An Inquiry about Laughter and Respect (July 13 2020) Charles Yeo

 Disclaimer: This is in no way a political analysis, merely a philosophical inquiry.

Most would have seen, if not heard of Charles Yeo’s delivery of a rally speech in Mandarin. With his awkwardness and discomfort, it emerged as a comedic sketch amidst the political campaigning. Naturally, the memes and clips began to spawn and circulate. Quite recently, Ho Ching posted a short Facebook message defending Charles Yeo and lauded his bravery for daring to deliver the speech.

This case-study will simply be an anchoring point for which the rest of my inquiry shall follow and the primary question that will be addressed is as follows: Is it possible to laugh at someone and yet respect that individual?

Intuitively, the answer seems to be no. There would be some that maintain that the act of laughing at someone automatically negates or cancels any respect attributed to that person. It is a deformed or mutated respect that cannot qualify as respect. If I laughed at someone for their race or skin colour and yet insist that I respect the person, there still seems to be something wrong. Although I could argue that I see the individual identity as something more or greater than his/her racial identity but that’s beside the point. So quite naturally, laughing at someone and claiming to respect someone seems mutually exclusive.

Or perhaps not. Maybe they appear contradictory but there is sense to it. If so, we enter into the realm of paradoxes and try to makes sense of the conditions that gives rise to this paradox.

When I first watched the speech, the instinctive response was laughter. But then almost immediately, once the initial humour subsided, there was a maturing of the light-hearted sentiments into a more profound form of respect for his courage. The chronology matters a fair bit. When watching the speech, we laugh first and then the respect follows. They are not two simultaneous events but happen in a sequential order.

So maybe it’s possible to posit a different way of looking at the relationship between laughter and respect. Taking into account the idea that the sequence matters, the laughter at Charles Yeo does not undercut the respect we attribute to him but rather, the respect we attribute to him is predicated on the laughter (or more precisely, the comedy in him stumbling on his words).

Predicated? To rely on or be dependent upon? Surely respect is independent of being able to elicit laughter! But here, I do think that there are different variants of respect. I list here two but there are likely to be others that I cannot think of. The first is a deferential form of respect. This respect we usually give to those whom we perceive as much greater than ourselves like Lee Kuan Yew or any figure out there. There are attributes of these figures which we magnify and look up to (the preposition matters) and in some ways, set a standard for individuals to aspire to. But the second respect is that of a peer. Where we see the other individual as someone on the same plane as us, with a more real grasp of the person’s flaws and yet find ourselves drawn or attracted to. The former kind of respect is detached and distant. The latter more relatable, amiable, familiar and even participatory. One is not necessarily greater than the other although of course this is a contentious point but in terms of its affectiveness, the latter is certainly more inviting. So imagine instead that Charles Yeo was proficient in his Mandarin and he spoke with the eloquence of a true Chinese orator. Yes, we would be adequately impressed with his proficiency and we would certainly respect him for his language proficiency but it stops there. It is in his discomfort and over-lengthy pauses that we find that organically genial respect for him.

The crucial thing to note is that he endured the discomfort for the sake of the Other- which is to say he did what he did to help someone else. It was an act of self-sacrifice for his absent colleague rather than himself. And because of that, his laughable moments become enshrined as a monument of nobility. Moreover, the greater the self-denigration, the greater the act of self-sacrifice. The more reputation and image of himself he surrenders, the more recognition and admiration he gains. The rhetoric of Christ’s teachings seems to percolate. But again, this courage which we see defining his actions is because we see him as surrendering his self for the sake of the Other. This image of self-sacrifice is difficult to fabricate or manipulated. Humans are pretty amazing at sniffing out these frauds and that voluntarily humiliate themselves for their own personal gain.

With that, I would think that yes, under the right conditions, it is possible to laugh at someone and in that laughter, respect that someone. Now whether it is possible to mock someone and respect said individual is a different matter but it's not within the scope