questioning by my driver on what it was like to have
grown up in “Communist China,” those were innocent questions, even though I had
explained to him that I actually grew up in Queens, and that I left China when I was four
and a half. And maybe when he insisted that I was “in America now and shouldn’t be
afraid of speaking freely,” he was honestly trying to help. And maybe all the times that I
walked into a store and, apropos of nothing, was asked by someone, “So where are you
originally from—China or Japan?” those were just sincere inquiries with regards to my
heritage.
Or maybe other people didn’t have to put up with this stuff, and maybe I didn’t want to,
either. Maybe it wasn’t an innocent coincidence that at a concert where a Japanese band
was headlining, some drunk girl decided to come up to me, the only Asian person she
saw at the show, single me out, and ask me if I was in the band.
“I’m not in the band,” I said.
She looked at me askance and said, “C’mon, what instrument do you play? Are you the
singer?”
And maybe at that point, it was OK that I started to feel like shit and turned to my
boyfriend and said, “That girl just asked me what instrument I play in the band because
I’m Asian.”
“Wait, but you are in the band, aren’t you?” he joked. “Why else would you be here?”
And we laughed, because it feels good to laugh when you are dealing with racism. We
laughed because it feels good to laugh when someone makes you feel small and
powerless.
In middle school, I had a classmate whose mom would sometimes drive me home from
school; once, when we were stuck in traffic, she yelled out, “Move!” to the car in front of
us, and then muttered, “Chinks,” to her daughter, who started giggling. When I lived in
France, every single day, random strangers would pretend to karate-chop their way to
me on the street. Whenever I went outside, men would shout out all the Asian-language
words they knew, which were usually some combination of ni hao, arigato,
and konichiwa.
And those are just the obvious, easy examples. There were less-obvious ones, too. I have
known plenty of people who considered themselves properly socialized, tolerant, good
people, who would never tell me that Chinese people have slits for eyes, or that our
names sound like pots banging, but those same people still hurt me when they confessed
that they honestly could not tell the difference between Chinese, Korean, and Japanese
people. They still hurt me when they told me that the zongzi I brought for lunch every
day smelled weird and grossed them out. They still hurt me when they laughed during
the parts of movies when the broken-English-speaking Asian character showed up for
comic relief.
This should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: no one deserves to be hurt by
racism. This seems like an easy statement to abide by, until you realize that racism is not
always intentional, and it’s not always obvious, and sometimes people don’t agree what
constitutes racism or even acknowledge that it exists. And for those reasons, sometimes,
it sucks to talk about it, it sucks to think about it, and it sucks to have to deal with it at
all. But if you are a person of color, chances are at some point you are gonna have to deal
with it, and for me, when I was first confronted with it, I went from feeling hurt to
feeling active self-loathing to feeling full-on apeshit angry. All of it sucked.
Let me just say that it’s totally OK to be apeshit angry. Don’t let anyone ever shame you
for feeling bad about racism or put you down or make you feel like you are overreacting.
THERE IS NO WAY TO OVERREACT TO RACISM, BECAUSE RACISM IS A
SYSTEMATIC DEVALUATION AND DEHUMANIZATION OF ENTIRE GROUPS OF
PEOPLE. I repeat: RACISM IS A SYSTEMATIC DEVALUATION AND
DEHUMANIZATION OF ENTIRE GROUPS OF PEOPLE, AND NOT REACTING TO IT
ONLY HELPS PERPETUATE IT.
That said: at some point, when dealing with racism—especially casual, genteel
racism that can be easily dismissed by others—being angry all the time is only going to
deplete you completely. And very few people—whether they are high school kids, teeny
tiny kids, grown-ass adults, or your friend’s grandparent who still freely speaks in
outmoded, endearingly antiquated racist phrases—are gonna stick around and listen to
you explain why what they said was hurtful and wrong. Anyway, it’s exhausting to
always have to be the one to “teach” others how to recognize racism when it ain’t
something as obvious as calling someone by a racial slur or doing physical violence to
someone because of their race or ethnicity.
As a person of color, I believe racism is a serious matter. But just because it has affected
me in serious ways doesn’t mean I can’t or don’t want to have joy and humor and play in
my life. In fact, I want more of those things to balance out the moments when racism
leaves me feeling joyless. Sometimes humor is one’s best defense—even if it means the
only person laughing at the punch line is you. Stephen Colbert once said in an interview,
“Not living in fear is a great gift, because certainly these days we do it so much. And do
you know what I like about comedy? You can’t laugh and be afraid at the same time—of
anything. If you’re laughing, I defy you to be afraid.”
Racism is scary. Being the target of racism, having to exist in a racist world, is scary.
Feeling like you have no power to stop it is scary. Here’s what you can try to do when
you just want to laugh and not have to feel afraid:
Use humor to call people out on their racism.
The always brilliant Wanda Sykes has this bit in her stand-up where she talks about her
thoughts on white folks who claim that they are the targets of “reverse racism.”
Her shutdown is simple and to the point. She says, “Isn’t reverse racism—isn’t that when
a racist is nice to somebody else? That’s reverse racism.” And then she says, “What you
afraid of is called karma.” BOOM. ROASTED.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3dFbomu6-U
Re-appropriate racist language/imagery/stereotypes.
