Another installment of Monday Morning Madness takes us to Sugar Sammy, an Indo-Canadian stand-up comedian who offers a narrative that is dripping with racial, ethnic and gender jokes, directed against Indians, and virtually every other major ethnic group in North America. Thanks to UK-based Trinidadian blogger, Jumbie’s Watch, for drawing my attention to these videos.

I do not want to “anthropologize” this to the point that I suck the life out of the humour, but it is always amazing for me to see how well comedians do in deconstructing race, ethnicity, and gender, by inverting, by performing stereotypes, by engaging in self-deprecation, and by playing on the myths that have become the currency of everyday social discourse. By making a joke of it all, Sugar Sammy achieves in a few short minutes what we anthropologists try to convey in numerous lectures and readings: the arbitrariness of culture. Sugar Sammy shows how arbitrary it all is, by revealing its ultimate absurdity, that race, ethnicity, and gender are something to not just laugh at, but laugh with. What he also does is to take various conflicts and fears as given (listen for example to his material on “terrorists” and “sand niggers” in the second video — raunchy, provocative stuff), and thus unlike anthropologists makes no attempt to take the deconstruction further, to examine the roots of conflict. I suppose that is one reason why so few of us anthropologists have time to be funny — and yet I say this while acknowledging that, by far, the funniest academics I have ever known in any discipline (and I studied in most), have tended to be anthropologists, at least in my experience. Enough now, let’s hear Sugar Sammy…