Is it wrong to mock Indians?

So The Rude Awakening has offended the Indians, and people who are offended on their behalf. Hardly surprising, really; in the past, Jeremy Mansfield and Co have incensed the whole of Boksburg and Brakpan combined, so nothing scares them.

It seems that there have been a number of complaints about a show that broadcast last week in which the difference between Durban and Joburg Indians was discussed. Listeners were especially offended by:
• Jeremy Mansfield’s fake Indian accent (whether they were offended because the fake accent wasn’t convincing enough or the fact that he mimicked an Indian accent in the first place, is unclear);
• claims that “all Indians own sound systems that are worth more than the value of their car”;
• a caller who said that Durban Indian women were classier than Joburg Indian women, and
• a caller (Indian, as it turns out) who said that Durban Indians are so dark they’re purple.

One listener commented, “I’m not Indian, but it made me cringe just to hear how a radio station in our time and era is allowed to blatantly discriminate and joke about a specific race group. That is just appalling.”

This is exactly the sort of thing I love, because it means more material for the next insult book. It’s also a subject that’s close to my heart, because quoting insults in the first place means that I have had to be very careful about the way I have positioned myself in relation to the material. The general point about comedy is that self-mockery is acceptable; it’s once you target others that you start having to be a little more careful. That’s not to say mockery should only be permitted between people of the same ethnicity — if that was the case most of South Africa’s comedians would be out of a job, not to mention Leon Schuster.

South African Indians are actually quite good at laughing at themselves. If you’re easily offended, for example, don’t watch Krijay Govender, who likes to joke that her husband is so dark, even the blacks who meet him are amazed. “Yo, you are black!” she mimics them.

Self-mockery can be crucial to group identity — after all, if you have no idea what people are going on about, you’re not going to find it funny. So a certain level of familiarity is required to share the joke. There are several Facebook groups devoted to the discussion of specific Indian identities, where people get to do a bit of communal navel-gazing. This group, with nearly 2 000 members, is devoted to “Charou’s”. (In fact, there are Facebook groups for South African Indians in Perth and Adelaide.)

One respondent to hellopeter.com thought it was all a bit silly: “I enjoy your show every morning. In every single nation you will ge them coming up against each other. So what is the problem. You are all uptite for nothing. I am PORRA and I am telling you now you have got the same problem there. Portugual vs Maderia and we are all the same. North coming up against the South. Apologise to the community for what. You run each other down as well. That is life. There is not one nation that does not do it. At least we laugh and joke about it and that is life. Imagine if we were all sour like some of you because you feel offensive.”

Without having heard the show for myself, it’s difficult to say whether I think they crossed that fine line. (It’s worth remembering that The Rude Awakening team was hauled before the Broadcasting Complaints Commission for a show about “white trash”, so it could be argued that they are equal opportunity offenders.)

Not that, if we’re looking for subversive mirrors to society, The Rude Awakening is necessarily a good candidate. It’s too mainstream, too beholden to LSM 8-10* 30-49 Gauteng WCI listeners, mainly English-speaking (Jacaranda is for the planks, bru). It’s the spiritual home of the Fourways cluster, the Nissan Navara, the jetski and the 42-inch plasma screen, gigantic sunbaked parking lots dotted with car guards, Value Marts and garden centres, braais and splash pools and Xboxes, holidays in the Maldives or Thailand (not Mauritius), Super 14 and Twenty20, sales executives and financial managers and the IT dude who sends out group messages informing you the server is going down for maintenance this evening. It’s the station for people who distribute pictures of Jacob Zuma with rude captions, who get teary when they listen to the Christmas Wish List, who care about their larfstaal.

I used to listen to The Rude Awakening on the way to work, years ago. I stopped because the relentless banality** made me want to slit my wrists, so I switched to 702, which was also depressing, but for different reasons. Even John Robbie was preferable to the cutesy cartoon jingles Highveld plays whenever Jeremy Mansfield starts telling the Traffic Joke.

I suspect that a sizable chunk of Highveld’s listenership — of all races — would emigrate tomorrow if it could, and that’s partly why the studied banality of the show is so appealing: it offers a form of escapism. It would have been better if the team had included a guest Indian comedian on the show for a little more balance and to address the perception that this was a bunch of northern suburbs whites*** mocking another race group, but overall, from what I can tell, I don’t think the show or its producers are deserving of censure. If Indians were the target of the comedy, they were also willing participants (how many white South Africans can even tell the difference between a Durban and a Joburg Indian anyway?).

In closing, I’m reminded of the time my husband and I attended a Blacks Only concert. Around 10% of the audience was white, and when David Kau, the MC, started poking fun at us, we felt strangely included. It would have been terrible if he hadn’t targeted the whites for mockery; after all, we only laugh at the things that matter. Humour of this kind not only helps, somewhat counterintuitively, to integrate society, it also offers a type of pressure release, helping to maintain a general level of passable sanity.

In a society under as much pressure as South Africa’s, that can only be a good thing.

* LSMs, or Living Standards Measures, have been the standard marketing segmentation and media targeting tool for many years; recently they’ve been updated to include 14 segments. The principle still holds though.
** In case you are wondering, a lot of Australian radio is also relentlessly, aggressive banal. So I don’t listen to it either. If anything, the TV is worse.
*** It’s high time that northern suburbs whites were the targets of sustained mockery. And not just kugels, please. There are hardly any kugels left in Joburg as it is.