This one can be tricky, and sometimes it can lead you down a bad path of selflampooning and even self-loathing, and some people believe you shouldn’t mess with
racist language and that it’s best to just not use it, but DA-YAM is it satisfying to tell
someone that my mother’s maiden name is Ching Chong Chang and watch that person’s
face screw up in total confusion. When I took improv comedy classes at the UCB Theatre
in New York, I once did a job-interview scene with a dude who addressed me as “Mrs.
Chang,” and the whole class laughed immediately, which made me uncomfortable
because the Chinese last name was the entire joke, which basically meant that having a
Chinese last name is funny, which basically meant that my last name is funny, and I, for
one, certainly don’t bust out laughing every time I remember what my last name is. But I
went with it. I replied that my hobbies were eating rice, catching flies with my chopstick,
dressing like a geisha, being inscrutable, and practicing kung fu. That got an even bigger
laugh, and I felt good, because I no longer felt like I was the butt of a racist joke; instead
it felt like the whole class was laughing at racism and racist humor.
Pre-empt racist comments.
Again, sometimes this backfires, but when it works, it works. Once, some dude told me
that the birthmark on my back looked like “Asia,” which was ridiculous, so I started to
tell people that I had named my birthmark “Asia” because I wanted to preemptively selfOrientalize before anyone else could do it to me. That particular joke usually prompted
an uncomfortable silence coupled with a WTF does that mean look, which was fine with
me, because at least it established a tone of Yeah, racist jokes are uncomfortable for
everyone, so don’t do it, OK?
Sometimes, when I see an Asian person on TV, I will tell my friends, “Oh yeah, that’s my
uncle,” or when we go into a Chinese restaurant, I will say, “By the way, that waitress is
my mom.” It’s a silly joke, and it’s not even that funny, but it feels satisfying to make,
because you’re basically saying, YO, DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT MAKING A “YOU
ALL LOOK ALIKE” JOKE ’CAUSE I ALREADY HEARD IT ONE MILLION TIMES, SO
SHUT YER MOUTH. For all the times that someone has asked me if I’m related to
Jackie Chan, or if I know kung fu, or if Chinese people eat cats and dogs, or whatever the
stereotype du jour happens to be, and made me feel powerless, I loved being able to say:
HEY, MY DAD IS JACKIE CHAN, I HAVE A BLACKBELT IN MARTIAL ARTS, I JUST
ATE FIVE CATS BECAUSE I’M CHINESE, AND I CAN’T OPEN MY EYES SO THAT’S
WHY I BUMPED INTO YOU. WHAT ELSE HAVE YOU GOT?
Now, you have to be careful with this one, because the point of pre-empting racist
comments is to show how inappropriate and uncreative they are, NOT to give racists an
opportunity to enjoy “The Self-Loathing Internalized Racism Comedy Hour,” if you
know what I mean.
Also, I don’t know why I’m wasting time with my amateur efforts at satirizing racism
when I could be showing you this clip of Margaret Cho KILLING IT here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc6mLwOa2Ig
And when all else fails, it’s all right to cry.
Or scream, or write an angry rant in your journal, or throw your shoes at the door, or
punch your bed, or whatever it is that you need to do to let it out. It felt really good to
laugh at the racist drunk girl at the Melt-Banana concert with my boyfriend, but that
feeling was cut short when she grabbed me by the shoulders and said, “Are you calling
me a ____ racist?” and then turned to her equally drunk friend and said, “This ___ just
tried to call me a ____ racist.”
My boyfriend tried to defuse the situation by explaining to these girls why what the first
girl had said to me was indeed racist—but that only made things worse. The girl’s friend
tried to throw her drink in my face, and the original girl kept jostling me and punching
me in the shoulder during the concert, shouting, “You’re the _____ racist. You’re the
____ racist. Don’t you ever call me that again,” even though I hadn’t called her that,
even though she was that, and even though I wished I had been brave enough to tell her
so.
I ended up fleeing the show and crying in a bathroom stall. That night I lay in bed with
my boyfriend, still crying, still shaking. He cried too.
“I’m sorry this happened to you. I’m sorry it’s ever happened to you. I’m sorry it might
happen to you again. I’m sorry I can’t protect you from it.”
“It’s OK,” I said. “It’s OK and it’s not OK.”
That night, I went to bed feeling like I was born sad.
The next morning, I woke up feeling much better. I went to brunch with my friends and
told them, “You will not believe what happened to me yesterday. This drunk girl
wandered into the Melt-Banana show and thought I was with the band because I’m
Asian. And then she told me I was racist. It was not a fun night.”
One of my friends joked, “You should have said, ‘Konichiwa.’”
Another one said, “Or, like, ‘Namaste,’ just to confuse her.”
It felt good to be with friends who had my back. It felt good to be in a safe environment,
one where I felt comfortable enough to laugh. It felt good to exist without fear, even
though I knew there would be another time when I wouldn’t be able to laugh it off. But it
felt good, that morning, to have some _____ fun. ♦