 This is where the sharpest ideas are forged. And some wonky ones too. I grew up with a lot of, you know, white friends, but all my white friends had one non-white friend. Thank you for your service. I don't know, I think comedy suffers when you only have one type of perspective, you know what I mean? Migration is part of the human condition. Everybody is a migrant, which is objectively not true. I, as a matter of policy at the Comedy Pub, don't want to ever tell anybody what they can joke about or not. Comedy as a genre is probably the most honest way of portraying what our current societal values are. What is yellow and plays the guitar? John Lemon? Yeah, that was stupid. See, proof that even in academia... Hello and welcome to Standard Time. I am Reka Kinga Popp, your host and editor-in-chief of EuroZine, a magazine behind this show. EuroZine is an online magazine that connects over a hundred cultural journals, reaching a global audience. We also take pride in being a founding member of the Display Year platform, where we present diverse content from across Europe in 15 languages. It's our New Year's episode, so meet all the merry-making. I'll be the party pooper, because today we will discuss who's allowed to joke about what. A few years ago, people complained about political correctness. Today the call is on cancel culture. It sometimes goes as far as show business billionaires complaining about how they just can't say things anymore, because women or trans people or abused survivors, sometimes even homeless folks and other tyrants, just won't know how to take a joke. These poor oppressed folks do mostly their complaining on primetime shows too. Now, I have a lot of actual existing things to cry about, so I cannot quite spare a tear for them. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't advocate in favor of respecting authorities too much. By me, you can make fun of any church or the police, the state, public personas, all politicians, left, right and center. I love a fart joke as much as the next person, and I especially enjoy making people feel awkward by bringing up gonorrhea all the time. Are you sure you don't have gonorrhea? Super gonorrhea? GONOREEEAAAAAAA But I do prefer to avoid punching down. Not necessarily avoiding topics, but to choose wisely at whose expense. I extract a laugh to feel the ever-expanding void in my soul that only an audience can feel for fleeting moments. So instead of all the cancel culture foolishness, let's turn the tables and see what some not-so-billionaire comedians and thinkers recommend we sharpen our wits against. Tonight we have a set of guests whose jokes tend to chafe and burn in just the right places. Comedian Ashlyn Cain is here to tell us where to put our pronouns. She's the founder of Gay's and Day's comedy in Vienna and brings a rowdy California girl energy. Historian Janis Panayoditis is the scientific director at the Research Center for the History of Transformation at the University of Vienna. He's specialized in the history of migration. He'll measure his observations with a scholarly spoon, but behold, because his remarks do, in fact, cut sometimes. And Homer Hakeem will show us what an Afghan really looks like. Spoiler, it's not what most Austrians expect. He's the comedy daddy, the owner of the comedy pub on Wiedner Hauptstraße, the only club dedicated fully to stand up in Vienna. He's a comic himself, of course. Let's see who gets canceled today. Hi, welcome. Thanks for taking the time. Homer, some Austrians don't seem to recognize where you're from or not necessarily recognized, but they are baffled that they don't see on your face where you're from. The first reaction kind of moment where people are like, oh, you don't look like an Afghan because the one Afghan, the one other Afghan doesn't look exactly like me. So I usually now just say, yes, I'm not a carpet. Another thing, Afghan thing, is a carpet. Yeah, it's fair. As a comedy club owner and, you know, in charge of the programming there, somebody comes in. I guess you don't tell them what they can joke about. I haven't had this experience with you so far. But when somebody you feel like are going too far, what is the line for you that you wouldn't want to tolerate or wouldn't necessarily prefer having on your stage? To be honest, I as a matter of policy at the comedy pub don't want to ever tell anybody what they can joke about or not because stand-up comedy is a very direct art form. You do a joke, it's either funny or it's not, and you get instant feedback from the audience. We do a lot of open mics, so a lot of people try out new stuff. I'm always very careful with them. I want to set up people for success and I know if you just, you know, with your first joke alienate the audience completely, you're not going to do well and you're not going to have a good time. The audience is not going to have a good time and that way it will be just a terrible experience for everybody. Ashlyn, you are the co-founder of Gaze and Theyze, a comedy ensemble. We organize events, we provide platforms to people who are for LGBT comedians who are already established and we provide platform for new people who want to try out material for LGBT people who basically might not have felt so comfortable on a normal regular stage otherwise because I think Homer will agree with me on this that stand-up comedy has not exactly been a traditionally welcoming medium to a lot of people of our persuasion. I think comedy suffers when you don't have, when you only have like one type of perspective, you know what I mean? Vienna specifically, but also this wider culture context has this very long tradition of the cabaret and theatrical traditions. Stand-up feels like an implant here, quite a recent implant. It's a very sort of Anglo-Saxon thing and maybe that's also the reason why the majority of people that I see doing stand-up, including in German, have some kind of a migration background or are