Racism and Three Jokes about Naming Twins

This story is mostly true.  I had a conversation with an eighth-grader I have known since her first day on the planet.  She is the product of a very expensive and very progressive private-school education. It wasn’t exactly the Patrice Lumumba Day Care Center followed by the Che Guevara Elementary School followed by the Saul Alinsky Middle School but it might as well have been. 

Jody and I share jokes.  She is very adept at the language and we both appreciate pun-based humor. Any joke is funnier when it includes the cleaver use of the language. There is a double payoff, assuming the underlying joke is funny in the first place.   The worst puns are sometimes the best, worthy of being called groaners, named for the appropriate audible reaction they elicit. 

So here’s a joke:  A guy has twin sons.  He named the older one Jose.  What did he name the younger one?  In no time, Jody got it.  Hose B.   (Okay, this is not a joke to be written out; the parallel would be Hose A and Hose B.  But is works well when spoken and that is how jokes are meant to be told.)

Jody got the right answer and then proclaimed this to be a racist joke.  Hmmmm.

Okay, Jody, how about this one: 

Poor couple in a poor country has identical twin sons but they already have more children than they can care for and so they put the boys up for adoption.  One gets adopted by a couple in Spain and is named Juan.  The other ends up in Egypt where his adoptive parents name him Amahl.  They do not see each other for thirty years, at which time Juan contacts Amahl through the original adoption agency.  Juan and Amahl agree to meet.  Amahl is scheduled to land at the Rome airport twenty minutes after Juan.  Two counselors from the adoption agency and Juan await his plane but he missed his flight and is a no-show.  One counselor is very disappointed and says so.

“I was really looking forward to this.”

“Really?”    says the other, “it’s no big deal.  If you’ve seen Juan, you’ve seen Amahl.”   

Is there a tinge of racism in this joke?  It manages to take advantage of the pronunciation of two foreign names which sound like words in English. To call that racist is really a stretch.  

I actually know three jokes involving the birth of twins, all of them pun-based.  Here is the third:

Sam is rushing to the hospital after getting a phone call that his wife has been admitted and is in labor and is likely to deliver at any moment.    But he gets tied up in traffic and, by the time he gets there, his wife has delivered twins, a boy and a girl.  He is delighted but feels badly that he was not there to share the experience with his wife as planned.  The nurse tells him that all went well and that in fact, his brother stepped in and provided all the help needed. 

“Larry? Larry’s an idiot.”  he said. 

“No, no.” said the nurse, “he was terrific.  He even named your kids.”

“Really, what did he name them?”

“He named you daughter Denise.”

“That’s nice name.  What did he name my son?”

“DeNephew,” said the nurse. 

Okay.  Is this joke racist?   Not in any way.  No one is denigrated or humiliated.  No minority is mentioned or even hinted at.   So what’s the difference?  Why might the first joke have a racist tint, the second joke at least be open to review and the third joke not a problem at all? 

The answer evidently is that this is still predominantly an Anglo-based culture and Jose, Juan and Amahl are obviously fer’ners with foreign names.    Apparently, any reference to a minority in a joke makes the joke racist, or at least offensive.  It degrades the minority.  Really? 

Hose A and Hose B degrades Latin culture?  Let’s modify the joke a little bit.  Billy is the youngest of five brothers.   What are the names of his older brothers?  You got it — Bill A, Bill B, Bill C, and Bill D.  This is essentially the same joke.   What happens to the racist allegation?   Clearly, no discernible ethnicity is disparaged because the name Billy is not associated with any minority or ethnic group.   If the Billy joke is not racist, neither is the Jose joke. They are both simple word plays; the only difference is that the Jose joke is funnier. 

What does the accusation that the Jose joke was racist say about the accuser?   There was no racist intent in telling the joke. And no assertions were made or implied that the family in the joke was Latino.  This is an assumption on the part of the accuser.  Jose’s father – a fiction to begin with — might be from a very old California family, Spanish in origin and a direct descendant of the conquistadors.   His roots on US soil go back almost a century before the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth rock.  How establishment can you get?  The father of Bills A through E, on the other hand, might a Central American immigrant wanting to acculturate his family by giving his kids Anglo names. 

From any angle, this is just It is just a simple pun which is only offensive to those looking very hard to be offended.  And that is the point.  If you find yourself being offended at every turn, maybe you are just looking to be offended. 

The problem is that the word racist is used to mean either racially oppressive or merely racially conscious.  It is not racist to notice that the NBA is 75% black.  In fact, it Is impossible not to notice.  Although some might draw a racist conclusion from this phenomenon, noticing per se is not racist.  Maybe we should use racial to mean race conscious and limit racist to genuine prejudice.  But we don’t.  Too bad. It would avoid a lot of unnecessary contention.