At the Oscars last month, in a performance for which he’d be praised for skewering Hollywood’s lack of diversity, host Chris Rock took a moment to introduce PricewaterhouseCoopers, the accounting firm that tallies the votes. “They sent us their most dedicated, accurate, and hard-working representatives,” he said. “I want you to please welcome Ming Zhu, Bao Ling, and David Moskowitz.” Three Asian kids in tuxedos walked onto the stage, briefcases in hand. “If anybody is upset about this joke,” Rock added, “just tweet about it on your phone, which was also made by these kids.”

In one brief skit, Rock managed to perpetuate three common, distinct stereotypes about Asians or Asian Americans: the model minority student, who is born a math genius; the foreign child laborer, who assembles tech gadgets for pennies and kills American jobs; and the silent, obedient immigrant, onto whom we can project whatever identity we please.

“I’m a fan of Chris Rock because he’s a guy who tells it like it is, and I was really looking forward to hearing what he was going to say in his monologue. But I was just so disappointed,” said Guy Aoki, founding president of the Media Action Network for Asian Americans. “I called it child abuse. He abused those three cute Asian kids, which just pissed everybody off.”



Rock’s jokes, and the laughter from the Academy Awards crowd, showed that even in this age of supposedly excessive political correctness and internet outrage, many still think it’s socially acceptable to make fun of Asians. Of course, many others don’t: Rock’s jokes caused considerable anger from the Asian-American community. On Tuesday, 25 Academy members, including Sandra Oh, George Takei, and Ang Lee, sent a letter to the Academy condemning the “tasteless and offensive skits” and calling on the organization to “preclude such unconscious or outright bias and racism toward any group in future Oscars telecasts.” The Academy responded by promising to “be more culturally sensitive” in the future.



The PWC skit was easy to condemn because it was so obvious. But much of the racist humor about Asians these days is subtler—sometimes, the joke is simply that the actor is Asian. Which is progress, of a sort: The common joke used to be that the actor was not Asian, but a white person performing an Asian stereotype. Asian humor today is more insidious and thus tougher to combat, though there is at least one obvious solution.