I was reading this article on Guardian yesterday and very much impressed.

Is it ever OK to make a joke about this?

Conservative MP Ann Winterton's quip about two sharks heading to Morecambe 'for a Chinese' has earned her the opprobrium of most of the country and the condemnation of her own party. Jeremy Hardy on when a joke is no laughing matter
Beyond a joke: the ones that went too far

Friday February 27, 2004
The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1157307,00.html

Obviously the knee-jerk, leftist response to Ann Winterton's joke is that it was racist. And as a knee-jerk leftist, I am bound to say that it was. But I think there is more to say.

It is perhaps foolhardy for a humorist to write about humour. It opens one up to the suspicion that there's not much work on at the moment. Most comedians hold their breath when it is announced on a news programme that there is to be a discussion about a humour-related topic. Then they hold their breath and wait to hear who is going to represent them. Then they cry in unison: "Oh, why him?" Then they might make a joke like: "It's as though the announcer said, 'Vaccination - what is the case for single injections? We asked Dr Harold Shipman.'"

That's not a particularly good joke, and people bereaved by him will be justly offended by it. If it is funny, it's not because people are amused by what Shipman did, but because he is already the mythic personification of a demon doctor, in a way that Crippen, say, has been for some time. Time helps in making a joke less sick. There are still people alive who were affected by the sinking of the Titanic, but to say that it can never be joked about seems puritanical.

I had already heard the Morecambe joke before Winterton's attempt at it. If it's possible to repeat it without telling it, it went like this: "Two sharks were circling round in the Atlantic and one says to the other, 'I'm sick of eating tuna'. The other replies, 'Fancy going to Morecambe for a Chinese?' " I heard it from someone who is not a racist and I was quite surprised. But he likes sick jokes. The fact that this was such a very sick joke means that even the most racist of tabloids must condemn it. But people who are not in themselves wicked will laugh at some terrible things, usually in private. It is undeniably worse to say something in public, for the simple reason that more people hear it. And you give it legitimacy if you are a person of standing. Fortunately, this was Ann Winterton, so that doesn't apply.

All I can say about hearing the joke for the first time is that I was still reeling from the event and couldn't believe what I was hearing. I can't say I've never laughed at or cracked a sick joke. But the humour in this eludes me. The deaths are recent, completely horrible and caused by an existing political situation. The reason that the joke is so racist is not that it is about some supposed foible of the Chinese. If a joke is about the fact that dishes on menus have numbers, it might be construed as racially based and best avoided. But it would hardly be as hateful as this.

It might be lofty and perilous for a Saxon to decree what is and isn't racist but there are indications observable by anyone. If a joke is made by Jim Davidson to police officers, it probably is. Likewise, if it is made by Winterton. To give her credit, this was a better attempt than her previous efforts. At least it was a play on words. The one about Pakistanis being 10 a penny wasn't really even a joke. It was on a par with something like: "A man goes into a pub. He shouldn't have done because he was not white and people like that should not be in this country."

She is clearly as stupid as she is nasty. Why does she imagine she can get away with it? It's not as though she's a cab driver, with a captive audience of tired people who just want to get home and can't face an angry incident and a long walk. She is an MP. She is a member of a party with a very bad track record on race, which is making tentative steps towards appearing anti-racist. How was her leader supposed to react?

Michael Howard has, for the first time, been making an issue of the fact that his parents were immigrants. His foray into anti-racism has not been epoch-making. His leadership is more remarkable for demonstrating that the Tories have finally accepted the Jews. A century ago, the Tory MP W Hayes-Fisher compared them to sewage. Today, the Roma of eastern Europe have taken their place as the most reviled migrant community in Britain.

Migration is what lies at the bottom of this matter. The victims were in Morecambe because they had no work permits. If they had been businessmen, they wouldn't have been picking cockles there. And that does make the joke worse. It would be a distressing joke if those drowned had been Chinese millionaires aboard a luxury yacht, but I venture that it wouldn't be quite as distressing, if one can measure these things. This is not to undervalue any human life, but you figure a millionaire has at least had some fun in life. And when do 20 millionaires ever drown off the north-west coast? These people were pushed into a desperate, lethal situation by British immigration law. Their ethnicity was not incidental to this tragedy. They didn't happen to be from China. They died because they were from China.

