Last year, I blogged my digital literacy autobiography as an assignment for a course I was taking at the time. Now, I’m posting something sort of similar: a discussion of digital public writing. 
Growing up, one of my favorite books was Hatschi Bratschis Luftballon, a story about a pipe smoking bearded brown-skinned wizard in a turban who travels the world in his hot air balloon to steal misbehaving children. I can’t remember the details of the story (the book is back in Austria, or I’d refresh my memory), but I remember finding the name Hatschi Bratschi funny, probably because of the rhyme, assonance, and consonance. The name is really a perfect storm for capturing the imaginations of small children. It’s also culturally insensitive in and of itself.
I don’t remember being especially afraid of the titular character, but I think the 1968 edition of the book that I had featured less frightening illustrations than the original 1922 publication. Also, I was a fairly well behaved child (as far as I can remember), so I felt pretty safe from the wrath of Hatschi Bratschi, who preyed exclusively on bad children who ran away from home. The book doesn’t seem to be in print anymore. But that just shows how terrible this all is. Before I learned even to read, this book taught me that non-white, non-Christian people are evil child predators. In our politically correct world today, such literature is no longer welcome.
With hindsight, I can say that no harm was intended. No one was trying to enculturate me into xenophobic racism. It was just a book, and I was just a kid, too young to understand. It wasn’t until I was in my twenties that my mom pointed out how problematic the book really is. Something she was aware of when she read it to me.
I don’t remember where the book came from because it’s been part of my life since before I can remember anything. It’s just always been there.
This is where institutionalized racism comes from. It’s just part of the system, and so no one is aware enough of it to point it out, to gesture towards the root by which we must pull it out. This is where misogyny comes from. And homophobia. Transphobia. Bigotry of all varieties. It requires an outsider to point it out to those of us who have been socialized and assimilated into the system. We’re so close to it that we can’t see it. My mom, for example, is not racist or xenophobic. (OK, she is a little bit, but she’s also my mom, so I don’t think about that until she says something that causes me to shake my head in disbelief… it’s just so deep down, so not on the surface as to barely exist at all, but it is there…) She’s one of the most liberal, open-minded people I know, and she passed that along to me. While reading Hatschi Bratschis Luftballon to me. (So I must have that same deep-down white privilege racism inside me as well. In fact, I know it’s there because sometimes it comes out.) It’s all very complicated and it would take a summit of psychologists, sociologists, historians, and anthropologists to tease it all apart, to tell us why we are the way we are, how society has become what it is.
In the meantime, it’s paramount that we point out to ourselves and each other when our inner bigotry bubbles to the surface. It turns out we have just the right tool for the job: humor.
Humor and the resulting laughter are social phenomena. In his article “Why Do We Laugh?” Wilson D. Wallis writes that laughter and language are “very similar in origin [and] in function. ‘Laugh and the world laughs with you’ may be true when the world is a society; at present, ‘laugh and your social group laughs with you’ would come nearer the truth” (343). According to Wallis, laughter is a way to put wrongdoers in their place and teach the uninitiated right from wrong. So humorous critiques of current social standards (such as the satire we see on shows like The Daily Show and Last Week Tonight) are a way of emphasizing the problems with those standards.
J.P. Steed takes this theory a step further. For Steed, the insight required to make and understand jokes points to laughter as a tool not just for reprimanding those who step out of line, but also “to provide and provoke self-examination, self-understanding, self-criticism.” (299). Steed bases this concept on the theories of Henri Bergson, who complicates superiority theory of laughter by claiming that laughter is “corrective in nature. The distinction here is subtle but crucial: the former sees laughter as essentially alienating while the latter sees it as essentially assimilating” (300 Steed). For example, by “pointing and laughing” at Western mainstream media’s narratives of oppressed, helpless Muslim women (Kasana 239), satirical blogs like Oppressed Brown Girls Doing Things teach readers to stop buying into these misguided beliefs. Here’s how it works:
- Western mainstream media is inflexible in its portrayal of Middle Eastern women.
- Blogs such as Orientalism is Alive are pointing out this inflexibility.
- Western readers laugh at the joke, initially out of a sense of superiority, but then we catch onto the joke and realize our own prejudices are part of the problem.
Now that I’m an adult and I know better, I can laugh at my childhood obsession with Hatschi Bratschi, but by laughing, I’m acknowledging that the book is problematic, that my exposure to it and my enjoyment of it were wrong. Hindsight makes me feel superior, but I can’t escape the crux of the joke: the flaws of my upbringing, of my enculturation at the hands of this xenophobic book.
Do you have any examples of insightful jokes? Memes, videos, or blog posts that point out our flaws and demand we do better? Share below.
Works Cited
Kasana, Mehreen. “Feminism and the Social Media Sphere”. Women’s Studies Quarterly 42.3/4 (2014): 236–249. Web. 22 March 2016.
McCorkle, Ben and Jason Palmeri. “Putting Our Bodies on the Line: Towards a Capacious Vision of Digital Activism.” Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion. 1.11 (2014). Web. 6 March. 2016
Pervocracy, Cliff. “Cosmocking Catchup: October-Decemeber ‘13!” The Pervocracy. 3 January 2014. Web. 17 April 2016.
Ryder, Phyllis Mentzell. “Counterpublics: Beyond Deliberative Conversation.” Rhetorics for Community Action: Public Writing and Writing Publics. Lexington Books, 2011. Print.
O’Reilly, Tim. “What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models.” The Digital Divide: Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Networking. Ed. Mark Bauerlein. New York: Penguin, 2011. 215-229. Print.
Ouellette, Jessica. “Blogging Borders: Transnational Feminist Rhetorics & Global Voices.” Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion. 1.11 (2014). Web. 6 March 2016.
Steed, J.P. “‘Through Our Laughter We Are Involved’: Bergsonian Humor in Flannery O’Connor’s Fiction.” Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought 46.3 (2005): 299-313. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 10 April 2016.
Wallis, Wilson D. “Why Do We Laugh?” The Scientific Monthly. 15.4 (1992): 343-347. JSTOR. Web. 10 April 2016.
Warner, Michael. “Chapter 2: Publics and Counterpublics.” Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books, 2002. 65-114. Print.
Vetter, Matthew A. “Queer the Tech: Genderfucking and Anti-Consumer Activism in Social Media.” Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion. 1.11 (2014).Web. 6 March 2016.
Stuck under a Cat 