The Big [Censored] Theory

Personally I'm mostly offended how stale and unoriginal a lot of these jokes are, but I can definitely see why the censors took offense at some of them.

For example, the joke about the Chinese restaurant ("I'd be more concerned about what they're passing off as chicken") plays off of the stereotype that Chinese people eat dogs and cats, and the “passing off” remark implies that the Chinese restaurant owners are deceptive and would immorally and illegally serve their guests a different kind of meat than advertised. I can definitely see how that joke would be considered offensive.

The author labels that joke as "harmless" but you don't have to be a Chinese censor to interpret it as reinforcing harmful stereotypes. I dare you to show that scene at a liberal college and notice how few laughs you get.

Similarly, the racist remarks about Chinese people made by Sheldon's mom are somewhat offensive if taken at face value. I guess the joke is supposed to be at her expense instead ("old people are racists" is an American comedy cliche, if a somewhat tired one) but it's conceivable that either the censors didn't get that, or they feared that their audience didn't get that, so they decided to cut it out entirely.

"They wouldn't get that" is probably also the right explanation for censoring the joke about Jews eating at Chinese restaurants during Christmas, which is a very American tradition. That doesn't imply the joke needs to go, but I can see how that would, at best, leave Chinese viewers scratching their heads.

> can definitely see why the censors took offense at some of them

Take offense maybe… censor absolutely not

> I dare you to show that scene at a liberal college and notice how few laughs you get.

Yeah, the show isn't that funny.

>For example, the joke about the Chinese restaurant ("I'd be more concerned about what they're passing off as chicken") plays off of the stereotype that Chinese people eat dogs and cats, and the “passing off” remark implies that the Chinese restaurant owners are deceptive and would immorally and illegally serve their guests a different kind of meat than advertised. I can definitely see how that joke would be considered offensive.

I hadn't considered the cat/dog meat angle, thank you for the perspective. In that case, I'd probably cut it too. I was thinking more of chicken nuggets, where a dozen birds are liquified and poured into a mold.

Like if you ordered the pork and was served a hotdog, the "passing off as" bit would still work, you know?

> I dare you to show that scene at a liberal college and notice how few laughs you get.

Did you see the recent video where the white guy dressed up in a poncho, big hat, and fake mustache and carried around maracas? He asked a bunch of white kids on a college campus if they thought his outfit was offensive to Mexicans, and they all said yes.

Then he went to the Mexican part of town and asked actual Mexicans, and they all said it was funny or that they liked that he was trying to honor their culture. Not one of them was offended.

So perhaps it would be good to ask a Chinese person if this joke offends them.

> plays off of the stereotype that Chinese people eat dogs and cats

So... you support government censorship of jokes that somebody, somewhere might be offended by?

I don't find BBT funny. The censored sex-related stuff is in there for its shock effect, anyway.

As a measure of whether a stereotype is actually bad or has negative effects, this sort of thing is a lot staler than a BBT joke, though.

Who posted that video, and was it unedited? If we're going on a single piece of anecdata, I think it's fair to question if the creator had any biases or was trustworthy.

And not all racism / bias is equal. Maybe you are right that Chinese and Chinese-American people would not be offended by this, but it seems completely reasonable that they would be, and the onus on you would be to get data that they wouldn't. It really doesn't matter what liberal college students think at all, unless they happen to also be of Chinese or of Chinese descent (or they are southeast Asian, and tired of lazy racism that doesn't bother to distinguish such things).

edit: it was in fact PragerU (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PragerU) which is intended for entertainment. It should not be considered reliable or unedited.

The important part of virtual signaling is that it has nothing to do with it's stated aims. Virtue signaling such as calling out the college cafeteria for serving sushi as "cultural appropriation"[0] is not because the people doing the signaling care about the art of sushi or the Japanese culture - it's narcissistic posturing by the person doing the signaling. Another term for this is "white savior complex".

In many ways the virtue signaling is doing the thing they are accusing others of - using a culture (that isn't theirs) as a weapon for social status.

[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-36804155

> and the onus on you would be to get data that they wouldn't.

