Análisis de los recursos empleados en los programas liderados por las diferentes

The standup humor of Henry Cho, a Korean-American comedian whom I referred to briefly in Chapter 3, serves as a fitting summative exemplar for the various arguments I have been attempting to put forward in the preceding chapters. Cho grew up in

Knoxville, TN, and regularly claims that his family members were the only Asian people he had ever seen until he went on a trip to Korea with his father. Much of Cho’s early standup material focuses on his unique perspective as a Southern Asian-American. However, not all of Cho’s humor explicitly references his Southern background, but even when it does not, Cho embodies and plays upon a number of common Southern humor tropes, which places him squarely onto the spectrum of Southern humorists. For instance, in his standup routine “What’s That Clickin’ Noise?” Cho never explicitly references “the South,” but instead riffs on his unfathomably stupid friend, “J. B.

Stewart,” who is such a backward redneck140 that he is unfamiliar with something as

seemingly commonplace as car turn signals:

This is how dumb he is. One time he was ridin in my car, and I flipped on the turn signal, and he just went, [with an exaggerated accent] “What’s that clickin’ noise? Hey, Henry, your car’s makin’ like a clickin’ noise.” [Returning to previous speaking voice] You’re an idiot. (Cho)

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At the end of this routine, Cho brings up hunting, another quintessentially Southern activity, but he mainly does so in order to further ridicule J. B.’s intelligence and end on a callback to the phrase “What’s that clickin’ noise?”:

He’s dumb, but he’s a great hunter. The way he hunts is dangerous. He’ll go, “Man, if it moves, just shoot it.”

He’ll go like, [makes shotgun clicking then shooting sounds] “Got ‘im, Zeke! [looking around] Zeke?”

And Zeke’s last words were like, “What’s that clickin’ noise?” (Cho) Cho’s casual, nearly off-the-cuff rendering of hunting and his friend’s style of speech are critical to the success of these jokes; though they may be completely fictional, Cho convinces us that he’s merely relating stories about his friend. And in doing so, Cho turns a set of Southern stereotypes into a personal—and thus unique—Southern persona.

Yet, Cho also contradicts a number of Southern stereotypes, creating immediate

incongruities in his performances. For instance, Cho references watching Star Trek in

one joke and not as a means of making fun of people who watch the show, but in order to continue mocking J. B. The most obvious incongruity is the combination of Cho’s ethnically Asian physical appearance with his undeniably Southern dialect. Though he does not use a very “thick” accent as his regular speaking voice onstage, no one would be likely to mistake it as anything other than Southern, either. He augments his Southern pronunciations by also peppering in a number of colloquial Southern phrases, such as “He’s dumbern’ dirt” and “Bless his heart” (Cho). He plays off of this most obvious of incongruities when talking about his first trip to Korea with his father in a routine titled “Going to Korea”:

The next day in Korea, I’m waiting on a bus, just minding my own business, this American girl walked up. All the Korean people she could

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pull out of the crowd, she pulls me out of the crowd and goes, [very loudly and very slowly] “Is this the bus-ee that goes-ee down-ee townee?”

[In his normal voice] I looked at her and said, “I reckon so. … So what’s your name?” (Cho)

The subtlety and power of Cho’s punch-line delivery at the end of this joke depends in large part upon his use of the Southern phrase “reckon so” because of how unexpected it is in that particular situation. At the same time, however, it comes off as completely and authentically the response any other Southerner would give in the same circumstance.

Because of his performance style, Cho is both seriously Southern and un-seriously Southern. That is, he establishes his Southern credentials through a variety of techniques, but his legitimacy also calls many of the same Southern stereotypes into question. For his humor to work in the ways it does—to create the necessary comic tensions and to

relieve them humorously—he must enact both roles “naturally.” He must be Southern,

even as his humor challenges what it means to be Southern. If for whatever reason, it

seemed as if Cho was simply “putting on” his Southern-ness to get laughs,141 the humor

would cease to be truly “Southern” and would become something much more

straightforward and openly mocking. This does not happen, though, because humor is both repetitive and creative; it invokes and manipulates stereotypes to arrive at

unexpected and (hopefully) funny conclusions. But in doing so, stereotypes are, by necessity, perpetuated, and no matter how transformed or critiqued they are by the end of a joke or standup routine, the stereotypes always remain central to comprehending the humor.

141_{He undoubtedly “plays up” his Southern-ness when it suits his comic ends, but that’s a lot different that} completely manufacturing an accent, personality, and background, a la Larry the Cable Guy.

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This double and contradictory movement is the principle argument and contribution of this dissertation to the fields of rhetorical and humor studies. As a

persuasive form of social discourse, Southern humor is a highly ritualized practice that, at its most successful, comes off as spontaneous and authentic, even as it calls the idea of truly “authentic Southern-ness” into question. To use Douglas’s terms, it is

simultaneously rite and anti-rite because it both affirms and, at a minimum, potentially interrogates the South and what it means to be Southern. As Blount describes it, in the discourse of the South, humor (as a cultural ritual) has become a “requisite element” because it meets two needs of the larger Southern identity: 1) as a rite, it helps perpetuate a specific aspect of Southern heritage not easily conveyed by other means; 2) as an anti- rite, it helps Southerners deal with the often complex and ambivalent aspects of the Southern identity. However, the key to this understanding of Southern humor and, in my opinion, the most significant insight of this whole rhetorical study, is that this is not an “either/or” situation. That is, for Southern humor to work, it must seem authentically

Southern and authentically humorous, but because humor requires a certain amount of

disingenuousness, there is an ever-present suspicion that all of it may just be made up. Consequently, Southern humorists work tirelessly to reassure their audiences that, in fact, the absurd incongruities in their humor are based in truth—if not fact—or in Jerry

Clower’s terminology, “If I’m lyin, I’m dyin.” After describing how his friend J. B. came to have the nickname “Jonly Bonly from Boldy Go,” Cho captures the same sentiment this way: “I can’t make that up. I am not that smart” (“What’s That Clickin’ Noise?”). This refrain of honesty goes to the heart of Blount’s “requisite” claim because an adeptness at participating in Southern humor serves not only as an authenticator of

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Southern identity, but as one source for constructing the parameters of what counts as “the Southern identity” as well. And much of the power and subsequent responsibility (though not all of it) for determining how to create and adjudicate this identity falls on the humorist. Understood this way, clearly no one would want such a significant community ritual to be completely baseless. Thus, in one sense, Blount is exactly right when he says that “Southern humor tends to work best when it isn’t trying to be any funnier than life and death” (131). The point the humorists seem to keep making, however, is that they don’t have to try; the culture and the people they focus on continue to provide them with ample material—they’re just trying to do it justice.

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