That Time SNL Laughed at Chinese People.
In 2009, Saturday Night Live put out this cold open featuring Will Forte as Chinese President Hu Jintao and Fred Armisen as U.S. President Barack Obama:
When I first watched this skit with my parents, I was in sixth grade. I didn’t know much about whitewashing and systemic racism — or any of the economic issues that Obama and Hu discuss in the skit. But I did sense that something was wrong with Will Forte’s impersonation of Hu.
I just watched this video again, and my reaction to it is nuanced. On the one hand, I think the content of this skit, for the most part, is funny. I love political humor. I love sex jokes. Sex and politics are the breadsticks and butter of modern comedy.
On the other hand, I’m dismayed that the writers of this skit cast Forte — a white dude — as a Chinese-speaking politician but didn’t bother to give him any actual Mandarin lines to say. Instead, he uttered a sequence of random syllables that were meant to sound like Chinese to the untrained white ear but didn’t mean anything in any language. My Chinese wasn’t very good the first time I saw this skit — and it still isn’t — but both times, it was painfully obvious to me that Forte was speaking gibberish.
Political satire is supposed to punch up, not punch down. The Beijing authorities are a horrible, horrible government, one that executes thousands of people every year and sells their organs on the black market, one that suppresses and imprisons political dissidents just for speaking their minds, one that refuses to grant Tibetans and Uyghurs even an inch of freedom. So by all means, make fun of the Chinese president. Make fun of every man, woman, and child who has ever held office in China. We’ll laugh with you.
But when SNL punched down at Chinese language and culture that night, the American people weren’t laughing with us. They were laughing at us.
That night, we were the boogeyman, the country of robots who took your jobs by working for pennies. We were America’s arch-rival, the yellow peril beating her sorry ass in trade and scheming to take over the Pacific and humiliate America until she’s forced to butt-fuck us in front of her entire population of savory white couch potatoes.
That night, we were flattened into a one-dimensional caricature of the Chinese nation played by a white guy, a nation of 1.4 billion at the mercy of SNL’s white audience.
Never mind that at least two Asian Americans — me and my mom — were part of the audience, trying to make sense of the skit.
We were invisible.
The American people weren’t laughing with us. They were laughing at us.
Moving Forward
SNL has had a great track record using comedy to fight racism in America, especially since the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement. Michael Che’s jabs at white supremacy on “Weekend Update” are a huge step forward, and the fake political ad that ripped Trump for courting neo-Nazis and the KKK was EPIC.
So I’m confident that SNL would not put on a skit like this one today. Overall, I still love the show. However, I hope that the cast, writers, and producers of SNL continue to increase the show’s diversity by hiring more Asian and Pacific Islander writers and cast members. (Yes, I know that Fred Armisen, who was in the skit, is a quarter Japanese, but he’s off the show now.) Heck, Bobby Lee was on Mad TV when I watched it as a kid. Go see if he wants to join.
And next time you want to make fun of Asian politicians — even in ostensibly liberal democracies, there’s a lot of fucked up shit that you can make fun of — please be more sensitive, and please mock the politics, not the culture.
