The SIGGRAPH conference has thousands of attendees. One of the reasons I like to go is the opportunity, when things go well, of running into old friends. In some cases I may get to see someone I haven’t seen in years.
This morning on my way from the hotel to the conference center I saw an old friend walking ahead of me, somewhat in the distance. I hadn’t seen him in years, and I began thinking of all the interesting things we could talk about, and of all the things that had happened since the last time we had spoken. I started walking faster, so I could catch up with him.
I was surprised to see, as I got a bit nearer, how young looking my friend seemed. Some people, I’ve noticed, just don’t seem to age with the passing years.
As I got even closer I observed that my old friend wasn’t nearly as tall as I’d remembered him. It’s funny how over time we can exaggerate certain traits in our memory, like height or weight.
When I was just about close enough to call out to get his attention, I noticed that my friend was the wrong color.
It was around then that I decided there wouldn’t really be any point in saying hello.
Hey, Ken, afraid of saying “hello” to non-white people ? 😉
(I hope you have some kind of sense of humour in the other side of the ocean 🙂 )
Why would you assume that my friend was white?
Such traits as height, weight, hair color and skin shade can be useful for identifying individuals.
But to characterize entire groups of people based on such traits would just be silly, don’t you agree?
you’re right, it was just a joke.
I don’t know for other countries, but in france, there is a type of humor that consist of embarrassing the ‘target’ on controversial subjects (religion, homosexuality, racism, etc…).
I could have say “Yes, you were totally right to not say hello to a non-white !”
It consists to take one word or part of a sentence of someone (you in this case), and to rephrase it slightly out of context to make the ‘target’ uncomfortable, as if he told something racist, or fundamentalist, etc…
Then, the target may try to clarify, claiming he is NOT that kind of people and the joker continue his game harder by putting more and more ambiguity to the target.
One other option : the target play the rules and continue the conversation with absurdity, as if he was really that kind of bad people, racist, or anti-homo or whatever (-> trying to embarrass the initial joker at his turn, who may think “what, my colleague/fiend/brother is in fact a crappy racist ?!?”).
The goal is generally to laugh against the ‘bad people’, mimic their absurd words or way of thinking. As an actor playing some bad character.
I’m curious to know if this kind of humor is found everywhere on the earth. It’s a kind of derivative of self-mockery.
by the way (i.e. totally unrelated) is there any collection of small pieces of code like the one from your homepage that draws a fractal in console ? I often show this to some new co-worker, it’s always a pleasure to discover how far we can go into obfuscation !
cheers 🙂
I’ve seen people do that, but I didn’t quite know what they were doing.
In particular, I’ve seen people that I am quite sure are not racists make racist comments in a sort of oddly ironic and self-deprecating way, and I never quite understood, until your explanation, what that was all about.
In a way, it’s the same as those guys : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yes_Men (and have a look at their documentary : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379593/ )
-> Try to get a copy of their dvd, it’s really worth watching it, they are some kind of mind-hackers 🙂
I’m not sure the connection here is very strong. Catching corporations up on duplicity for economic gain (which is what the Yes Men do) serves a definite public good.
But making weird comments that are racist, or homophobic, or antisemitic, or whatever, in hopes of catching somebody up on actually having one of these dysfunctions just seems weird. It doesn’t serve any public good, and it doesn’t help cure the person who suffers from the illness of racism or homophobia.
Well, I think both methods have same goal : warn people. Wake them up (in fact, wake all of us) from ambient numbness. One simple example is : we can act like a macho, because it’s common, usual, daily suggested by all kinds of signals, without feeling ourselves macho. But if nobody points that out, we won’t notice it !
We, individuals, can easily detect speeches we don’t like when the real words are used (someone who frankly tells racists words for example).
But there are lot of speeches that tell slightly the same things but with smoother words. People who don’t really pay attention may be seduced by that kind of speech, even if they would be afraid by the concepts behind.
So we daily hear double-language speeches (in the news, in the movies, in all the advertisements, …). And as we are not always enough awake, we may accept parts of them, and even reuse them ourselves !
Yes men are usurping identity of people saying that kind of smooth, politically correct speeches, and “in their name”, use the real words => this warns us : “hey, they’re right ! In fact that kind of society behavior is like re-introducing slavery ?!?”
The kind of humor I referred to does the same thing. It tells “hey, look, warning, you may be misunderstood.” or “don’t go too far that way or you may look like (or even become!) a {racist|antisemitic| homophobic |macho|…}” or “did you notice you use the same words as that politicien who is notoriously racist but who disguises his words to looks like if he was just ultra-patriotic” (I hope my fr->us translation is not too wrong, I don’t daily use those concepts in english 😉 )
I always feel guilty when someone points me that I use “prefabricated” speech in my argumentation. I like to think I have my really own opinion, that I can explain. It is where friends can help show me when I fail. And with humor, it’s easier to take it 🙂