Funny or Fascist

On a scale of 1 to 10, how funny would you say the following cartoon is?


 
"Good shootin', son. I'm pretty sure that was a squirrel."
                     (By Tom Toro in The New Yorker)



I'm giving it a 9.5 at least, because I find it hilarious.

Of course, you may not find it funny at all, in which case you are probably a fascist.

JK, IG.

What?  An explanation is called for?

OK, what gives this cartoon its ultimate bite is the social comment it makes about Americans of a certain mentality.  These Americans, sometimes described as “gun nuts,” hold one or both of the following opinions:

(a)    the U.S. Constitution gives ordinary citizens a sacrosanct right to wield assault weapons,

(b)   wielding such weapons is a good idea.

These are views with which I adamantly disagree, and, when I am in a cheerful mood, I often refer to people whose views clash with mine as fascists.

But Where Does Funny Come from, and Why Does It Sometimes Die at Cultural Boundaries?

When I showed this cartoon to a Chinese friend, she didn’t get it, even though she is a bright young woman who speaks English well and who has lived here for two years.  What gives?

It has often been said that humor is one of the most difficult things to translate across cultures, and, though this may be true, I haven’t heard any good explanations as to why this should be. 

In the case of this cartoon, I believe, the humor depends on an understanding of America’s ongoing gun-law debate, and is further augmented by a degree of frustration with the reasoning that is often offered in support of gun ownership. This “reasoning” boils down to a sentiment that says, “I love - yes, LOVE - my implements of death, and if you can’t sympathize with my devotion, you just better shut up.”

It is in this emotional hothouse that points (a) and (b) cited above grow roots.

Obviously, someone from China might have difficulty picking up on the humor of Tom Toro’s clever cartoon, depending as it does on a viewpoint embedded in contemporary cultural ideals.

Three factors are said to underlie humor: incongruity, superiority and release of tension.*  Different authors emphasize one or the other of these, but I believe each can contribute to funniness.

In the Toro cartoon, incongruity rules.  We see it in the horrendous destruction rendered by the boy’s shootin’ and in the very idea of hunting with an assault weapon, especially hunting a small creature like a squirrel.  But adding greatly to the hilarity is the incongruity between the madness of assault-weapon hunting and the calm demeanor of the Dad – a man who talks as though he were quietly commending his son on his fly-fishing or hoop skills.  A man who talks, in other words, as though he and his son weren’t doing something insanely violent.

But there’s more, and this is where the “release of tension” theory comes into play.  For me, the very idea that assault weapons should be readily available to whoever wants them is so destructive and so irrational, that hearing this position argued as though it were reasonable is frustrating.  And yet we do hear this argument being made on a daily basis.  Having the lunacy of this idea so beautifully skewered is, for me, downright therapeutic.  Laughing at the incongruity here is one thing, but thinking about the crazy people who might say “there is no incongruity here,” adds to the hilarity.

So how would someone from a less gun-crazy country like China understand this?  They probably would not, unless they were keeping a close eye on America’s gun debate, and unless they too felt stymied by the bizarre ideas that are offered by the gun lobby as normal.   

Culture boundaries: where laughter goes to die.

OK, next time, maybe I’ll find a Chinese cartoon and try to see why Americans might not get it.

Until then, 再見.

____________________________________

*See Culture World January 6, 2013 for more on humor theory.

How Anthony Bourdain Became an Anthropologist and Found His Soul

Anthony Bourdain did a bit at Orlando's Hard Rock Cafe last night. Funny guy, and boy can he cuss. Later, when I got home, I took a look at his blog, and discovered that Mr. Bourdain allows that there was a time when he believed that people were no damn good and that “the human race as a whole was basically a few steps above wolves.”

First of all, let me extend an apology to wolves everywhere, a noble species that, for example, is much better at parenting and other social skills than are most humans. But never mind.  Bourdain’s point was that after spending months in remote parts of the world, talking to ordinary people about their lives and their food, he decided that “…the world is, in fact, filled with mostly good and decent people who are simply doing the best they can.”

Welcome to the world of ethnography, Brother Bourdain, and if we ever meet, let me be the first to teach you the Secret Anthropologists’ Handshake.

                              Anthony in Paradise 

                           (Thanks, Baltimore Sun)

 Actually, the question of whether or not people suck is one that has haunted me since my adolescence (which did not, contrary to the claims of some, only end when I turned 65). Like Bourdain, I have ultimately decided that people mostly don’t suck, though they certainly can. And one crucial source of human suckiness comes from the yearning to dominate our fellow Homo sapiens. This yearning, it turns out, has been bestowed on us through honest Darwinian pathways, as is revealed when we compare ourselves to such human cousins as Pan troglodytes, the common chimpanzee.

