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Korean Parents for SaleRandy Newman's on-target race humor.

By Jeff ChangPosted Tuesday, Sept. 2, 2008, at 6:47 AM ET

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Asian Americans can appreciate the hucksterism here—strict, sure, but fair?—as well as what writers Frank Chin and Jeffery Paul Chan once called "racist love," that weird white desire to cross Charlie Chan with Suzy Wong to produce the highly attractive, perfectly submissive, middle-management problem-solver. Two decades ago, after protests by problem-solving but altogether unsubmissive parents and students, universities like Stanford, Brown, and UC Berkeley admitted stacking their admissions deck against Asian-American applicants through racially biased point-scales and legacy programs. After they changed their policies, just as Ivy League schools did in the wake of Jewish-American protests in the 1960s, Asian-American enrollments at places like the University of California soared. And thus, Newman's carny would seem to say, is a premium value product made.

If there's any problem with "Korean Parents"—that is, aside from the gratuitous dog-eating reference—it would be, as Newman helpfully noted for potential protesters in a pre-emptive interview with the Los Angeles Times, the song's "stereotypically Asian" music. No, not Korean pungmul-nori drumming. Instead, "Korean Parents" goes to that old yellow-face standby, "The Siamese Cat Song" from Disney's Lady and the Tramp, and even takes a brief Puccini-like detour at the bridge. It adds up to a late-American Orientalist statement that is the musical equivalent of "They all look alike to me."

But the song clearly isn't about Korean parents; it's about the white ones, whose "real American kids don't have a clue." The fear binding the rednecks who were sickened to see Lester Maddox getting sonned by the Jewish TV host and the Ari Golds kicking the tires of the Korean parent in the lot is what Barbara Ehrenreich called fear of falling, that uniquely American hysteria that once found expression in anti-busing protests (from Boston's South End to San Francisco's Chinatown) and that, for the last decade, has set off middle-class panic attacks whenever the words "highly selective" and "college or university" appear next to each other.

On an album that often feels like a merry requiem for American Empire, Newman's aim is true. "Your parents aren't 'The Greatest Generation.' So sick of hearing about 'The Greatest Generation,'" his carny says—surely aware of the Korean War's role in commencing 50-plus years of Korean-American parents—as he moves to close the deal. "That generation could be you. So let's see what you can do. Korean parents—and you!"

In a time when there was more hope about achieving racial justice, African-American author Chester Himes wrote, "Racism introduces absurdity into the human condition. Not only does racism express the absurdity of the racists, but it generates absurdity in the victims. And the absurdity in the victims intensifies the absurdity of the racists, ad infinitum." So why shouldn't we be able to find race funny? But that absurdity may also be part of what Dave Chappelle saw when he looked in the mirror and decided for a while to stop making people laugh.

Silverman's and Blitt's meta-satire relies on the dubious claim that their work is not racist because it attempts to mock racism. But the proof is in the funny—who's laughing? Many commentators, such as James Zogby of the Arab-American Institute, saw in Blitt's cover illustration "the deep disconnect that exists between the 'liberal snobs' of NYC and the rest of us." Done the wrong way, meta-satire is still just, as Himes put it, absurdity to battle absurdity to battle absurdity.

Newman is not merely about outshocking the invisible armies of political correctness or strapping on self-insulating armors of irony. The best kind of race humor—at this strange American moment, and as it has always been—can be found by wedging open the wound long enough to stare at, and then sharing the joke in that. Of course, the trick is that you need to be the one who's bleeding.