FWIW I have a few data points -- this is something my Chinese wife has literally said inside a Chinese restaurant, and some of her other family members have said similar things about not trusting that the food being served is what they said it was.

No, but I constantly hear right wingers referencing it. It must be very popular in the echo chamber.

The original poster only said they could "see why" the censors took offense, not that they supported it.

Yes, it does support a right wing point of view, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily wrong. It's just one video, but there are many other videos and essays about the same topic.

What "right wing point of view" exactly? That racism isn't a real problem? Are there mainstream right-wing organisations that actually promote that view?

>Personally I'm mostly offended how stale and unoriginal a lot of these jokes are

It's CBS. The channel for old people on a medium for old people.

>I dare you to show that scene at a liberal college and notice how few laughs you get.

Yes, and? Everyone thinks they like 'irreverent' comedy until it violates the wrong proprieties. "On the way out of fashion" is a flavor of subversive comedy, often targeted at different audiences than "on the way into fashion" flavor of subversive comedy.

The people old enough to watch CBS are from a generation where they and their friends can exchange jokes at the expense of eachother's lineal stereotypes without it being inherently toxic. I just let them have their laughs, it seems pretty harmless.

Wouldn't that happen even in the US? A movie full of vile racist and sexist jokes bordering on abuse is not going to get a [G] rating, meaning the government is censoring it for some viewers.

Edit: it seems it's actually relatively easy to find jokes that are genuinely offensive and degrading in PG rated films. Why that's considered less potentially harmful to kids than showing sex between consenting adults I honestly don't know.

The right wing uses videos like that to show that, "liberals are the only ones offended by cultural appropriation". The topic is far too complex to be encapsulated in a TikTok video, but the video is just an example of how it's possible that representing another culture could still be appreciated, and that not every instance of representing another culture is appropriation.

No. The point of view that between being maximally uptight about race is different than acknowledging and working against racism.

> The author labels that joke as "harmless" but you don't have to be a Chinese censor to interpret it as reinforcing harmful stereotypes.

Is it actually "harmful" though? People are still going to Chinese restaurants as far as I know. The "harmful" adjective is being thrown around a lot, but it's never been very clear to me there is actual harm. People will cite things such as "violence against Asian-Americans has been on the increase!", but that seems entirely disconnected from some jokes in some sitcom.

That's my point of view and I don't consider myself the least bit right wing!

Yeah, when you're part of a culture that suffers from cultural appropriation, you understand it. Although my culture suffers a very benign culinary example (poutine), it allows me to understand the power play, and how I wouldn't want others decrying the appropriation my people are living.

> I dare you to show that scene at a liberal college and notice how few laughs you get.

This is why, in a sane society, liberal arts students are not consulted for their wisdom.

Age ratings are quite a different thing than making it unavailable to the entire public. I don't think you can just lob all censorship in the same basket like that: there's quite a bit of nuance here that makes all the difference.

This is called Common Sense. To the extent that it's right-wing-coded in (and, I believe, only in) USA is only a reflection of how wacko their pseudo-left has gone.

You are confusing movie ratings, by the movie industry, with government censorship. Movie ratings are just labels anyway, and not censorship.

Agree, these are 'jokes' are pathetically trite, bland fare. However ironically, liberal college grads are mostly the ones writing the shows. Hard to wrap one's head around.

MPAA ratings are decidedly not government censorship.

It’s extraordinary that people are taken in by such videos. Those videos are selectively edited to make the creators point.

Tell me, when Jimmy Kimmels producers go out on Hollywood Boulevard and find that not even one person can point to a country other than America on map (https://youtu.be/kRh1zXFKC_o) - do you think that’s real too? Or is that selectively edited for laughs?

MPAA ratings are not government censorship, they're cartel censorship.

The reason corporations follow the cartel's rules are financial agreements and the fear of PR backlash for not letting parents outsource parenting.

> For example, the joke about the Chinese restaurant ("I'd be more concerned about what they're passing off as chicken")

That same joke is made about a lot of food chains, especially fast food, like McDonald's. Replace chicken with beef and you have half of all the jokes ever made about Taco Bell (with the other half being poo jokes).