According to Christopher Boehm’s Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior, humans have a built-in propensity to dominate each other. Anthropologist Boehm draws his conclusion partly by comparing us to the chimp and other close human relatives. Of course, you may think it insulting to have one’s species compared to inherently savage and violent brutes, but so far no chimpanzees have complained.

Sorry. Couldn’t resist.

                                Professor Boehm

Anyway, a remarkable conclusion that Boehm reaches is that despite our propensity for bullying and self-aggrandizement, humans have thrived for hundreds of thousands of years in egalitarian communities. In other words, give us a chance and we will start pushing each other around, but for a great long stretch of human prehistory, we weren’t given that chance. What then, kept us in check? To a certain extent it was the fear of being scathingly satirized and ridiculed by our compatriots. Humans have for millennia lived in moral communities, and the agreed upon morality of these communities has provided a basis for keeping the jerks and shysters somewhat in line through growls, guffaws, and verbal chastisements.
 

But behind the moral community there has lurked the capacity for lethal violence that humans have commanded and that for a couple million years has made us, with our spears, clubs and poison arrows, much deadlier than our chimp cousins. In fact, the human capacity to kill efficiently, according to Boehm, has forced us to accept a moral code, or, better, a myriad of moral codes, each of which shared at their core such ideas as “bullying is intolerable,” and “greed and stinginess are bad.”

Boehm argues that moral systems, originally linked to religion, offered communities criteria according to which the jerks and assholes of the world could be kept in line, and that societies would therefore not devolve into murderous Survival shows in which only one man would be left standing. The propensity to dominate has continued to haunt human nature since we diverged from the apes, but for millennia this propensity has been kept in check by the power of society as a whole; among early Homo sapiens it was the social group that dominated the would-be dominators.

A lot of Boehm’s evidence comes from some of the same places where Bourdain found the gentler side of his own soul – the worlds of tribes and peasants. One point that Boehm doesn’t emphasize (and, understandably, neither does Bourdain) has to do with the origin of marriage. Like food sharing and the resentment of bullies, marriage is a human universal (except maybe among the Mosuo – see blog post on Love and Marriage – October 24, 2010). Since marriage occurs virtually everywhere that humans are found, there must be a strong genetic basis on which this institution is built, something beyond mere masochism. 

To tie in the marriage factor, we can look to Canadian anthropologist Bernard Chapais, author of a fascinating book -- Primeval Kinship: How Pair-Bonding Gave Birth to Human Society. Chapais describes the origins of human pair-bonding at length, and offers a compelling thesis to explain this human phenomenon. Briefly, Chapais’ argument is that pair-bonding first emerged in human evolution as a morality-based cognitive-behavioral system by which males would be discouraged from killing each other over females.  Professor Chapais, meet Professor Boehm.

Of course, there remains the question of why Brother Bourdain came to look down on humanity in the first place during his urban cookery days. A possible answer to this can also be found in Boehm’s work (and in Marx’s and Engels's, by the way): it has to do with the accumulation of property made possible when humans settled into agricultural civilizations. When some people found it possible to amass wealth, which they then used to manipulate others – that’s when we stopped being nice. You might say, that’s when we gave up our wolf-like sense of decency and turned vicious. The rest is history – history being a nightmare from which, following Stephen Daedalus, we all now need to awake.

It Is Cool to Rebel

Back in The Sixties, which, by my calculation, lasted roughly from 1965 to 1972, millions of young people took to the streets in protest against war, racial discrimination, corporate domination of public policy and in support of various other worthy causes.  But did these acts of rebellion succeed in transforming America?  Perhaps not enough.

According to an occasionally reliable source (MOFI), a meeting took place on April 17, 1972, between Dick Cheney and Karl Rove which included the following dialogue:

Dick (snarling out of one side of his mouth): What are we going to do about these obnoxious brats taking to the streets and demanding “peace” and “justice?”  This could ruin all our plans!

K-Rove (with an air of insidious smugness): Don’t worry, Dick, they may get their “Civil Rights” and their end to the Vietnam War, but when the dust clears, our grip on America’s resources will be tighter than ever, and then the middle class and poor will fall helplessly into our hands like a couple of ripe avocados all ready to garnish our elitist salads – mwahahahaha!

