Ethnicity & Humor

Okay, so I've been thinking about this one for a bit. Let me start by posting this video. It's from the musical "Avenue Q" -- sort of Sesame Street for adults (many of the characters are puppets). Unfortunately, I couldn't find a high quality version so I've posted this one. The song is from the soundtrack and an art student drew the pictures:



Okay. Now, I think that the song might have simplified things too much. I mean just admitting you're a racist doesn't make it okay for you to walk around telling jokes that are offensive to people. =But is there some truth in in "if we all could just admit that we are racist a little bit, and everyone stopped being so PC, maybe we could live in harmony"? This is where I want to segue this into local "ethnic" humor in Hawaii.

Here are a some examples.

Rap Reiplinger's "Chanting"
(Rap Reiplinger is a local comedian who passed away in the early 80's. I believe he was really popular in the late 70's and early 80's though his comedy lives on in recordings that have been released posthumously. I grew up with this stuff.)


This one is old stuff by Rap Rapleinger, Andy Bumatai and Mel Cabang from the 80's.


Here's some more recent stuff - Frank DeLima (I think this was originally recorded in the 90's):


So is local humor in Hawaii a form of racism? Are we contributing to prejudice? Or perhaps diffusing it? Are we masking bigotry?

Or is it part of our culture? -Something that grew out of a necessity.
Does this mean we're more "evolved"? - Certainly we wouldn't be able to take our humor to the mainland.
Is any type of ethnic differentiation a type of discrimination?

Frank DeLima discussed some of his thoughts on this in an interview in 2002 (http://www.hawaii411.com/articles/frank.asp). He said that humor in Hawaii has been around since the plantation days - where different people saw each others' idiosyncrasies in themselves and others and were able to laugh at it saying, "That's what kept them from being at each other's throats." At the same time, he notes that there still are some things you can't joke about.

He also discusses three different types of people that tell jokes: the professionals (that tell their jokes in venues where the people that see them pay to see them), "joke tellers" (that share jokes they hear that they think are funny but might be doing it inappropriately - like at work) and the one that hates (one who tells jokes to hurt an ethnic group because they think they are better and they don't like them because they are different). --Hmm. So if you're not doing it out of meanness, is it justified?

Local humor is part of local culture, though one could argue that perhaps as local dynamics change (i.e less "pidgin") then the humor may be less appropriate (reflected nicely on here: http://www.honoluluweekly.com/archives/coverstory%202001/05-30-01%20Humor/05-30-01%20Humor.html). As Hawaii becomes less isolated, more "Americanized," and less "local" perhaps the humor becomes less appropriate. Hawaii is changing.

So the question is - has Hawaii evolved? Or are we behind the times? Or perhaps, it's simply a generational thing.

What do you think?