I don't see any point trying to justify or argue for extreme Chinese-style censorship. But there are still useful debates to be had about censorship in Western liberal societies.

But they're not the same things at all; I don't think age-ratings are "censorship".

So there's literally no government involvement in what content can be shown in broadcast material in the US? Even for FTA TV? In Australia the ratings system is administered by the commonwealth government, so I incorrectly assumed the same was true in the US.

In Australia they are: https://www.classification.gov.au/classification-ratings/wha...

I know the video was edited, it's by PragerU. That's not the point though, it was just a story to point out that not all things about other cultures are offensive.

And it's funny you ask about Kimmel, because I actually know the person who did those bits (she was the offscreen voice for the first few years and is actually the interviewer in this video). She said that while it was edited, they didn't have to edit it much, because about 80% of the people really were that dumb.

We have law that restricts indecent/obscene content, and it applies exclusively to FTA TV and radio. But it's completely unrelated to the ratings system for tv and movies.

Most channels not restricted by those rules (subscription cable & satellite) set in-house standards on content for commercial reasons. And of the broadcasters that are covered by the regulation, they are the old stodgy networks and never choose to get near the boundaries.

And I did not know if you were Chinese or otherwise of east or south-east Asian descent, either. A group is not obligated to be a monolith in what they feel is offensive or not. And sometimes can be empowering to steal a slur / stereotype, but it feels a lot differently if the same word or joke is made in other circumstances.

I don't know the right answer, but I definitely think it would be understandable if someone didn't appreciate that joke. And worst of all, it's just in service of the cheapest, blandest kind of humor. The writers should be ashamed of such lazy work, regardless of bigger issues. "Would it work without a laugh track" clearly fails badly here, as it does pretty frequently in TBBT.

> not trusting that the food being served is what they said it was

Chinese folks being weary of restaurants with swapping ingredients for lower tier is not comparable to assuming chicken being swapped for cat, which is a tired joke. Usually reserved for pricer seafood, hence pick your victim tanks. Many restaurants do similar type of substitute shenangians, like I'm pretty sure the hipster burger joing is not serving genuine kobe beef patty for $15, but they're also not serving ground chihuahua either. Like even in PRC you're worried about things like gutter oil at a hole in a wall joint versus slightly cheaper grade of sea cucumber at a fancy restaurant. Even during the pork crisis, no one was particularly concerned that restaurants were feeding them cat/dogs instead.

E: relate back to your parent comment, there's somethigns like cultural appropriation that most (especially older gen) Chinese don't care about, i.e. they thumbs up for white girls wearing qipao.

Those are companies, not nationalities.

There is a bias in that we see such videos, find them shareable, notice their existence but really there's absolutely no reason to use either the Kimmel or PragerU vid as anything other than light entertainment.

That doesn't mean the underlying argument they propose can't be defended, just that the videos have no explanatory power whatsoever.

I’d agree that that is the case a lot of the time, especially in the online popularity contests, but a big percentage - I’d say probably a majority - of the time it is simply sheep behaviour that has become ingrained

I felt this pull at university, when I spent a brief time flirting with the art society. everyone there had these kinds of values, and it would have made fitting in significantly easier if I had vocally agreed with them. this would have been especially tempting if I was (more) lonely and desperate for company, as many people are

as it was I mostly just kept quiet or carefully found points of agreement. I suspect if I was the type of person to give in to this zeitgeist, and not particularly question my beliefs, it could easily have developed into something real without any need for narcissistic tendencies

For the most part, jokes are only offensive if they strike a nerve.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-walmart-china/wal-mart-re...

> Wal-Mart will reimburse customers who bought the tainted “Five Spice” donkey meat and is helping local food and industry agencies in eastern Shandong province investigate its Chinese supplier... The Shandong Food and Drug Administration earlier said the product contained fox meat.

> edit: it was in fact PragerU (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PragerU) which is intended for entertainment. It should not be considered reliable or unedited.

Isn't PragerU a far right site know for promoting bizarre things? I'd would definitely call it "unreliable".

