A Third Serving of Caste

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…via SAJAforum. This ran in the WSJ today, as we were still discussing caste on this blog. What excellent timing for a barely-mediocre cartoon.

A very stupid toon.jpg

What do you think? Over at SAJA, commenter Sendhil had the following to say, which left me giggling:

If this is from the WSJ’s “Pepper… and Salt” spot, it’s not unusual that it’s not funny. Those cartoons are funny less often than “Fred Bassett”. I have concluded that they must serve some other, hidden, purpose, like sending coded messages about tomorrow’s Dow performance to the members of the Trilateral Commission.

Fred Bassett? Ouch.

93 thoughts on “A Third Serving of Caste”

  1. Now you’re just competing with yourself when you’re a scant 5 from 400 on the other one! Patience!

  2. What “caste” would a dopey white xenophobic WSJ reader be anyway?

  7. WSJ editorial page is not xenophobic at all so the regular readers cant be that xenophobic either.

    Loopy and wrongheaded? Yes. Xenophobic? probably not.

    By the way I am regular WSJ reader (by far the best reporting in the U.S.)

  8. siiiiiiigh, y’all are too stuck on “accuracy” and such. Ok, what “caste” would dopey xenophobic fans of this cartoon be? Better?

  9. “what caste would a dopey white xenophobic WSJ reader be?”

    I dunno. What caste would a dopey socialist-lite (viva la middle-class revolucion! And, what about tech jobs being outsourced!) Boston Globe reader be?

    I dunno. What caste would a dopey limousine-liberal New York Times reader be?

    *Come on, guys. You can do better media criticism than that. It’s a silly cartoon, but it’s not evil.

  10. This has nothing to do with the Wall Street Journal. It’s just not funny. That’s what’s really wrong with it.

  11. BTW, I was talking to Neale with that last comment, not ANNA. For ANNA, I have this: do you know there is a movie based on Joy Division coming out? Looks pretty stellar…..great reviews at Cannes, etc.

  12. “I told this tech support person; ‘I’m Harry John’ and she just hung up?”

  13. The funniest comics are Pearls Before Swine, F Minus, Get Fuzzy, Close To Home, and lately I’ve become a fan of Diesel Sweeties too.

    Sorry, I’m all ‘caste system’d out.

  14. I meant the “e”, too.

    I’m with Pondatti: I don’t think it’s funny, but I do think it’s sort of New Yorker cartoon circa 1985. Seriously. Take a look back – that’s exactly the kind of cartoon you’d find.

  17. do you know there is a movie based on Joy Division coming out? Looks pretty stellar…..great reviews at Cannes, etc.

    Links please. You can’t drop news like that and not leave links.

  18. Pathetic. Only second gen kids of stupid brahmins would have this funny or not discussion when only I feel the pain of billions of Dalits in India. Say I am right. Bow to the power of irrelevant data. NOW. OR I WILL POST THE SAME COMMENT OVER AND OVER. AND OVER.

  23. Norah Jones, daughter of Ravi Shankar, who belongs to the sitar caste, gets good reviews at Cannes. She’s so lovely. I bet women are so jealous of her. Talented musician, beautiful, successful, and now acclaimed actress in movie made by art house genius.

  24. “So I told this tech support person; ‘Your job should be reserved for Americans’ and she said; “Oh, I didn’t know Americans have been classified OBC.”

  25. i found that some people from the north of england sort of looked down on people from London

    That’s just because the folks in Yorkshire have way cooler accents than the folks in London.

  26. “That’s just because the folks in Yorkshire have way cooler accents than the folks in London”.

    Do they Ekk!!

  27. Red Snapper, She suffered for her art. There were ridiculous number of retakes of her kissing scene w/ Jude Law, sez the hon’ble NYT. I am curious about the looks of the movie. The great Christopher Doyle was not on board here. But then again Darius Khondji + KWW could be a dynamite team as well.