How prescient Rove was.  Conservative opposition to rights for women, minorities, gays and lesbians, as well as conservative contempt for the environment, have all been in retreat since the Sixties.  But - where control of the nation’s wealth is concerned - the right wing has won every battle.  The rise of conservatism since 1980 has resulted in skyrocketing incomes for the super-rich, and stagnant or declining incomes for the rest of us.

So should we children of the Sixties have just shut up and stayed indoors applying ourselves to our  school work?  I don’t have an answer for this question, but I will use it to segue into a topic that has recently drawn my interest: the rise of a protest generation in the People’s Republic of China.  This generation, which embraces values dramatically different from those of its parents, emphasized its uniqueness by the adoption of the word “ku” in the 1990s as its all-around slang term of approval.  Ku as a slang term is based on the English word “cool” and is linked in China to the rise of individualism.

One of my Shanghainese super-students and I produced a power point presentation that focuses on this generation and its dominating presence on China’s social media.  Since the material appearing on social media is anonymously produced, it’s a bit presumptuous for us to attribute it to any particular generation, but not entirely presumptuous for the following reason: since the 1990s, a spirit of individualistic expression (ku-ness) has emerged among young Chinese that is unlike anything China has seen for many generations, and the satirical protests that are showing up in social media have the unmistakable stamp of this generation’s feisty attitude.

A lot of this web satire is based on double entendre as is, for example, the phrase “grass mud horse.”  These three words are pronounced in Chinese “cao, ni, ma.”  As it happens, cao ni ma is a nasty curse in China meaning, literally, “Fuck your mother,” but used more or less the way Americans use the phrase “Fuck you!”

Grass-mud-horse has been extended on the web through the image of a llama, an animal whose countenance and furry coat suggest this phrase.  Artist Ai Weiwei has taken the image one step further by posting a picture of himself completely naked with his “central parts” strategically covered by a llama-like stuffed toy. 

This picture calls to mind the sentence: “Grass mud horse covers central (body parts).”  Pronounced “Cao ni ma dang zhongyang,” this is a homonym for “Fuck you, Central Party Committee!”

The brave and brilliant Ai Weiwei has been imprisoned in the past for his protests, but as of now, he is free to carry on his freedom-promoting shenanigans.

Our presentation at an anthropology conference incorporated a number of these oblique critiques of China’s party and government, including the widely known use of the phrase or image of “river crabs” (hé xiè) to satirize the government’s promotion of a “harmonious society” (hé xié).  The harmonious society concept seems largely to be used to suppress individuals whom the authorities want silenced.

                  Chinese flag with River Crabs in place of stars

Another form of satire is represented by the following reference to the heroic Long March, the Valley Forge-like experience in which battered revolutionary soldiers hiked for thousands of miles through harsh terrain pursued by Nationalist forces in 1934-35.  It was said that food was so scarce that soldiers sometimes wound up eating their own shoes, and, according to legend, a generous older soldier might allow himself to starve by claiming to not be hungry and giving his shoes to a younger man.

But in China today, certain inadequately regulated companies (perhaps by virtue of bribes to responsible government officials) have been found putting shoe leather and other grossly inappropriate and impure substances in their processed food before selling it to unknowing customers.

In light of the discovery that contemporary Chinese have been eating shoe leather, some snarky internet rebels posted the following picture from the Long March along with a caption saying,

“The old soldier gives his shoes to the young man. Then, looking at the young man he says to himself, ‘Once we are liberated, I hope every Chinese can have as many shoes to eat as he wants.’”

Here are a couple of the many comments that this bit of web satire inspired:

“That old soldier must have been a fortune teller!”

“We have damn sure made it!”

The spirit of satirical protest lives on in China.  This month it was reported that 14,000 pig carcasses have been found floating in the Huangpu River which flows past Shanghai.  As concern spread about the effects of this shocking development, the government announced that the city’s water supply was nevertheless safe to drink.  A Chinese netizen posted the following response on Weibo (China’s Twitter): “Thousands of rotting carcasses in the water, but it is still safe to drink.  What a magical country we live in!”

This is all interesting stuff, and to an extent, encouraging.  A clever and active citizenry that dares to defy its government is a necessary element in any decent society.  But what does this portend for China’s future?  Will the government give way on some issues, while still dominating and exploiting the citizenry a la Cheney and Rove?  Or will China impress us all when Generation Ku ® grows up and builds a society with a spirit of justice and freedom such as we in the U.S. have so far failed to attain?

MOFI: my own fertile imagination.

® See “Generation Ku: Individualism and China’s Millennial Youth,” Ethnology, Vol. 44 Fall 2005, by R. L. Moore.