Funny Strange or Funny Ha Ha?

My wife and daughters and I were watching Showtime at the Apollo on TV yesterday. My wife thinks it is great that there are venues where amateurs can go to get discovered without having a panel of judges compare them to experts. This time, though, there was a comedian doing an act about being involved in an interracial marriage and how it affected his kids. The Apollo is a mostly black venue and the comedian was white. He talked about his kids choosing whether or not to be black or white depending on the holidays that were available or the social circumstance that gave one more relative merit than the other.

He wasn’t that funny, and here’s why: there were no real, hard truths behind the differences he set out to evince in his routine. His social constructs were mostly toothless, and I believe this is because we Americans have been thinking more about ourselves as Americans lately.

I know the masses of Eastern Europeans who have moved into Western Europe to find work and better lives since the restructuring of the European Union have more differences and more real social problems than we black and white Americans do, and they are for the most part racially homogeneous. I know the nouveau riche in China’s cities are having serious issues with the influx of “classless” peasants from the countryside. I know the Bantu and Muslim east Africans are still perpetrating genocide against each other, even though they are, for the most part, racially homogeneous.

I think that black and white Americans are realizing that we are not so different anymore, and that soon enough we will not be different enough to make jokes about. My older daughter is far more aware of the differences in her parents’ cultures than she is of our races. I think the guy should try a new bit, maybe with date jokes or funny stories about his foibles while trying to do laundry or work at a factory or something.