recent implants themselves. Does the migrant perspective, do you think, have to do something with this intermixing of humors or is that like, is a joke necessary when you're negotiating the circumstances that you're facing? How do you see that? Or are you just a funny person and that just happens to be so? Well, first of all, I'm a German citizen. Can I say that? Important. Yes. Jokes help with negotiating a lot of things. Once you start having sort of diversity and humor, you will have, I think you will necessarily have different groups poking fun at each other, for instance, because that's, you know, many of the best jokes are about inoffensive stereotyping. Call it inter-ethnic humor, for lack of a better term, could actually be a very helpful tool, I think, for negotiating an immigration society and for actually taking some of the tension out that there is and humor is, in any walk of life, a way to release tension. Today's episode is brought to you by Glitterpig. This glossy hog brings you good luck for the new year. May you avoid being cancelled in 2024. Glitterpig supports our program by pledging us handfuls of shiny, shiny acorns each month on Patreon. And so can you. Well, we'd be better off with like three euros a month or whatever amount you can afford to chip in with. For these, you'll get access to bonus materials, early releases. You also get to send us questions and recommend topics for us. So please sign up at patreon.com. That is, Eurazine, the presenting partner of this show. Thanks. And now back to Talking Smack. You did these sort of sensitivity classes or conversations with school children. Scholars of migration tend to start with the statement that we all come from a migration background. But now as a scholar yourself and sort of a second generation immigrant to Germany, you found that not everybody comes equally from a migration background. And that it seems that, for instance, second generation migrants tend to stay in place more than others do. That's true. I mean, that's so far more of an act of the observation that I have. Yeah, but when this show airs, it's like the 30th of December. So everybody's hungover. I think it can pass. As migration scholars, migration historians, this is like a favorite line. You know, everybody, migration is part of the human condition. Everybody is a migrant, which is objectively not true. A lot of people have not any sort of active migration experience. And a lot of those who are migrants in one generation then actually stay put and their kids stay put. Like if I can throw in another anecdote here, when I was a kid in 1980s, 1990s rural Germany, there were some pretty bad racist anti-Semitic, you name it, jokes out there. I'm not going to tell them here because those are definitely beyond the pale. Those were never funny. I think by now you couldn't easily talk like that anymore. Or you have to become better at telling these. If you're going to make a joke about something like someone else's ethnic background, you actually have to, I think a lot of the time you have to actually one, know something about that background. That's not just a shallow surface level understanding of their identity. Because I feel like a lot of the time the tension is broken when you make a joke that could potentially be offensive when it's actually smart. People don't get mad about offensive jokes when they're funny. That's the truth. People don't get mad about offensive jokes if they're smart and well written. Funny is like a moving goal post and then there's an element of witty that we expect in a joke. To have a bit more of a depth, that's not necessarily deep in this dramatic sense, but have a bit of a nuance that we recognize. Have an edge. Exactly. And the punchline, I would hope that the punchline we expect today would go beyond, it turns out they were gay, something like this. One of the funniest people that have ever been on a screen, Eddie Murphy, his first fantastical stand-up has a couple of very, by today's standards, very poor gay jokes, which he, I believe, has already said that wouldn't make today, but back in the 80s, at the height of the AIDS crisis, they counted as funny and today they feel different, even though this is an outstanding comedian with a very good deliverance. I think that's just sort of proof of, first of all, there's the phrase that comedy is the genre that ages the fastest and the least well. It doesn't speak well to Eddie Murphy's belief system at the time, of course, but... He was also like 19 or something, so maybe we can cut him some slack. Humor changes, but in general, sort of the culture repertoire that people have changes, and it changes very quickly. I don't think anyone has tried to sort of cancel Eddie Murphy for that, right? So it's like, okay, it's something that you thought was funny at the time. We don't do that anymore, but we have to renegotiate the present. How do we treat certain texts from the past that we still read which contain offensive words? Like, you know, Shakespeare, specifically about Jews and women. You can't change the past. You can't change what people wrote at the time. Of course, you can recontextualize it, but you cannot and you should not sort of try and change this and make it sort of digestible for the present. Because it's, you know, at least as an historian, I would say, you know, you shouldn't temper with your sources. Or erase. So one genre that allows you to change the past is actually stand-up. So let's talk about assembling material. One thing that I always take as a rule of thumb is that punching down never ages well. Punching up always ages well. If you go to, like, you know, you know, Karlin Pryor, whoever you pick from stand-up comedians, if you look at their material and they have some material that is, like, not really, would not be okay nowadays, or it's every, it's every time it's because they have been punching down. Women or, like, minorities or something like