Blog Post 3: “If we are Asian, then are we funny?”

Posted on August 27, 2018 by by | 4 Comments
  1. In “If we are Asian, then are we funny”: Margaret Cho’s “All-American Girl” as the First (and Last?) Asian American Sitcom”, Sarah Moon Cassenelli discusses Margaret’s career playing the lead role in the short lived sitcom “All-American Girl”. She uses Margret’s memoir and comedy routine, “ I’m the One that I Want”, to describe the reasons for why the show was unsuccessful. Cassenelli argues that because the show was too focused on “ethnic authenticity” of the characters, the show was unable to succeed as a sitcom.
  2. “It is disturbing that others would ask Cho to try and alter her face, believing that the features she puts out in the world are not only undesirable but somehow fixable.” (pg.134). Before shooting the pilot of “All-American Asian”, Cho was asked to lose weight because her face was too full. It is not of unheard of for Hollywood to cast “thin leading ladies” so it is not surprising that Cho was asked to lose weight. What makes asking Cho to lose weight significant is the fact that it was to make her face slimmer so that her facial features would better match that of her character on the show. The producers of the show believed that because she was Asian her face could easily be altered to resemble the face of another Asian. This is an example of how producers of the sitcom put too much emphasis on the “ethnic authenticity” of the characters.
  3. A concept that Cassenelli introduced in her article is that the jokes in the show were not “so much stereotypical as stale”. Using the example of Mrs. Kim being compared to Yoko Ono, Casenelli calls the joke “stale” because it ignores the significance behind Yoko Ono’s fame. Yoko Ono is an Asian female in the entertainment industry who is widely known for her work in performance art and filmmaking. Rather than focusing on the fact that she is well known for her work rather than her ethnicity, the show uses her simply because she is a well known, Asian public figure. Other than the fact that both women were asian and wearing sunglasses, Mrs. Kim and Yoko Ono bare no resemblance to each other.
  4. Cho’s struggle with her physical appearance after being asked to lose weight reminded me of “Letter to my Sister” by Lisa Park from our first class. Both Park’s sister and Cho struggled to make themselves look like what society expected them to look like. Both their struggles with their physical appearance raises a question of racial representation in media and more specifically in Cho’s case on television.  
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