  28. That’s just because the folks in Yorkshire have way cooler accents than the folks in London.

    Well, Jude Law has a Manchester accent in his movie with Norah Jones so you could be right.

  30. Where it concerns caste cartoons, the old one of a ballot box in India saying “vote your caste” (instead of “cast your vote”) is much funnier than this one. This particular cartoon reflects a typical stance among even the most “progressive” non-xenophobic westerners (or perhaps especially among them): once it concerns caste, Brahmins, devadasi, etc., they suddenly go on the old colonial “Indian culture is backward and immoral” trip. One cannot change three-hundred years of reproduction of the same story about India in a few decades, it seems.

  31. By the way I am regular WSJ reader (by far the best reporting in the U.S.)

    Damn straight- I am neither white nor dopey or xenophobic. And I agree- it is by far one of the best papers in the United States.

  32. Man, SM really needs a “delete my bad joke” button :-/ Apologies to all WSJ readers ok?

  34. “delete my bad joke” button

    Nooooo, If I had to put up with it, so do you. Well unless we can go back in time and delete.

  37. The advertising industry discounts WSJ non-subscription readership figures by at least 30%, which it then credits to National Enquirer’s numbers.

  39. Fred Bassett? Ouch.

    Holy crap. I was curious after reading the wikipedia entry, and my god! It takes skill to be so relentlessly not funny!

  43. Sorry to change the subject but has anyone heard anything about that new movie “Blind Dating”? It about this white dude who is blind who after being set up on bad dates by his brother falls in love with an Indian girl who’s parents are coercing her into an arranged marriage with Sendhil Ramamurthy of all people. Of course in typical hollywood fashion she falls for the white dude and ditches Ramamurthy. I am surprised with all the Ramamurthy love on this site no one has said anything about this movie. But just to be safe I apologize if it has been mentioned in a comment somewhere else.

  45. Suman, intruiged by your mention of this movie, I visited IMDB to investigate, and was rewarded by a quite delicious piece of critical invective:

    +++++

    it’s amazing to me that a society which has mastered the concept of fire is capable of making a film this bad. Too insipidly, cloyingly cutesy to be edgy, too crass, juvenile and vulgar to be cute, and not funny enough to be either.

    Additionally, there is not one single iota of genuine wit, emotion, or originality in even one frame of this odious film. It’s as someone took “At First Sight”, “Daredevil”, “My Big fat Greek Wedding” and “Bend Like Beckham” (among others) and threw them in a blender. Worse than that the film is insulting to every group it portrays: blind people, Italian-American, African-Americans, Indian-Americans, limousine drivers, therapists. Even the portrayal of prostitutes is somehow beneath the dignity of the profession. [link]

    +++++

    Is it a sign of wickedness or cruelty to be tickled and inspired by such fearsome words? How I wish I had written this line, funny, original and devastating:

    it’s amazing to me that a society which has mastered the concept of fire is capable of making a film this bad.

    I am this reviewer’s humble servant. Make more bad movies, so that we can have more reviews like this.

  46. Additionally, there is not one single iota of genuine wit, emotion, or originality in even one frame of this odious film.

    This makes me giggle so much! I’m going to plaigarise the fire line too. Crappy diaspora movies inspire such a wonderful reaction! I fear they bring out the evil side of me.

  47. it’s amazing to me that a society which has mastered the concept of fire is capable of making a film this bad.
    I am this reviewer’s humble servant. Make more bad movies, so that we can have more reviews like this.

    Seriously!!! I can’t imagine how any movie could be more entertaining than the above. 🙂

  48. Red Snapper,

    No, Norah’s one of those women who women adore. Now if she had an attitude, instead of a doe-like insouciance and humility, things would very different…

  49. The joke in the cartoon is not on the Indian call center operator supposedly asking whether the caller was of the right caste – the joke is in the irony that a cartoon from the very culture that exported the jobs to India also projects its prejudices onto Indians.

    I say we play ‘Get the punchline right on this one’.

    ‘Martha, he sounds black, I’m going to tell him we sold the car.’