Flight of the Concords and Comedy on Racism

After Thursday’s lecture I got thinking about white comedians that tell jokes about themselves and thought of the Flight of the Concords and their episode “Drive By”. Most of the episodes by Flight of the Concords deal with negative but hilarious stereotypes of New Zealanders and Americans and their misunderstandings when brought together.

Flight of the Concords can be seen as both regressive and progressive at the same time. The season is full of negative stereotypes in which laughter can confirm their validity. One example is the three main NZ characters who are socially slow and backward. However, I think these negative stereotypes are progressive in that they show the white New Zealanders, the dominant majority group in NZ, as abnormal and weird. Therefore their comedy possibly eases tensions between different ‘races’ and make the engrained stereotypes of minority groups appear immoral and insensitive. What is also interesting is that these prejudices are nationality based as opposed to specifically race-based.

In this episode, Bret and Jemaine the (white) New Zealanders are portrayed as the disadvantaged minority, who cannot buy food or enter night clubs. In many ways I see this aspect as disruptive to the norm since it seems unlikely that an Indian American man would deny white men (although kiwi) the right to buy something from his stall. This inversion highlights the seemingly commonsense white privilege and how it is not expected to be challenged. It also portrays the negative effects that racism has on a person emotionally – Bret sits watching television from his safe box sent from home. At the end of this episode, the fruit vendor realises that he had mixed the New Zealanders for Australians and he is suddenly friendly offering them free fruit. Bret and Jemaine seem glad the vendor ‘overcame’ his prejudice for them – but the fact still remains that the vendor is racist just not to them. This humour points out the entrenched nature of people’s racism.

What I also found interesting to discover was that Taika Waititi, the Maori film director, directed this episode. This relates to what we talked in class, that the person who is telling the joke has an influence on the humour itself and its reception. Taika Waititi is said to think that “New Zealand is still a racist environment” even though there are many New Zealanders who think that racism does not exist (Lumiere). Waititi’s ideas about racism against minority groups can be seen clearly represented in this episode and I wonder how different would this episode be if it was directed by the white creators, Bret and Jemaine?

http://www.lumiere.net.nz/reader/item/1899

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zs_rXxi0zhM