Arakawa Group Cringe-O-Rama on SNL

February 27, 2023 - 5 minutes read - 948 words

In my late teen years, I started watching SNL (or, actually, on VHS delay so that I could get my beauty rest). One of my favorite sketches in the late-90’s, Mike Myers / Dana Carvey / Adam Sandler era featured a Japanese punditry show that emulated the arguing talking heads format of “The McLaughlin Group”, “The Arakawa Group.”

Leveraging Mike Meyers’ sense of random, absurdist humor (stolen whole cloth for pretty much every 15^th second of “The Family Guy”) and supported by the comedic delivery of Dana Carvey, Phil Hartman, and Rob Schneider, the panel discussion follows a pugilistic talking-political heads format and then breaks à la Meyers’ “Sprockets” with a random non-sequitur (“Now we dance”) as Meyers-san bellows: “SHOW ME THE MONKEY.” Thus is shown a monkey salaryman in a suit falling over (it seems). Arakawa-san et al. are then shown wiping tears of mirth away as the cut ends and they utter in Engrish: “He sray me” etc.

At the time of airing, I found random jump and meta-meta spoof (more on that later) he-high-larious, but, looking back, it’s a cringe-o-rama of dated stereotypes, racism, and laaaaaazy writing that dodges the charge of unfunnyness by appealing to cheap racial stereotype.

It’s. Just. So. Bad.

And while I don’t believe we should go back and shame/re-evaluate the humor of yesteryear in light of current mores or “cancel” people over it (we all make mistakes that are bonded to the cultural moment in which the mistakes surface), that this ever got out the door and got Carvey / Hartman to stake their well-established bona fides on it is surprising.

The Meta-Meta Angle

What’s notable about this sketch-as-concept is that it’s some inside-baseball for SNL regulars (as a dateless teen me certainly was). The (real) “McLaughlin Group” had been parodied by Dana Carvey doing a straight impersonation of McLaughlin:

The impersonation of both the host and the format was spot-on, no notes. McLaughlin was an imperious gasbag and the show, while I enjoyed it for its…pique, has been revealed to have been a pretty toxic stew.

Now, what’s remarkable is that Phil Hartman, brilliant Phil Hartman, saw the unhingedness of this particular spoof and then spoofed-the-spoof by doing “The Sinatra Group.” Instead of a beltway pundit dressing down other pundits, Harmann’s Old Blue Eyes would give some Jersey verbal backhanding to a panel made of relevant pop culture icons:

Which brings us to “The Arakawa Group.” In the time adjacent to this sketch, the fortunes of the Rust Belt and the Motor City were facing challenges based on Japanese competition. Additionally, President G.H.W. Bush had just made a state visit where much of the discussion was around trade economics and the US trade deficit. So when Japanese Matsuda City functionary, the 79-year-old Yoshio Sakurauchi, took the US auto worker to task for indolence and intellectual softness, papers knew a good rage-bait article when they saw it and they published the hell out of it (a nice preview of things to come on Facebook and Twitter and their selling of rage for dollars).

Sakurauchi’s gist was something like:

the US work force was “too lazy” to compete
a third of the US workforce “couldn’t read”
America may become “Japan’s subcontractor”

Source

So the “Arakawa Group,” then, was a second-degree indirection of sketch format spoof on top of the rage-topic of the moment: Japanese functionaries thinking Americans were stupid and lazy. This setup offered a lot of opportunities for skewering culture, workday models, office drunkenness, underwear from vending machines, etc. But instead much of the “comedy” came from, uh, lazy stereotypes and accents.

For his part, Rob Schneider’s take has an extra drip of acid on it that is not quite so much Japanese-McLaughlin-is-unhinged but more something else, something nastier in its intent. I’ll not attribute anything to Schneider himself here some decades on, but every time his character gets a turn at the mic, I wince a slight bit more.

And what of the monkey? I love the Pythonesque clip of the absurd breaking the expectations of the bit. I like that there are some things in Japanese culture that are funny to outsiders: salarymen culture has funny in it, manga culture has funny in it, vending machine ubiquity has funny in it, (as The Simpsons showed contemporaneously) “Seizure-Inducing Robot (“Mecha”)” media has funny in it, risk of Godzilla has funny in it…so that these functionaries might enjoy a falling arctic monkey, that’s kinda funny. But that the monkey “srays” and the facial gestures of the panel feel a bit too close to the big, buck-toothed “Yellow Peril” propaganda posters to feel free of something very, very nasty.

No doubt, these racist propaganda posters were helpful in ginning up popular support for entering World War II. And, I’m sure, 50 years after “A Day Which Will Live in Infamy,” the blighting of Detroit by Japanese economic blitzkrieg felt like an updated attack. But when we summon these nasty demons, it takes decades if not centuries to put reason ahead of visceral reaction. In many ways, that’s what I worried about so often with Trump: he’d let oily, nasty, nativist demons out because it’d help his popularity in one week without any care for how that demon would skew the mixture of American culture for far longer than his presidency (it turned out) or lifetime (we have yet to see).

To close out “Arakawa,” in the time, I laughed and laughed hard. But now I realize it was unearned and cheap and nasty. I guess all that is to say: Looking at it I cringe, and looking back at a boy version of myself laughing at it, I cringe again.