singlish?

jus read this report abt a Taiwanese artiste making a joke out of singaporean english on this popular taiwanese talk-show. aft someone posted this one you-tube, many ppl (singaporeans i assume) were upset, so the guy had to post an apology on his blog and say that his english is also quite bad and needs to be polished.

well, of course i am a lil' unhappy abt this kinda jokes. i mean, it's probably more acceptable to be laughed at by Americans or British than by someone who admits that his English isn't terribly good too. And the report says that other guests on the show were also laughing at the way aunties and uncles here typically speak. my question to them is, don't they have aunties and uncles in their country as well? don't they have aunties and uncles who speak imperfect English/Mandarin as well? Just because we may be better educated in a certain language doesn't make it acceptable to laugh at others who did not have that privilege, and it's even more UNacceptable to laugh when you yourself isn't educated in that same language.

Well, i guess most guests on that show aren't terribly popular in Singapore, i.e. they probably don't have that huge a fan-base here. Thus, to make jokes like that may not mean a thing to them. If they have a large fan base here, and knowing that the new media has made it possible for shows to be seen overseas, they'll probably think twice abt cracking nation-sensitive jokes.

But then again, sometimes we ourselves laugh at others, don't we? here at home, we may laugh at the way a certain foreign group speak, snub our noses in the air at the way a certain group acts, or raise our eyebrows at the way another group gathers. We may even have laughed at the way Taiwanese artistes speak English too! I guess this is a good reminder that we all need to be aware of our prejudices and be more careful about the jokes we crack. Let's be more open and "embracing" towards other cultures.