"Pinoy Humor"

The remarkable feat involved in the triumph of Senator-elect Nancy Binay is not that she got elected; her last name all but guaranteed her a seat in the Senate. The real feat was that of the multitude of idiots online who were able to drown out the voices of people trying to call the public's attention to Binay's utter lack of any experience that would make her suitable for the position for which she was running...all by harping on her skin color.

Apparently, it all started when some celebrity cracked jokes about Binay's skin color, and several people, probably too stupid to follow any intelligent conversation about her lack of qualifications for public service, dwelled on that instead, and as a result the whole conversation mutated into a diatribe on how Nancy Binay shouldn't be elected because she's dark-skinned and therefore ugly. Full stop. Internet memes on how the "black Nazarene" would assume public office became all the rage and in a twinkling Binay went from a woman with no notable achievement in public service to speak of who was coasting solely on her father's last name to an underdog being lambasted for the color of her skin. Filipinos love underdogs, and in her television interviews she played up that angle for everything it was worth.

In the end, in a perverse twist, Nancy Binay's apologists ended up hailing her as a champion for the masses, despite the fact that she had done absolutely nothing for them. The one chance people had of derailing her senatorial bid by asking legitimate questions was basically killed by morons who thought that crude jokes about her appearance was the way to bring her down.

We in the Philippines don't have a monopoly on jokes that appeal to the lowest common denominator, to be sure; it's all over the world. The problem with our brand of lowbrow humor is that a great many of our celebrity comedians don't seem to have any boundaries as to what the subject of that humor can be.

Recently, the same celebrity who started the ball rolling on Nancy Binay's skin color got in hot water for a highly inappropriate joke about rape, which is but one of many that have been cracked by various local comedians on different television stations. In short, while this celebrity reaped the whirlwind, many others have been sowing the wind for quite some time now, and I have to wonder when it's going to stop. A few months back I yelled at my son for laughing at the mention of the word rape, only to find out some kid in his school had gone around telling people that the word meant something funny.  Where that kid learned such a horrifying concept is anyone's guess, really, because as far as our local entertainment goes there are tons of places where he could have picked it up.

The ability to laugh is one of God's greatest gifts to us. It makes us feel good in just about every imaginable way, and it apparently has wonderful health benefits as well. Laughter comes naturally, but the choice of what to laugh at is a product of cultural conditioning. Save for perhaps the most rudimentary humor like slapstick, no one really knows what it is what he or she is supposed to find funny until his cultural environment conditions their minds.

Maybe it is possible to tell intelligent, genuinely funny jokes about something as heinous as rape. After all, grisly topics like murder, war, racism and pedophilia have been mined for some reasonably intelligent humor, although the spirit of the humor still retained some aspect of social commentary, rather than coming across as mean-spirited putdowns. In any case, however, humor like this is not the kind on which our children, incapable of understanding satire or nuance, should be raised, and yet it pollutes our televisions on a regular basis. The erring celebrity mentioned gave his act at a live comedy concert, so in a way he is excused from the charge of polluting kids' minds, but the same can't be said for generations of so-called "comedians" who have been around for decades, and some of whom, with due respect, are already even in their graves. A few months ago, another so-called comedian drew public ire for having a little boy gyrate on stage like a male stripper, to much bawdy laughter from the audience.

This particular incident was thrust into the spotlight because of the sheer speed at which communications moves nowadays, and maybe this should cause the purveyors of crude humor here in the Philippines, regardless of their "home network" to take pause and reconsider the kind of jokes they've been telling, and if they really want the children of this nation to absorb their so-called "humor" without context or discernment. Not only that, but the worst part of this brand of jokes is how, even with context it tends to demean every conversation into which it is introduced. A stark example of this, again, is the Nancy Binay phenomenon, where the genuine desire for discourse on qualification for public office was basically squelched by internet memes about skin color.

The thing about us Filipinos is that we are actually very clever people. We can do satire and classy humor along with the very best of them. We can be self-deprecating and come up with humor that is uniquely our own, without having to be crude or crass.  This unique brand of Filipino humor may offend some people, but it doesn't have to be so universally offensive that it demeans not only the people we mock but us as well. We're better than Tito, Vic and Joey and their scores of imitators.

We can be genuinely funny.