Discussion Groups / English Usage / January 2010

You could have expressed that in a plain-Jain way.

--
Jerry Friedman

I attended a party at U of So Cal in the spring of 1955. It was in the
apartment - one of the apartments - of my friend Kasem*, a Thai cinema
major. Many of the partiers were also in cinema, and in my memory I
was the only non-"foreign" student. I heard innumerable "Indian" jokes
that evening, only one of which was intelligible to me, and it was
told by a Sikh who was missing three fingers from his right hand. The
other jokes were told by non-Sikh Indians who so enjoyed the telling
process their words became a string of sounds modulated only by
hysterical giggles and a spray of mist from their lips. I don't know
if others present were able to understand what was being said or if
they already knew the jokes ("Number 117!"), but at the conclusion of
each joke there was raucous laughter and not a little applause. That
seemed to be the occasion for a retelling of the same story, no more
recognizable to me the second or sometimes third time.

I have heard the joke I /did/ understand with two slightly different
plot lines:

1-

Ali** went to the veterinarian about his donkey, which would not walk
to market when encumbered with a load. The veterinarian gave Ali four
bottles of pills: green ones, bigger yellow ones, large orange ones,
and really-big red ones. Instructions were to give the donkey a green
pill, rectally, which would make him walk at five kilometers per hour.
If that wasn't fast enough, Ali should give the donkey a yellow pill,
which would make him walk at ten kilometers per hour. If that wasn't
sufficient, he should give the donkey an orange pill, which would
result in a fifteen kph pace. The red pill was a
twenty-five-kilometers-per-hour special.

Well, Ali was already late for market, so he calculated he'd better
get started, and put a green pill in the donkey's rectum. The animal
shuddered and moseyed off in the direction of the market, but he
wasn't keeping up with Ali, who administered a yellow pill, which
almost made the difference, but not quite. With the orange pill, the
donkey took Ali by surprise, as it suddenly perked up and loped off
into the distance.

Ali grabbed the arm of a nearby stranger, thrust a red pill into his
hand, and said, "Here, shove this pill up my a.s! I have to catch that
donkey!"

2-

In his distress, Ali did not understand a doctor's explanation of how
to use a suppository. He chewed and swallowed four of them with no
results before returning to complain: "Those pills you gave me didn't
work; for all the good they did I might as well have shoved them up my
a.s!"

______

*He liked to be called "Kazz"; according to him his father was the
State Electrician of Siam at the time, and had five acres of roses
under glass in upstate New York.

** "Ali" is apparently the "Little Johnny" character in many Indian
jokes, such as the classic, "The year Ali farted at his wedding".

On 20 Jan 2010, Mike Lyle wrote

This may be well-circulated by now, but it made me laugh (guilty
laugh, but there ya' go):

------------
I got really depressed last night thinking about the economy, wars,
climate change, jobs, Haiti, my savings, pensions, and the rest of
it. I seriously thought of topping myself, so I called the
Samaritans' "Suicide Lifeline", and got put through to a call center
in Pakistan.  When I told them I was suicidal, they got all excited
and asked if I could drive a truck.
------------

(Am I unconscionably evil for laughing at that?  Yah, probably.)

He is not too buddha'd about it.

Derogatory?  I think it usually is.  Less so than some other words?  I
feel sure of it.  If you want to express that "less so" with a
stronger word than "mildly", I won't object.

And yes, a lot of derogatoriness depends on other things than a single
word.

--
Jerry Friedman

That too.

'Rev. Jesse Jackson referred to Jews as "Hymies" and to New York City
as "Hymietown" in January 1984 during a conversation with a black
Washington Post reporter, Milton Coleman.'

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/frenzy/jackson.htm

--
Jerry Friedman

Yeah, and it was certainly a lot less of a story than if someone had
used the construction "niggertown".  I'm not exactly sure why the
objection to "mildly derogatory" was raised upthread--"hymie" is
certainly a slur, but more along the lines of "honkie" than "cracker",
and it's certainly less offensive than "kyke" or even "hebe".  Mild is
a pretty reasonable qualifier, IMO.

Ah, those little cultural subtleties--which are what this thread is
about.

From what I've heard about my country in those days, anything Jewish
was automatically funnier.  Forty years earlier, the robot's name
could have been Sully.  Now it could be DeShaun.

--
Jerry Friedman
Oy gevalt!

<snip>

In one episode of the comedy, Maxwell Smart tells Hymie, who, being a
robot, takes everything literally, to "get a hold of yourself", to
which Hymie grasps each arm with the other.

I sometimes wonder if in "advanced" Euro cultures we've undergone a sort
of punch-line inflation akin to needing increased doses of addictive
drugs to get the same effect as before. Less industrialized cultures do
seem able to get full value from a much less blatant humour, as, I
think, did our own in the past.

It's better than last year's SDC.

--
Jerry Friedman

I don't think the Iraki guy who pitched his
chopplies at Bush used new ones.

She knew her sandalwood incense him? Don't even bother to groan,
please.
--
franzi