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7 years ago

461 words

Weird post title, right? I’ll explain. It’s not typical to think of immigrants as funny, indeed, it’s rare to think of immigrants as individuals in general. They are a group of (usually) poorer, (usually) browner, (usually) slightly strange people who come to this country to live. They are people we see in the news being deported, protagonizing a human interest story, barely surviving the crossing of the Mediterranean from northern Africa, or representing a small yet economically valuable statistical minority in Silicon Valley. They are folks hard at work all around us in the local bodega, grocery store, corporate office, mostly invisible and mostly silent.

Well, Chinese immigrant Joe Wong is not silent. I found this video a couple of months ago and laughed my head off at Wong’s classic timing and word play, delivered with sharp political commentary on U.S. monolingualism, xenophobia, racism, and ignorance about people from other places that make the audience wriggle and chuckle. “Am I in on something?” they seem to be thinking. “And should I be laughing?” when Wong offers up lines like the following:

I’m an immigrant to this country and I used to drive a used car with a lot of bumper stickers that are impossible to peel off. And one of them said, “If you don’t speak English, go home.” And I didn’t know this for two years.

The question always remains: who is he making fun of? Offering himself up as the guy who isn’t sure if the audience can understand him when he speaks or the guy who naturalized to the U.S. because he couldn’t do the thing he did best in China (e.g., “being ethnic”), threading through Wong’s stand-up is the constant reference to the absurd, both in human existence as a whole as well as U.S. assumptions about the immigrant experience. The point? It always depends, and varies just as much as those stories and personalities we all treasure as distinctly our own. We can be brilliant, or dull, or oddballs, or politically incorrect and yet still funny people. So can immigrants.

One more excerpt from Wong (I’m chuckling as I transcribe):

In order for me to become a U.S. citizen, I had to take these American history lessons, where they asked us questions like, “Who’s Benjamin Franklin?” We’re like “uuuhhhh…the reason our convenience store gets robbed?”

“What’s the Second Amendment?” We’re like “uuuhhhhhh…the reason our convenience store gets robbed?”

“What is Roe v. Wade?” We’re like “uuhhhhhh…two ways of coming into the United States?”

Yep, nothing PC about Wong. He helps us to see that as far as immigrants are concerned, there’s a lot more than pity than we can experience, including discomfort, offense, and/or hilarity. For starters.

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