that. I draw a lot of inspiration from my own past. I grew up in ruler Austria. I grew up with a lot of, you know, white friends, but all my white friends had one non-white friend. Thank you for your service. Truly great that I'm a U.S. Marie. And it's not, most of it is not maliciously said to me. It's just people not knowing, being nervous in the conversation because they have never met somebody from another culture is a big part of it because that was, like, I was exotic in ruler Salzburg because they knew Turks, they knew people from former Yugoslavia, and that's it. Like, what the fuck are you? But it's interesting what you're saying that, you know, they knew Turks and they knew Yugoslavia, and that actually shows the kind of change that has already happened, 50 years ago they wouldn't have known those people in ruler Austria. So it's a constant renegotiation. You know, there's always someone comes in who is kind of the new sort of exotic kid in town, and that again changes the constellation and former outsiders become insiders. I don't know if you had, maybe you would have had Turks or Yugoslav also staring at you for being from Afghanistan. They were just confused because they also didn't knew anybody else. They were like, where is that? How did you get here? I talked with this young comedian Dushan from your comedy club who is Serbian and has a set of jokes about how interchangeable the languages are and who takes offence as what, and he says that he gets told all the time because he's also part Bulgarian that he looks like a Russian. I can't even imagine what that means because we're talking about so many people over such a vast expense, like what does a Russian look like? When I think about it, he really does. I'll tell you the answer to that question. It's a very, very strict stereotype of mostly invented... Vlad? Yeah, Vlad. Literally looks like what I would say mostly Western Americans have formed of all bad guy who beats Rocky in a fucking fight or something. Sorry, am I allowed to curse? No, no, it's fine, it's fine. I'm not sure I want to meet this guy. He sounds scary. No, he's really sweet. Yeah, he's a very nice guy. We've been talking about punching up and punching down. I think what we're talking about now is actually punching sideways, if you will. And I think that's, again, that has, again, something to do with changes in society that those who are down don't necessarily stay down. So I think it's actually healthy to an extent. If at some point you can sort of make fun of such things on eye level, then it's not punching down, it's not punching up. It's really punching among equals, if you will. I mean, it's always contentious what kind of equality you need. But this post-Jubaslav example, which is actually also 30 years after a bloody war, kind of encouraging that you can sort of make light of certain things that turn into, that are stereotypes at the end of the day. Yeah, for instance, the stereotype that Montenegrens are supposed to be lazy, so have the laziest man in the world contest where people lay about for days in a very strict set of rules to win this trophy, which I want to participate in and somebody pay me for that amount of time, please. I heard this amazing joke about Montenegrens being lazy. Yeah? Yeah. You don't remember the joke? Oh, no, I do. It's a very good joke. I'm not sure if I should tell it. Basically, when Montenegrens were separated from Serbia, this joke came along. It's probably a very old joke and it's about many different people, but in this case, I heard it in the context of Montenegren because they're said to be lazy, so that's the stereotype. The first parliament meeting that they had, they had to set the days off and the days to work, and they said, we're going to set the Sundays off. The rest of the week is we will work and somebody raised their hand. They're like, hey, wait a second. We do have Muslims here and they want to have Fridays off. How about that? They're like, you know what? Yeah, let's be inclusive. Let's give them Fridays also off. So Friday, Saturday, Sunday, we will be off. Other days, we work. One guy raised his hand and said, look, after a three-day weekend, let's be innovative. Mondays also off. And somebody said, well, before a three-day weekend, we should actually give people also to prepare themselves for the weekend. So they're like, yeah, okay, let's give them Thursdays also off. So like this, the days kept falling out and at the end of the day, they were like, you know what, we will just do it very simply. Every day is off except for Wednesday. On Wednesdays, we work. And that was like everybody's like, everybody's fine with that. And then like at the back seat, there was a guy and he raised his hand and he's like, excuse me, do we work on every Wednesday? Now that is my preferred work week. Ideal society right there. The jokes that will be received the best by other people are things that you know about, things that you have experienced, things that you have to know about the subject matter to tell good jokes about it. So I don't tell jokes about Yugoslavia because I'm an ignorant American and I don't know any of these stereotypes until very recently. As a minority, the entry point how you enter a culture kind of defines your position in that culture. I never thought I was a Karen, which is not... Great way to start a sentence. Not really a nice or pleasant thing to realize, but I did realize when I was going to get my e-card, this is this health insurance card for non-Austrian viewers, get it renewed and I went to the Magistrate, the institution where you do all of these things and there were a whole line of people with the buggies, with little children on the side of a, I think like eight lane road on the Görtel waiting outside of the building and I went there and I looked at them and I asked them why don't you go in and they just looked at me like I lost my mind and then I realized oh, we have a