In 2001, Sarah Silverman told a joke on Late Night With Conan O’Brien that incurred the wrath of Asian American activists and, in a perverse way, also became her breakout moment. The bit involved trying to get out of jury duty, with Silverman recounting a friend’s suggestion that she write something “really inappropriate” on the form — something like “I hate chinks.” But, Silverman said, she didn’t want to cast herself in such an ugly light, so she opted to instead write “I love chinks. Who doesn’t?”
The network that aired the show, NBC, apologized for the slur a few days later. But Silverman refused to, opting instead to fight it out with Guy Aoki, the cofounder of Media Action Network for Asian Americans, on Politically Incorrect. The comedian, who in more recent years has shifted her perspective on — and moved away from — the sort of meta-bigot comedy that marked her rise, insisted at the time that Aoki was a humorless scold who’d missed the point: “It’s not a racist joke,” she said on Politically Incorrect, “it’s a joke about racism.”
She never seemed to hear Aoki’s own point that a slur is still a slur, and that the reason Silverman settled on the one she did was because it was seen as permissible and more acceptable as the stuff of humor. Looking back at this particular sorry-not-sorry moment, and how little the conversation has progressed since, what really rankles is not just the implication that racism against Asians is less serious and less real. It’s the familiar proprietary ease of it all, the sense that it could be gotten away with because Asianness is colonizable enough as an identity that anyone can gain in-group joke privileges. Silverman didn’t intend her chipper punchline (“Who doesn’t?”) to also work as an orientalist slogan, but it did, and still does — a handy summation of the fact that a lot of anti-Asian racism gets presented through a lens of warped, acquisitive affection, and then denied or defended on the basis of it.
Great piece. I respect the Asian-Americans who’ve done nuanced and thoughtful criticism after seeing the movie. But I’m not one of them. The trailer looked like total weeb trash and I don’t care enough about “respecting Wes Anderson’s quirky vision” to subject myself to a second more of it.
Weeb trash is omnipresent in our cultural landscape, so it’s not like I’m mad about it. I’ve gotten good at ignoring weeb trash and tuning it out. What makes me mad is that the Asians who, unlike me, do care enough to engage aesthetically with the movie… are the ones that get the most abuse.
There’s no overt malicious intent to Isle of Dogs’ cultural
tourism, but it’s marked by a hodgepodge of references that an American
like Anderson might cough up if pressed to free associate about Japan —
taiko drummers, anime, Hokusai, sumo, kabuki, haiku, cherry blossoms,
and a mushroom cloud (!).
I feel like if he actually wanted to pay respect for Japanese culture instead of just throw around Japanese-inspired aesthetics, he’d not have included that last one.
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