Mother Jones
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“Well, you’re lucky your dads are American; my dad beat me with a math book ’til I was 16,” says Veronica, an Asian American character (played by Brenda Song) on the upcoming Fox sitcom Dads. The new series (executive produced by Seth MacFarlane of Family Guy, American Dad!, and Ted fame) premieres on September 17, but it has already generated controversy for its comic portrayal of Asian Americans and the Chinese. The show focuses on two founders of a video game company, and how they deal with their intrusive fathers. Comedy supposedly ensues, some of it at the expense of Asian folk.
In the pilot episode, the main characters (played by Seth Green and Giovanni Ribisi) insist that Veronica dress up like a “sexy Asian schoolgirl”—one who giggles like a Japanese teenage stereotype—in order to impress a group of Chinese investors. Chinese people are mocked and declared untrustworthy. The “Asian men have tiny dicks” stereotype is gleefully deployed. The term “Oriental” is used because…funny. And it doesn’t help that Dads co-creator Alec Sulkin once tweeted, “If you wanna feel better about this earthquake in Japan, google ‘Pearl Harbor death toll.'” Sulkin sent this tweet on March 11, 2011, the day a tsunami struck Japan and killed thousands. None of the victims, Japanese or otherwise, was ever implicated in the plot to bomb Americans in the 1940s. (Sulkin soon deleted the comment and apologized via tweet.)
Full disclosure: I am indeed of Asian descent—my parents were born in Bangkok, and I was born in Washington, DC. I rarely have a problem laughing at jokes that invoke Asian/Asian American stereotypes, so long as they are funny and/or have something wise to say. If you’d like my personal opinion of Dads, I’d say that the real problem does not lie with any ethnic or racial stereotypes, but with the fact that it is unoriginal and often a painfully unfunny, lazy waste of production space.
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