The most virulent and unchecked racism in Britain today is against asylum seekers. And the dead in Morecambe might just as easily have been Gypsies, or Somalis, or Kurds. They were terribly vulnerable, like all illegal workers. And I use "illegal" not, in the way it is commonly used, to denote fault in the person, but to condemn the government that makes them illegal.

And the vulnerability of illegal migrants is part of what makes this joke all the more awful. I would go so far as to say that 20 local cockle-pickers dying would not have been as terrible in all its implications, terrible though it would be. And there would have been jokes about it, if anyone could think of them. The jokes would have been sick, and I doubt I would have laughed at them, but in talking about race, one must address the fact that some people in this country found this tragedy funny even before any jokes had been cracked. What makes this joke so disturbing is not that it is unacceptable to most of us, but that it is acceptable to some. And I would suggest that Winterton would not have deemed the dead a suitable subject for humour had they been white.

So not only did they die because of an immigration policy that welcomes wealthy white South Africans but bars poor Chinese, but now they are laughed at because they were not white and not legal. Perhaps even because the Chinese are still found risible in this country. It might even be that there are some people who would not have laughed if the dead had been Indian.

Bizarrely, although the Chinese are one of our oldest communities, I think the British still have difficulty noticing that they exist beyond the takeaway counter. Most people would probably say that there should not be attacks on black and Asian people, but probably imagine that attacks on Chinese people don't happen. And the left has never known where to put the Chinese because, although they are Asian, that's not what we mean when we say Asian. And perhaps because the Chinese are associated with small businesses in our minds, we don't cast them as oppressed in quite the same way as we do other ethnic groups.

Having said that, I think the left - and most good-hearted people - are united on this one. And I think that, if the dead had been from Manchester and their families had appeared on television grieving in English, in surroundings that are familiar to us, even some of those people who are sniggering at this joke would feel differently, because that would make them real. A sick joke can amuse us if it is close to home, as when we laugh at terrible things in our own lives. And it can amuse us if it's about something that time, distance or media coverage has made remote. The legend overtakes the reality very quickly and a thing becomes an idea rather than a reality.

And to come full circle, if people don't feel these deaths to be so real as to be beyond humour, it must be because the dead were not only Chinese but nameless, placeless, homeless and barely existing. And for all the righteous huffing and puffing from Labour and Tory politicians disowning Winterton, their policies are responsible. And that's more offensive than any joke.

当然不！！！

当你国家强的时候，他只是有少数人开几个玩笑！

当你国家弱的时候，他就会用武力给你开个国际玩笑！

伊拉克就是例子！

从而这个国家的人就越来越没有地位！！！

Form the point view of a Chinese like me, the most bizarre thing is that the Morecambe tragedy victims, actually, were incidentally drwon there. Since the moment the mainstream media in the UK would rather identify or brand them as 'illegal vulnerable Chinese migrant workers' grouply, but instead of individually, which I think should be more justifiable in the sense of humanitarianism, as human being bearing dignity, love, hate, fear, belief, life and death as any European ethnic person, I found I would not have been able to stop thinking that I could also be an one drown in Morecambe Bay tide, because I am a Chinese from mainland China.

The Anglo media is covering the issue as an outsider, thus to some extent deliberately dodgy the fact as of whatever identification the victims are, whichever coutry are they from, they are human beings, and they died in a freezing night on a dangerous beach in the land of the United Kingdom. Were they twenty countryside workers losing life in a urban construction site either in Shanghai or Beijing no UK media has to cover it (neither will any Chinese media, I think, sorrowly, but not relevant here). However, in the event that the tragedy had happened in this country, would the media at least have thought about something moreover than 'they were illegal migrants, and they were vulnerable and miserable poor Chinese, oh dear...'. The people who had lost their lives in Morecambe were brave and couraging, because they would challenge hindering miserability by risking lives. They deserve our respect in terms of their struggling for better life and dignity.

Unfortunately, the Anglo media, by far, do not pay much attention to this aspect. This can be forgivable. The worst thing is that even no Chinese media would not touch this point, or thanks to God if Chinese propaganda had not scolded them as aliented underclass something perishable. This is a most misrable moment whenas I am reminded I am a Chinese from mianland China.