Obscenity is one of the (very few) exceptions to the First Amendment. What exactly makes something “obscene” is somewhat unclear (see the Miller test), but in practice explicit pornography, for example, is not legally considered obscene, in part because the definition is somewhat dependent on community standards and porn is very, very popular.

The FCC can and does regulate over‐the‐air broadcasts to a stricter standard, thanks to its exclusive authority over the inherently limited wireless spectrum. It restricts not just obscenity, but indecency (explicit sex) and profanity (bad language). However, this power does not extend to (e.g.) cable TV, which is not broadcast over the publicly owned airwaves.

The US really does generally have stronger free speech protection than the rest of the developed world. There is no equivalent in the US to a work being “refused classification” as seen in Commonwealth countries. The First Amendment would prohibit it. Some retailers won’t sell unrated or X‐rated films or AO‐rated games, but others can, because the ratings systems are formed by industry groups and are not compulsory.

When the Christchurch shooting happened, the New Zealand government banned both the shooter’s manifesto and the livestreamed video, making them illegal to possess or distribute. I doubt such a thing could happen in the US. (I remember my surprise that NZ actually has a government office named “Chief Censor.”)

The interesting thing is that end result seems to be a proliferation of extreme views in the US vs other similar countries, which is arguably the opposite of what you might reasonably expect from the opportunity to allow freer discussion of ideas.

Just today I saw part of a BBT rerun on German TV: The guys camp out in some lodge, together with the lodge's owner. That owner is also a brilliant(?) scientist, living alone in the lodge. I think he is from Germany, but that might differ depending on the localisation. He and his wife send each other cards once per year, for their respective birthday. Well, turns out most years, because this year he forgot it (Sheldon later realizes that in fact Amy is more important to him than science). Anyway, he asks them if they know the difference in taste between (wild) rabbit and squirrel, and since the guys say they don't, "well, then we'll have bunny today" and leaves the lodge with his rifle. The guys then leave while he is hunting, with Sheldon commenting "I know the difference, I'm from Texas".

So, as a German, should I be offended because of the squirrel/rabbit thing? Should Texans be offended? What about the career over partner theme, is that insensible to Germans divorcing due to career-induced burnouts?

No, it's just a joke. I don't believe anyone would think we ate squirrel, and I don't believe Texans do. (However, rabbit is in fact eaten around here. It's also a meat in France (who are famous for their cuisine) and... China. Says the Internet. But around here rabbit is more a delicacy, often for Easter or other special occasions; personally I think I haven't eaten rabbit meat in nearly a decade. Also, the rabbits-for-eating are large animals, not bunnys. Those are adored and loved as pets).

Is that the case, though? The US has problems of religious and political extremism, but is Muslim violence worse in magnitude than in France with its restrictions on religious expression, or anti‐semitism than in the European countries that ban Holocaust denial?

I saw that clip - there may be a valid point somewhere in there at being too easily offended but it's a stupid stunt from a non-honest broker. At the outset, the video's author's intent is to make liberal college students look dumb or like snowflakes, so that's what that video sets out to do but; there's no telling how many people they to talk to get cut on either side of the argument.

Good question. At best it would seem that such censorship doesn't seem to have all that significant impact on beliefs and behaviours.

> 80% of the people really were that dumb.

Dropping in just to point out that ignorant, dumb, and uninterested are different concepts.

No one is claiming that The Big Bang Theory is the peak of high class humor but I wouldn't say its offensive. The first example might seem offensive if you don't have any social skills but the joke is not about the eyes of Asian people, the joke is that old people, particularly in rural areas often make off hand racist comments and the awkward moments that result. The viewer is meant to relate to things they have heard their parents say rather than relating with the person reading the line.

Everytime you hear someone tell their story you get an editorialized view (at the very least by having chosen to listen to them rather than someone else).

Those videos are clearly optimized toward the desired impression, but I don't think that they used actors to make their points.

On the other hand you have problems like https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweap... where you can construct a castle of lies and deception by only speaking selective truths...

