At the risk of offending some readers, I have decided to post the Cyanide & Happiness comic shown below to demonstrate a point. It was submitted over a year ago as a CIDU by Pandemonium, who noted: “The [explosm] site is sometimes (often) in poor taste.” That is undeniably true. Although Bill posted a number of Cyanide & Happiness comics from time to time, only two of them have appeared at CIDU in the last four years, and this one is an excellent example of why they have been so rare:
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Pandemonium noted that “This [one] doesn’t seem to be part of a running gag, series, or topic“, and he is certainly right about that. The gag is a simple pun, conflating a perfectly normal technical term (in metallurgy, note the damage to the breastplate) with an unacceptably racist epithet (both terms having identical spelling and pronunciation).
The only possible saving grace in this comic is that the word is not explicitly named, and soldier in the background appears to object to the use of the term entirely, but the primary purpose of the comic here is just as a borderline example.
Please note: Since CIDU no longer has access to a separate “Arlo” page to “hide” potentially offensive material, please be aware that it may not be possible to post every comic submitted, in particular when the artwork or language may be unacceptable for some readers.
Comics I Don't Understand 
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This is sort of an “my most embarrassing moment” memory, except it was an embarrassment more for my mother. At least not humiliating, as the crowd was friends and not going to gang up on her.
I will write “gap” or “[gap]” in place of the word this post also is not directly using.
My experience of ethnic dining in my youth was more Italian than anything else, but we did fairly often go to what we then thought of as a “Chinese Restaurant” — but it was really what a later, finer-grained vocabulary would call Polynesian, or to the extent of actual Chinese influence it was Cantonese. Not the classic American “chop suey” diner, nor the later very popular Mongolian and other regional specialties. There was a Dick van Dyke episode about “moo goo gai pan”, but we never had any of that.
Then one day there was a flurry of interest when a “Mandarin Chinese restaurant” opened, featuring dishes in styles from many parts of China that had gathered in their capital and elite areas. (That’s sort of still a meaning of “mandarin” as an adopted English word without reference to what in Chinese culture it means.)
But we didn’t go out for like a family dinner at the Mandarin places, until one of the suburban liberal groups my parents belonged to (like ACLU or ADL) held a banquet, and chose to go to one of the new Mandarin places. And the group was together in a special room, with the meal served Chinese banquet style. The planning committee had just chosen a package with the restaurant, and the attendees didn’t do any ordering. (And didn’t pay separate checks, it was all on a membership ticket or something like that.)
The “Chinese banquet style” I mentioned is a matter of serving very many courses, with relatively small servings of each. This was a novelty for most of the attendees, along with many of the specific unfamiliar dishes. Oh look, Naomi, they put the little crepe on the plate and you spoon in some filling and fold it up yourself! Watch out for that soup, there’s a reason it’s called hot-pot!
And on the theme of the banquet style serving, it was my mother who remarked to the group that it was really great the way the timing of courses worked. (It was kinda slow.) It’s kind of like the traditional saying about a Chinese meal filling you up but you’re hungry a half hour later – that’s because of settling. Same thing goes for these many small courses with time between them. It seems the food is filling your stomach, but it’s like an irregular stack of building bricks, or library books needing to be shelved — it seems solid and filled but the irregular stacking leaves lots of concealed empty spaces, gaps, between the objects. Then over a few minutes they can shift in place, and more empty space appears at the top when the shifting fills up all the little [gaps].
Omigod, Mrs J, did you hear what you just said? The Chinese food fills up all the little [gaps]? (This in an amused, not hostile, tone).
Clearly a familiarity with the use of that same word as an ethnic slang term for Chinese people made it an amusing/embarrassing thing for the wits in the group. And probably underlay my mother’s choice of the term, and the whole filling-and-settling imagery; but of course not consciously or with ill intention. But it was repeated back to her for several months — the Chinese food fills up all the little [gaps].
Many of you may remember Wang Laboratories, a Boston-area computer company. It was founded by Dr. An Wang, a brilliant scientist who invented core memory, the main memory used by almost all computers in the 1950’s and 1960’s. One of the company’s products in the early 1970’s was the Wang Word Processor, a single-purpose computer for word processing. Stephen King was an early user of the Wang Word Processor.
Later in the 1970’s, Wang Laboratories introduced a general-purpose computer, the Wang VS, that was compatible (mostly) with the IBM 370, the most popular computer of that time. When I worked at a service bureau near Boston, a client of ours had a Wang VS and I did some application programming for it.
It was a bold move to bring out a computer that directly competed with IBM, but it was small and inexpensive and was reasonably successful and continued to be marketed and sold for more than 20 years.
Now this was not the first direct competition for IBM — Amdahl and Hitachi had previously released fully-compatible mainframes — but still it was a bit of a tweak at IBM.
At the time I was working with it, a co-worker told me about an advertising campaign that Wang Laboratories had considered but rejected. Supposedly it showed a photograph of Dr. Wang standing next to the Wang VS, and the headline said, except with something in place of the ellipses, “Dr. An Wang … IBM’s armor.”
