Movies

The New Yorker's recent cover caricature of Barack and Michelle Obama as flag-burning, gun-slinging, fist-bumping revolutionaries aroused a firestorm of criticism and commentary.

In Hollywood, however, cultural stereotyping in the service of laughs is simply business as usual. Movies that trade in ethnic humor increasingly aim to give us laughs we don't need to feel guilty about.

Several of this year's comedies — Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay, You Don't Mess With the Zohan and the upcoming Tropic Thunder, to name a few — play around with once-taboo ethnic stereotypes. Most use humor subversively to ridicule cultural presumptions, not reinforce them, and compel us to re-examine our own pieties and hypocrisies.

The Korean- and Indian-American heroes of Harold & Kumar turn racial profiling on its head, upsetting popular assumptions at every turn. The film's buffoon/villain is a dense anti-terrorism agent who is a walking catalog of prejudices, but it also mocks quasi-racist arguments between blacks and Indians trying to out-minority each other over who has the brownest skin.

But the trick is in the execution, and ethnic watchdog groups don't always appreciate the joke.

Love Guru, starring Mike Myers as a nondenominational guru with a South Asian accent and a bushy Sikh beard, actually directed most of its irreverent humor at celebrities who embrace Eastern religions as a fashion statement. Although it was pilloried by critics and shunned by audiences, the strongest reaction came from Hindu groups rankled by the idea of the Canadian Myers lampooning Indian customs.

"Hollywood is trying to make money by laughing at our holy men," said the president of the Indian Heritage Panel. A U.S. organization called the Universal Society of Hinduism recruited multidenominational protesters, urged boycotts of the film and claimed credit for its poor reception.

However, critics who saw a double standard at work — arguing that Hollywood wouldn't take such blasphemous liberties with a rabbi or a priest — had it wrong.

Christian clergy have been the butt of comedy for decades. Rowan Atkinson (Mr. Bean) has made a sideline career of portraying bumbling Anglican vicars. Monty Python's Life of Brian was about as irreverent as you can get. And there are many more films that take satirical aim at Catholicism, from The Blues Brothers to Kevin Smith's cheerfully heretical Dogma.

What is now commonplace was once groundbreaking. In 1974's Blazing Saddles, Mel Brooks made history — and a lot of laughs — with a racial slur that would get you fired on the spot if you uttered it in an office. ("He said, the sheriff is near!") But since the film's hero lawman was played by the cool, unflappable Cleavon Little, the joke was on the rednecks who used the term. The film made piles of money, no one griped and a new era in ethnic comedy dawned.

Nearly all comedies traffic in stereotypes — it's a quick-and-dirty way of connecting with audiences, giving them something they recognize, exaggerated for humorous effect.

In fact, humor often depends upon that context of familiarity. Being an insider doesn't simply make ethnic jokes more meaningful, it makes them more palatable. Self-ridicule stings less than external criticism. It's an unwritten rule governing racial humor in moviemaking: when a character (or filmmaker) pokes fun at his own kind, it's permissible to laugh along with him. What isn't OK is someone in the majority mocking another ethnicity. Call it the Andrew Dice Clay Rule. Eddie Murphy gets away with mocking black foibles, but a white actor like Clay couldn't.

Thanks to the self-deprecating charm of stars Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, the shameless Asian and African-American caricatures of the "Rush Hour" series powered the franchise to $600 million in North America alone — a sum that boggles the mind, especially if you saw the crudely stereotypical films.

On the other hand, it's usually OK to laugh at white people, whose position in society is generally so secure that a little mockery won't leave permanent scars. Eddie Griffin's "Undercover Brother," Steve Martin's "Bringing Down the House" and the Wayans brothers' "White Chicks" all did respectable business showing awkward white people doing awkward white things.

Films that don't give viewers such permission to laugh haven't fared well recently. "War, Inc.," a political farce starring John Cusack and set in the war-torn Middle Eastern nation of "Turaquistan," made belligerent Arab villains the butt of jokes, and cast Hilary Duff as an erotic Arab belly-dancer/pop star. Amid the film's generic satire of cynical U.S. defense contractors and imperialist Americans, it was hard to decide which culture was more unfavorably portrayed. It failed to ignite much controversy, and quickly vanished.

While there was a flurry of indignation at the news that Robert Downey Jr. plays a comedic blackface character in the upcoming "Tropic Thunder," the controversy flamed out almost immediately when it became clear that the role is a parody of hard-core method actors, not black identity.