Filipinos are mocked in Britain because they are an ‘invisible’ ethnic minority

I’ve seen Pinoys in Britain over-react, because of simple misunderstanding of British comedy. Being able to take a joke is important, to fitting in and adapting to a country like Britain (or any Anglo country). It’s something older Filipinos seem to miss, but that does not mean they are not pilloried by comedians. I much prefer a Filipino comic to insult Filipino culture, because there is a context. It’s so hard to miss when you are describing another culture.

In 2013, when asked “unlikely lines from a cosmetics commercial”, comic Katherine Ryan replied “We don’t test any of our products on animals. We use Filipino Children”.

It was obviously not intended as an insult towards Filipino children, but I had trouble with her bitter retaliation over the misunderstood, but badly judged joke, in her 2017 special.

She used a stereotypical Chinese accent to pillory Filipinos, and said that the ghost of Joan Rivers told her that Filipinos are “as bad at understanding satire as they are at running away from tsunamis”. Why did she have to hide behind the spectre of Joan Rivers to further insult people who did nothing to her to begin with?

It’s easy to mock a minority who have no voice in Britain, and can’t respond through the platform of a comedy special. You will NEVER ever hear a British comedian mock Jamaicans or Indians in this manner, even though both those countries have child slave labour, because comedians like Ryan are cowards. They will claim that they don’t single anyone out, and say things about all races, but this is BS. It’s a very rare, and brave comedian, who will mock all races equally.

Maybe it’s hard to understand why it is not hilarious to attack children living in poverty, making clothes for people like Katherine Ryan, who gladly defends her cruelty towards animals because its “not illegal, just frowned upon”.

A bit like racism.

She may claim, that she was attacking cosmetic companies. Fair enough, but she invalidates that argument when she doubles down on a bigoted remark. She is a comedian, in multicultural London, and she has no idea what Filipino’s sound like? They don’t have Chinese accents. It’s just sloppy to assign a Chinese accent to Filipinos, (this in itself, is a racist caricature).

I get that the irony was sadly missed by Filipinos. But she chose to just lash out at a group that in her calculation, and in the calculation of many white British people, is OK to be bigoted towards. Just don’t make fun of Jamaicans, Africans, Indians, Pakistani’s, and other former subjects of the British empire. It’s open season on every other ethnic group.

She could have said that Filipinos can no more outrun a tsunami than the Irish can flee from a bottle of whiskey?

You’re an immigrant Katherine Ryan, but you have adopted a nasty British vice – insulting immigrants, while simultaneously forgetting that you yourself are one.

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