I do remember a real ad for the Wang Word Processor. An elderly and very prim-and-proper lady is shocked at the sight of a Wang Word Processor and says “My word! A Wang!” Yes, this was a real ad and I believe we were intended to think of a schoolyard meaning of that word.
The Goon Show, a 1950s BBC radio comedy program starring Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, and Harry Secombe, remains hilarious to this day…but is also a real minefield of racism. Particularly jokes hinging on Chinese stereotypes, such as the one focused on in this post. “I’ve found the [gap] in his armor.” “Those fiendish Chinese are everywhere!” from The Greenslade Story being one of the shorter ones. Some of the jokes don’t even NEED to be racist, they just have one of the Goons delivering it in a bad Chinese fake accent. Dunno how much of this is pandering to the anti-Communist hysteria of the 50s and how much is just “white working class Brits love them some racism against brown people.” (There’s also a lot of bad Indian fake accents.)
…and then there’s the Monty Python song “I Like Chinese”.
I must say it took me way too long to get the joke of the comic. I got hung up on the wrong word.
Listening to The Goon Show, I thought of the comments as being a satire on the attitudes of the day or of things heard on the radio. There were Alex Jones and Rush Limbaugh types back then, and it wasn’t uncommon to hear “Those fiendish Chinese are everywhere.” So it’s funny if Neddy opens a box of matches, the band plays a few bars of “The Japanese Sandman”, and Neddy says “Those fiendish Chinese are everywhere.”
There is a town in Illinois named Pekin. They had used the [gap] as the name for the high school teams. There was a stereotypical drawing on the wall, think conical hat and hands inside opposing sleeves kind of thing. It was changed in the late 70s to “Dragons”.
One of the company’s products in the early 1970’s was the Wang Word Processor
When I first started as an engineer at Megacorp, I was in Test & Evaluation. We had a number of test procedures, and new ones were being created for the project. The traditional way had been to have them typed, then changes were made with various cut and paste methods.
At some point someone asked me why were doing it that way instead of using Word Processing. I didn’t know what that was, but wandered down to the basement where they were. They seemed happy to see me, I got the feeling they didn’t have enough work. They said they could certainly do our new procedures, They also said could scan in and convert the old ones.
I had to sell this to my boss, who was pretty old-school. However, almost no one else was interested in working on the procedures, where old High School Paper me was. So we got them all on the Wang. The women in WP always called it that.
@Brian in STL: I think the first word processing software was “Expensive Typewriter”, written by a couple of MIT people on the Digital PDP-1 computer.
Around 1972 when I was in college, we had computer terminals which were modified IBM Selectric typewriters remotely connected to the IBM 360. You could type in your term papers with “dot commands” for formatting and have them neatly printed out.
Word processing requires an interactive system; if not the computer console itself, then at least a remote typewriter. With a personal computer, you had your own console. Hobbyists willing to deal with the quirks of early microcomputers could use the word-processing programs that began to appear, but the Wang as an easy-to-learn does-only-one-thing-and-does-it-well machine really filled a market need.
I filled in the unspoken word as “crack” and the mishearing as ending with a p instead. More “eww” but less politically incorrect.
First computer I used was in my senior year of HS – 1971in a computer programming course. There were numerous card punch machines at desks – used special paper with the boxes for each line of a card printed on them. We were working in Fortran (maybe Fortran 4?). Then one would take the stack of cards one had punched to a machine the size of a 1950s office desk called “the compiler”. The cards were fed into one end of the machine and new cards – in machine language – came out in a stack on the other end. One then took this new stack of cards to the computer and fed them in. If lucky the computer did what was wanted, if not one started over with their cards to find the error. (One nice thing was the computer room was one of few rooms in the school which was air conditioner as computer needed same.)
Second computer I used was in college. I took a course there in computer programming also. This time in BASIC. We would again write the program – now entering it at a computer console, of which there were several around the campus. The big deal for students was to write a program which would say “Boom” on the screen. We also learned how to place letters to form pictures out of the letters on the screen. We were told by our teacher that we should enjoy this time as we would never have as much time to play with and use a computer again. Obviously not a fortune teller. We had a third friend in the class who thought it great fun to name all of his programs “Forbin one, Forbin two…
During this last class Robert would often copy my homework as I knew what I was doing, but not being as focused on math in his studies as I was – he often needed help. Little did we know that sometime around the turn around the century he would be the family computer expert and I would calling on him for help.
We went from his Atari 800 to his Commodore 128 etc to our assortment of current Windows computers.
He has paid me back for my help in school by managing to keep my computers not only running, but since I, in general, don’t like change, has managed to set up my computers so that they run Windows XP in a virtual machine on each of my computers so I can continue to use my Lotus Organizer software – which syncs with my old Palm Centro – used around the house and on trips as a PDA these decades.
(Why LO? It is the best calendar, planner, address book I have used in a cell phone. Of course I also enter the calendar and address book in my Android phone separately , and have to use a note pad note to hold the completed todos in the Android and then transfer them by hand to the other setup to get them into LO and Palm.)