This is a comedy show by a famuous Indo-Canadian comedian, Russel Peters. In this video, he jokes about how Chinese people try to sell fake Louis Vuitton bags to Indian people. Russel is born and raised in Canada, but his family is of Anglo-indian ancestry, hence he always identify himself as a Canadian instead of an Indian. Russell Peters' stand-up performances are mostly made up of observational comedy where he uses humor to poke fun at the subjects of race, class and culture, often using his own life experiences as well as impersonations of different cultural accents to illustrate his act. Different than the other comedian who are in the position of North American culture, Russel tends to be standing in no position, which means he jokes about all the cultures or races including indian or canadian people. He jokes about the audians and about himself. His experties is try to capture the signs from different culture and raise them up through humor, he jokes about the culture differences but his goal is to eliminate people's misunderstanding of allien's culture.
I am so glad you chose this particular technique of using humor to bring down walls between cultures as a topic. I know some people find it offensive when shows like South Park and comedians like Russel Petter blatantly make fun of everybody without exception, but coming from a person born and brought up as a Hindu in India, I enjoy being included in their humor as a person with faults and oddities just like everyone else in our society. I know culture defines us all greatly but I do not believe it is the only component to who we are and what we believe in as humans.
ReplyDeleteAs Nivie mentioned, I too believe that one of the best method to approach the cultural barrier is to use humor to create a comfortable atmosphere for everyone. However, I'd like to take a stand for comedians and their position. For comedians, blatantly making jokes about other races and leaving out ones own is offensive. But in order to capture everyone, the better approach would be to make fun of ones own cultural background. This way, no one would be as offended. Even Russel Peter said it himself, he likes to joke a lot about his cultural background cause he then wouldn't be taken as serious.
ReplyDeleteThis guy is funny!!! For me as a Chinese, I always enjoy watching such stand-up comedy that makes fun of other culture and yes, I totally agree with what Nivie and Jason mentioned above that using humor is one of the good ways to bring down walls between cultures and to establish a funny comfortable atmosphere for everyone, instead of talking bad stuffs behind people, which does not help bring people together and to unify. Although this guy, Russel Peter, is making fun of Chinese people, people know that he is no offensive and he is talking about something that perhaps other people have in mind or having been wondering and discussing, so why not bring it up, talk about it and laugh about it?
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