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The Big [Censored] Theory

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1444 points feross | 4 comments | 29 Aug 22 17:34 UTC | HN request time: 0.016s | source
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sudhirj ◴[29 Aug 22 18:52 UTC] No.32641992[source]▶
We have this kind of censorship in India as well, even the in weirdly innocous places. In James Bond movies, and I think Gone Girl as well, scenes were by zooming into character's faces or just straight cuts.

This is probably the only reason I maintain a US iTunes accounts (used to have to buy gift cards from sketchy sites online to keep this going, but I recently discovered that my Indian Amex card works fine with a US address).

Also trivia for those who are wondering how cuts are made, at least for cinema content: all video and audio assets are usually sent to theatres in full, but there's an XML file called the CPL (composition playlist) that specifies which file is played from which to which frame / timestamp in what sequence. Pure cuts or audio censorship can be handled by just adding an entry to skip the relevant frames or timestamp, or by specifying a censor beep as the audio track for a particular time range.

https://cinepedia.com/packaging/composition/

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ginger2016 ◴[29 Aug 22 21:36 UTC] No.32643886[source]▶
Given the racist protrayal of Indian American Raj Kuthrapalli, I am of the opinion Indians are magnanimous in allowing this show to be aired there.
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koheripbal ◴[29 Aug 22 21:53 UTC] No.32644034[source]▶
It's a bit like Jewish, Irish, Japanese, Korean, or Italian stereotypes in movies/tv - few real members of those groups get offended because we're not currently disadvantaged.
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mr_toad ◴[29 Aug 22 22:01 UTC] No.32644114[source]▶
The whole show is a giant stereotype.
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kelnos ◴[30 Aug 22 00:14 UTC] No.32645187[source]▶
I was never a big fan of the show, but emphasizing stereotypes is a very common, often very effective form of comedy. If that's not your cup of tea, that's fine -- I tired of it quickly and stopped watching -- but that doesn't mean it's inherently wrong.
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1. ginger2016 ◴[30 Aug 22 01:52 UTC] No.32645797[source]▶
I don’t consider stereotypes funny. America has a really bad history when it comes to shows propagating racial stereotypes. People finding a stereotype funny is not a good reason to air it on national television.

Jim Crow was a stereotype which plenty of people found funny 80 years ago, we don’t find it funny anymore(it was never funny), as we see it for the truth. It was an untrue racist portrayal that harmed Black Americans. Granted the portrayal of Raj isn’t nearly as harmful and it is not comparable to horrors of Jim Crow. Jim Crow was a billion times more harmful to a lot of Black Americans.

Portrayal of Raj probably has little to no impact on Indian Americans. However as a society we have to learn from the past, and it is time to abandon stereotypical portrayals of people.

Big Bang Theory is an old sitcom people found funny during its time, just like people abandoned the stereotypes of the past, people will dumb Big Bang Theory.

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2. x-complexity ◴[30 Aug 22 02:58 UTC] No.32646167[source]▶
> I don’t consider stereotypes funny. America has a really bad history when it comes to shows propagating racial stereotypes. People finding a stereotype funny is not a good reason to air it on national television.

As stated by OP, this is a subjective opinion: The enforcement of a particular viewpoint on the issue of portraying someone from [insert country/background here] is not an easy problem to solve.

Stereotyping will inevitably occur as a result of generalization & snapshots of an intended (X := culture/background/country/activity/etc): They're the result of picking the most commonly-seen & widely-known/believed aspects of X at that point in time & adding their stylizations to it, in an effort to conserve mental energy when it comes to recalling aspects of X. While bad stereotypes will definitely exist, to dismiss it as an outright "bad" is an overly broad stroke of opinion: They will exist because at that point in time, the stereotypes were relatively accurate to them when it came to portraying X.

> Jim Crow was a stereotype which plenty of people found funny 80 years ago, we don’t find it funny anymore(it was never funny), as we see it for the truth.

...There's a paradox in the "it was never funny" statement: If it was never funny to them, it wouldn't have been that popular in the first place - Either it was funny enough then to still be remembered & now be considered a (racist depiction)/(heavily-negative-stereotypical mimicry) in the Western world, or that it wasn't funny & consequently forgotten about right then and there. Various other states can exist in between the 2 aforementioned extremes, but it must've been funny enough to them to still be noted down in the written word.

3. Gordonjcp ◴[30 Aug 22 09:08 UTC] No.32648207[source]▶
So you think that Apu from The Simpsons is a harmful stereotype?

What about Groundskeeper Willie?

What about Lisa?

What about Homer?

4. koheripbal ◴[30 Aug 22 13:28 UTC] No.32650138[source]▶
> I don’t consider stereotypes funny.

I suspect people who say this DO find stereotypes funny - just stereotypes of people they consider to be the "other" side of the political spectrum from you. So it's really just hypocritical virtue signaling.