At our trash depot I found eight discarded sombreros. For the annual Field Day parade in 2014, our family added serapes and even the women and children painted on mustaches. We marched with instruments as the Montville Mariachi, spoofing the cliche of a Mexican band.
As I read newspaper articles about incidents at Bowdoin College, such as a recent student party featuring mini sombreros and tequila, I uncovered personal questions. After all, I studied Spanish and one grandmother knew Latin America so thoroughly that she lectured about the cultures. Our band was only a joke, wasn’t it?
What is a joke versus an insult? The most common form of humor is taking a widely accepted cultural understanding and then overturning our expectations. One example is Ed Muskie’s favorite joke, which he reportedly told at least once a day. In it, a Texan brags about the size of his property to a Maine farmer.
“On my ranch down in Texas, I can get in my car after breakfast and drive until dinner time and still be on my property. Now, what do you think of that?”
The Mainer says, “I had a car like that once.”
Monty Python or Mel Brooks create humor out of culture’s terrible truths through surreal comedy. What if some Bowdoin students had dressed as Montezuma and spoofed human sacrifice or dressed as Uncle Sam imprisoning Japanese-Americans? Not one person would see humor in students donning bedsheets and stirring flaming brandy with tiny crosses. Some images in black comedy are so abhorrent, we actually get the point.
Sarcasm as a form of satire can mock in order to highlight real flaws. But who laughed when Jonathan Swift suggested eating Irish babies in 1729?
When we’re the butt of the joke or alone or the joke takes place where humor is negated, we’re afraid to be different. We must feel safe to tease the joker or make a joke in return. Are we finally able to say we’re insulted, we demand justice, when there are enough of “us”? The Bowdoin minority population grew from 20 percent to 30 percent in 10 years. Many cellphone cameras catch cops murdering black citizens. Civil rights marchers numbered in the thousands while children in church were slain in a small group. Feeling safe among others I marched for women’s rights while men on the sidelines ridiculed, gestured and yelled insults.
Were some Bowdoin students using parody, a mocking through imitation by wearing tiny sombreros in a form of burlesque? Was that a tribute to fiesta or mocking Mexicans or just something we associate with tequila? A cousin to parody is a malicious humor, in which one group bonds through put-downs of another group, yet avoids responsibility for their slights by saying, “we’re joking.”
The problem is that most of us really don’t think we intend to hurt anyone. Yet, unless pointed out, our mocking perpetuates prejudice. The difficulty for the offended group is that they may appear petty and are expected to respond to, “When did you lose your sense of humor?” In the ’60s a boyfriend grinned and asked me, “If women are so smart, how come none of you has been president?” The top Googled jokes about women are no longer about their brains.
As we transformed into the Montville Mariachi, what if a relative had asked if we showed prejudice.
No, this was just fun.
“So why not wear brown face?”
Would we then recognize a line we had crossed? What about the children, who had no cultural context and still wanted to march in dress-up? How could we lose any prejudice and keep the fun?
That’s the real question.
Leslie Woods is an artist who lives in Montville.