very different attitude to things because I as an EU citizen and as a Hungarian who feels completely entitled to everything in Austria because you took it from us I just like go through doors and tell, why do you make these families wait outside? Interestingly, I mean you use this sort of advanced yourself now, but why is it actually is it okay to call someone a Karen? Isn't that no, I think it's okay isn't that quite sexist actually? First of all, a Karen is most commonly understood to be a white woman who uses that privilege as a weapon against other people who are in lower positions to them so any minority group any like someone working customer service at the register I think deep entitlement and rage misplay, and again white rage you're using your position of privilege to basically punch down Karen also just so happens to be among the most popular names in North America for East Asian immigrants because it's so normal that there are a lot of Gen Z second or third generation Americans with East Asian heritage who are called Karen and now they're confronted with this stereotype. This is the reason why their parents chose that or chose this name in the first place because this sounded so very bland, normal American. You can be named Karen you just should not be a Karen. Karen is just a state of mind it's a vibe I didn't know that though that's really interesting because I've primarily I have an Aunt Karen who is a Karen also that's a great combination this show is made possible with the support of the European Union the European Cultural Foundation and our host, the Alte Schmiede Kunstverein Culture and media need supporters and they need space the US also has a different relationship with names like in the country where I come from or in Slovakia you choose from a set a little booklet you have a booklet the French were the first to come up with this of course standardizing names they are very fond of standards aren't they? they invented the meter and they invented the liter and acceptable names this is the moment where I go fucking white people it used to be the booklet which is a book of etymologies which meant for choosing the names for any Hungarian speaking users they would be familiar this is the thing that you would page through and look for baby names and you would find fantastic ones like old Hungarian names which means devil so that's kind of bringing it down on yourself what I've realized by watching comedy and watching comedians performance if you are not from a culture you better know your shit because if you know details and if you know and if the person from that culture knows that you know their culture they will laugh extra hard and they feel seen and they feel oh you know about us and you know about this one thing that we have like an inside joke about and now you also understand it and then you become part of their culture became like almost a genre of making fun of minorities in a way where you are like you are very knowledgeable in their culture even know a bit of their language but it's not like a malicious fun it's like hey this is funny in your culture comedy has been at least in the United States sort of pioneered by a lot of Jewish immigrants and Jewish Americans and I think about what Mel Brooks used to say of Jewish Americans but I do think that it is worth noting that these guys are also concerned about stereotyping their own culture because traditionally a lot of these stereotypes are used against them I wish that instead of reacting negatively to the comic of that culture talking about their experiences I wish that they would just take that and internalize it I need to recognize that this is a stereotype and this is not necessarily reflective of everybody you don't need to get mad at that person though for making fun of their experience comedy is very frequently a genre that lends itself to exaggeration it's not a research point but it's an entry point to get interested in something you didn't know you would be interested that's my understanding and now that we finally get to talk about the Jews so I come from this like ridiculously philosemitic peasants family my grandmother used to serve at Jewish houses and this was kind of like an unspoken but very obvious thing that this is these are the people that we hold dear in our hearts this very much goes against a lot of stereotypes about East European peasants if I may say so in a small village everybody was going to the same school they were friends they were together all the time so this is kind of like a heritage that I took with myself and I went to Budapest which admittedly was a bigger shift than going from Budapest to Vienna to be honest despite the crossing the borders and I picked up a lot of Yiddish style humor along the way and it had been quite some time until I kind of came up with a blend for myself negotiating which jokes I can make and which jokes I can't so now my strategy is to always attribute the joke to the person that I learned it from so credit where it's to it doesn't take away from the laughter that I cashed in anyway if I say that I learned it from a professor of mine this is one of my favorites and probably like the most historical one this is a joke from the early 90s from Israel which says if you see a Russian on the Israeli border and they don't have a violin it's a pianist do you find perfectly telling God I don't get it but it's funny to me someone who has lived in Israel and studied this kind of immigration it's hilarious it's all the classical musicians like Russia traditionally and of course during the Soviet times too was so strong in classical music on an industrial scale really they are very heavily mass produced and they all emigrated to Israel they could have had 10 philharmonic orchestras in the 1990s I now understand this joke and I will of course laugh context specific I told you I love draining jokes by explaining them I'm sorry it's funny because in the Soviet