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Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Those damned Languages

What's Mallard raving about today?

Spanish.

Mallard does his best to dress up "I hate the fact that we're tolerant of immigrants" in "why aren't we supporting all immigrants equally?" garb.

Not buying it.

12 comments:

GeoX, one of the GeoX boys. said...

Yeah! If we're going to privilege Spanish just because it's the country's de facto second language, why don't we privilege every other language in the world in the same way? Huh? Huh? Huh? Boy, you sure showed those hypocritical non-xenophobes, Tinsley.

CW in LA said...

I thought this was a "The Mexkins r takin' over BLLLLLLLAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHH" strip.

But of course it's also a "The Tinsh hates the free market" strip, if it's cost-effective for businesses to set up phone messages in English and Spanish but not other languages.

dlauthor said...

I'm pretty sure that the "press 2 for Spanish" thing is typically spoken in Spanish, not English. Tinshley was probably afraid he'd burst into flame if he wrote something in Dirty Brown Person Talk, though.

A nice, hot, blue-burning flame.

Bill the Splut said...

If he went to Mexico, he'd be the guy who LOUDLY...AND SLOWLY...speaks English to the locals, then bitches about how stupid the foreigners who live there are, since they don't speakee the Englishes.

Though he would say that every glass of Corona he drank had a real nice head on it, not realizing it was largely waiter spit.

WV: orshropp, the sound Tinny makes over the toilet when he realizes that it was.

Beef Wellington said...

Perhaps I'm stating the obvious, But mallard it clearly says press one for english,So why would you have to learn spanish?

Erich said...

When Paul Rodriguez said "You're in America now, speak Spanish," it was funny.

Michael Foley said...

So Mallard, you'd have no complaint if every company's phone tree had 30 language options?

rewinn said...

I think it would be way cool if phone trees had a "press 3 for other languages", and that option let you spell out the language on your keypad.

Otherwise ... what's the "joke" in today's "comic"? Humor comes from little surprises, so I guess the surprise is that there was a third option and it turned out to be useless because (Mallard thinks) Spanish and English are unfairly favored. But Mallard spoils the joke by listing multiple languages in the same line - as you read, you know that you can't possible do Japanese, German, Hindi, Urdu etc all at once, so the punchline is flabby.

A way of presenting this not-so-subtley-racist "joke" would be

For English press 1
For Spanish press 2
For Japanese learn Spanish
For Hindi learn Spanish
For German learn Spanish ....

...ok, it's still racist asshattery but at least it has comedy, sort of like the gorilla-suit number in "Cabaret".

On the evidence, conservative "comics" can't be funny because humor requires a deep understanding of human nature, and contemporary conservativism requires sociopathy.

Tog said...

I'm not sure when Mexico took over the United States, but I'm certain Obama had something to do with it!

...Kenya's in Mexico, right?

DiR said...

Clearly, Tinsly does not live in a city worthy enough of having its own Chinatown, et al.

Deepbeep gets a cookie.

Rootbeer said...

About 80% of Americans speak only English, or are multilingual and prefer English.

About 10% of Americans speak Spanish.

Japanese? 0.2%.
German? 0.5%.
Mandarin? under 0.8%.
Urdu? 0.1%.
Hindi? 0.1%.

The reason why companies do not offer support in all languages is the same reason they do offer support in Spanish: because that's the most efficient way to serve the greatest number of customers.

Why does Mallard Tinsley hate free market capitalism?

Kip W said...

Guilty confession: this one, despite the probably justified calling out of the racist overtones, actually seems to cross the border into humor, at least for me. (Well, I said it was a guilty confession! I also evicted a bunch of widows and orphans from their hovels, but I don't feel nearly so bad about that.)

Where's the clicky box for "enjoyed as humor"? Oh, there isn't one. Gosh, in all the time I've been reading this site, I never noticed that before.