Tursiops
Sunday 19th July 2009 2:56am
Welwyn Garden City
9,788 posts
Quote: Kenneth @ July 18 2009, 6:02 AM BST
I watched Dirty Harry a few weeks ago and this bit of dialogue made me laugh:
Gonzales: There is one question, Inspector Callahan: Why do they call you "Dirty Harry"?
De Georgio: Ah that's one thing about our Harry, doesn't play any favourites! Harry hates everybody: Limeys, Micks, Hebes, Fat Dagos, Niggers, Honkies, Chinks, you name it.
Gonzales: How does he feel about Mexicans?
De Georgio: Ask him.
Harry Callahan: Especially Spics.
This reminds me of a story an old friend told me once about his first day as an Officer of Customs & Excise doing VAT visits in the West End. "All Pakis are bent, his new line manager told him. "Now when I say that I am not being racist, because so are the Jews, and the Greeks, and as for the Turks..."
And of course as a generalisation, at the time, that was about right. Because the only way an immigrant could make a go in business was by going into marginal trades, such as cut make and trim, where fiddling your taxes was the only way to make a profit. Stereotypes usually emerge for a reason, and genuine observation should always be fair game for comedy. When stereotypes become genuinely offensive is when they are lazily parroted in a spirit of ignorant prejudice without any understanding of the context that gives rise to it.
(Oh, and jokes about the Welsh shagging sheep or Gingers being ugly, are not really offensive, because the people telling the jokes do not actually believe them; they just tell them because they know that Welsh and Ginger people find them offensive. The joke is in the wind-up, not in the insult.)