Union they were mass produced it was so much poverty this is my entire childhood by the way that you're just reenacted actually the explanation is way more for you than the joke itself sometimes it is it's part of making the absurdity for people like us who are not already familiar with the context that this is just it's another level there's humor on all levels I think since you mentioned Mel Brooks and casually bringing up one of my favorite comedians he's a master of sort of layering the humor arts in a way that is my favorite movie of space balls which totally works on the level of being a spoof of Star Wars of course but sort of if you go deeper there's all this Yiddish humor there are all these jokes and in the end there's this I think it's the end of space balls where it's like the Jews in space yes, yes I remember and I mean this is really walking a thin line there sort of alluding I imagine even to the pigs in space so you know really really pushing the boundaries there and having Jews flying around in star of David shaped spaceships I mean it's you know it's even an example I think of someone who with jokes and relatively bad taste sort of manages to break up stereotypes I do think that since this is a show about offensive humor we should talk about Blazing Saddles for a second Blazing Saddles was a movie about it was a parody of like Old West films and the protagonist was a black sheriff and a lot of the jokes were basically just the fact that everyone was racist towards him but I liked what Mel Brooks had to say about he was like I would never show a black person being lynched because that's not funny that's horrifying and I would never make a joke that shows like the brutalization or violence of people like this I will make fun of the racism that has to do with that movies like that especially like Mel Brooks movies you have to watch them every 10 years they are like a good like a canary in the gold mine of showing like oh okay how far away like a good indicator of society comedy on stage was always something that the oppressed slightly outcasted minorities did and that's how like Jewish humor became a thing actually somebody told me and I have not verified this so that like one of the first people who are considered a stand up comedian were here in Vienna who were like a leader and they would tell jokes in between you know the songs entertainment as sort of like an external thing to normalcy is always something that outcasts or people from a disadvantaged position could seek out for themselves if they don't want to remain underneath. I'm going to go as far as say most creative fields lend themselves well to like minority groups who have experienced oppression because there's a lot to say about like they are a group of people that have something to say I'm biased of course as a comedian I feel like it's one of the better ways to to not necessarily view the world but to at least share your experiences in the world. Are you berating operas and their social potential now? I was a musicology student so I feel oppressed by most of most of the things you say. No actually I actually think there are some pretty funny operas actually like Marriage of Figaro I love that one too because that one is kind of punk rock like they did not want Mozart making Marriage of Figaro because it has a lot of themes of like class struggles comedy as a genre is probably the most honest way of portraying what our current societal values are it's not always pretty it's not always it's not always something that we believe is right but it's most certainly the most direct most straightforward way to know who do we like who do we not like what do we think of this where is the power where is the money look that would be a very elevated closing and I don't want that Yanis you have anything really stupid on your mind ooh I love stupid jokes for instance since I just saw on the way here I saw on the tram they said that today is the anniversary of the Beatles releasing their white album so what is yellow and plays the guitar John Lemon yeah that was stupid she asked for it in academia especially in academia the most scientific director I know Ashlyn anything real stupid horse walks into a bar that's weird that's it that's the joke the version of this horse work walks into a bar type of joke that I like the best is like you know there's all these like iterations on top of each other and the one that I really love as a child is that a horse walks into a bar walks up the wall through the ceiling down the wall goes to the bar asks for a beer drinks the beer walks back up the wall through the ceiling down the wall out the door and a guest looks at the bartender and look in like amazement like what just happened and then the bartender says yeah he's like that he never says hi okay that's relatable though okay that's a very stupid place to end on thank you so much everybody you can see these guys at Gays and Vays and the comedy pub in Vienna and you can see Yannis often at all sorts of events of Rezept all of these are going to be linked in the show notes thanks everyone and have a great change of calendars this show is presented by Eurazine a platform offering insightful articles from over a hundred partner journals in multiple languages you can be a part of this intellectual journey by visiting patreon.com to become a patron starting at just 3 euros per month for this you'll get access to bonus materials, early releases and further perks our show is a production of Display Europe an innovative platform dedicated to presenting content with a strong focus on data privacy we're also grateful to the Altesh Mide for hosting us funding for this program comes from both the creative Europe program of the EU and the European Cultural Foundation the opinions and views expressed here are those of the authors and the speakers and do not necessarily reflect those of the EU or their European Education and Culture Executive Agency