To summarize my point: stories are ways to tell one of the many facets of the human experience, when told honestly they can be helpful to our understanding of both the common and the uncommon, when told dishonestly they can warp our perception of reality.

Good grief, I wish people would stop pointing to a particular subset of an ethnic group to try to "prove" that people are "wrong" to get offended.

1. Videos are easily selectively edited

2. Within an immigrant ethnic group, different subgroups will have different feelings due to their experiences. For example, 1st generation immigrants tend to be less cognizant of this sort of stuff.

Here's a bit of a rant for you- as an Asian person, I find these Asian jokes pretty fucking unfunny. It absolutely shits me when people will ask an Asian person from Asia what they think about some hot-topic issue within the Western sphere- yeah no shit they'll find it trivial. They're so geographically and politically disconnected from the issue it makes no sense to ask them.

They experience none of the effects, understand very little of the context and have very little stake in the matter, the only reason people would ask them for their opinion on these issues is so they can point to a foreign face and tell people like me "why can't you be as well behaved as them".

Swapping ingredients is pretty common in all kinds of restaurants; a lot of whitefish are actually tilapia no matter what they say, and a lot of farm-to-table ingredients are entirely fictional.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/02/20/fish-s...

https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2016/food/farm-to-fab...

The rabbits bred for meat also make good pets:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdAi5Y8DDoNyX-4qcEcd-5w

On the other hand, there's apparently a problem where pet stores are selling similar giant guinea pig breeds as pets, but they're too wild and don't have the temper to enjoy it.

https://www.cavyhouse.org/%22Cuy%22.html

I agree with your sentiment, but isn't it a bit ironic that you made a point of emphasizing heterogeneity among ethnic subgroups, but then sort of took that away from what was more specifically mocking Chinese and North Korean stereotypes, rather than broadly Asian? If you were Filipino and got mad about a joke that poked at Chinese materialism culture, wouldn't that be a bit of a reach? Surely within Asian cultures, different stereotypes abound in regional humor, especially is it's taboo to joke about regional cultural differences

> isn't it a bit ironic that you made a point of emphasizing heterogeneity among ethnic subgroups, but then sort of took that away from what was more specifically mocking Chinese and North Korean stereotypes, rather than broadly Asian?

Yeah a bit. I chose not to mention specific ethnicities and omit detail to keep my comment short. Regional humor has it's place, but in more nuanced contexts. A Chuck Lorre production isn't the first place I'd look to find anything thoughtful and nuanced, to be frank.

Main reason I used the broad brush for "Asian" is because in western society, 1+n generation Asian diaspora are less likely to segregate themselves by lines of national grievances back in Asia proper. In addition to that, nationality is rarely the deciding factor on whether an individual is subjected to racial jokes (from outside personal circles), it's their appearance. I've been jokingly accused of being a Chinese spy, despite not being ethnically Chinese.

FWIW, neo-Nazi marches in Europe have way more people attending them than anything that American fash have tried to cobble up to date (including the particularly infamous one in Charlottesville). Radical nationalist parties seem rather popular in Europe lately as well, to the point where they already run some countries (Hungary, Poland).

This guy simply edits videos to provoke a reaction and get clicks. It is just business, and not an accurate depiction of reality at all.

It isn't even a creative or original idea. Remember Jimmy Kimmel's "The Man Show" where he got women on the street to sign an "End suffrage now!" petition because "suffrage" sounds like "suffering"?

It is an easy trick to embarrass people by shoving a camera in their face and putting them on the spot. But it doesn't actually tell you anything. It isn't a data point.

Interesting, though not necessarily indicative of anything in its own right. I'd always expect a culture of free expression of ideas and a willingness to discuss fringe viewpoints would help reduce the proliferation of violent or socially destabilising behaviour, but I'm less convinced the degree of constitutionality guaranteed free speech matters all that much.

Poutine is actually a pretty classic example of the bad kind of cultural appropriation. I wouldn't call it benign. Non-Quebecker Canadians are happy to claim Poutine as a "typically Canadian" dish (erasing its connection with Quebec specifically) despite many of them holding Quebec culture in extreme contempt.