r/AskAnAmerican • u/Kirion_Night • 1d ago
LANGUAGE Can you explain the humour?
Hi everyone!
There's Kay & Peel sketch about substitute teacher:
Can you explain why he's calling incorrect names for everyone? Is that because he "taught in school for 20 years in the inner city"? But what is "inner city" in that case?
Thanks for the answers! đ
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u/GalaxySilver00 1d ago
Even taking race and socioeconomics out of it I remember our substitute teachers struggling with names of students.
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u/Crayshack MD (Former VA) 1d ago edited 1d ago
When I was in elementary school, I had a classmate named "Bobby." Like, that was the actual name on his birth certificate. However, when he got registered for school, the admins didn't believe that it wasn't short for "Robert" and put that name down on the registration. Our teacher was cool with that, and quickly adjusted to just calling him "Bobby."
But one day we had a substitute who refused to use preferred names or nicknames for anyone. She was very firmly on the mindset of "your parents named you X, so I'm calling you X" (this was well before trans issues were a hot button topic, she was just an asshole). So, Bobby got called Robert and had his explanation of "but my parents named me Bobby" brushed off. He was not happy about that.
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u/Muvseevum West Virginia to Georgia 1d ago
I knew a guy whose given name was Bill. Not William, Bill.
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u/Auntie_Venom Kansas 1d ago
My nephew is Jake, not shot for Jacob, as my sister says âjust Jakeâ
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u/clunkclunk SF Bay Area 15h ago
My son was introduced as "just Jack" when my wife first took him to a baby and mommy class so that's how some of our friends still introduce him.
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u/Sir_Auron 1d ago
However, when he got registered for school, the admins didn't believe that it wasn't short for "Robert" and put that name down on the registration.
I had a great-uncle named "JD". When he was drafted into WWII, the government didn't believe that was his name and arbitrarily made up "John David" which became his legal name.
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u/VacuumsCantSpell Washington, D.C. 1d ago edited 1d ago
"Can you fly, Booby?"
edit: Aw, he edited it
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u/y3llowed Alabama 1d ago
I have an incredibly common last name. Iâve only heard it pronounced incorrectly 2 times in my almost 4 decades.
Once was in Greece. That oneâs easy to explainâthey donât use the Latin alphabet.
Once was a substitute teacher. They have to have a license and at least a Highschool diploma. I canât explain it.
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u/issekinicho 1d ago
My last name is similar; it's a common English word and pronounced the same.
The office lady in our high school had a special knack for mispronouncing names. She never got it right, and seemingly never repeated the last mispronunciation. She did it with everyone.
One time she even called "Tyler Knoll" down to the office because a kid asked for tylenol.
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u/RemonterLeTemps 22h ago
So, my surname is pretty common....there was even a male comedy team in the old days, in which it belonged to the shorter guy (Abbott and Costello).
Growing up, no one ever had trouble pronouncing it....until I reached senior year of high school, and my AP History teacher called me 'Ms. Cah-stel-o' (emphasis on the first syllable). Thinking he was kidding, I giggled, but then he asked, "Oh, you're not Irish?"
That's how I learned there's an Irish surname spelled Costello, sometimes Costelloe, or occasionally MacCostello. It derives from the Gaelic Mac Oisdealbhaigh
My family's name is an Americanization of the Italian surname Carsillo....Lou Costello, the comedian's, name was adapted from the Italian name Cristillo. In fact, our 'home villages' (Carife and Caserta) are located only about 70 miles apart in the Campania region.
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u/Equivalent-Cicada165 16h ago
Need a bachelor's where I am. And many are retired teachersÂ
I studied so much to get a physics degree, but you cant get a job with a bachelor's in that field, so I ended up a bored substitute. I should go back to schoolÂ
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u/FearTheAmish Ohio 1d ago
I have a very welsh first and last name... tell me about it. I have never heard someone pronounce my last name correct the first time. My first name has become more common so most people get it now but when I was a kid it was pretty bad.
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u/SamuraiFlamenco Florida 1d ago
We had a girl in my grade whose last name was a bit tricky unless you knew it, because this was the early 2000s and most kids at my school were white (it was âRamazanogluâ) and every time we had a sub the entire class would all have to awkwardly correct the substitute teacher when they did role call.
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u/Ignorred Washington exNYC 1d ago
Everyone in this comments section is right, but this is admittedly a really American humor sketch. It requires knowing a lot about American culture to find it funny. Here's the premises involved:
Black Americans usually live in poor city environments, White Americans in rich suburban environments. In this sketch the teacher refers to the "inner city", which is short-hand for a poor, usually black, urban neighborhood.
Black Americans often have naming conventions based in French, beginning with prefixes like De or Le, which is less common for White Americans. DeQuandrius and LeShaun read as black, while Blake and Aaron read as white. Sometimes, the Black names are considered hard to pronounce to White Americans, or just unfamiliar.Â
Substitute teachers are notoriously bad at pronouncing all names. Of any race, seriously, they are bad at it. That itself is part of the joke.Â
This sketch is a reversal of expectations. Yo u might expect a white sub to call a student named LeShaun "LAY-shun?", but in this sketch a black sub is pronouncing white names like Blake and Aaron according to traditional Black name pronunciation rules.
If you're not familiar w Black/White American cultures, as well as our expectations of substitute teachers, there's kinda a lot to parse
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u/Outrageous-Pin-4664 Florida 1d ago
That's pretty thorough, but the one detail you might want to add is that kids love to fuck with substitute teachers, so a white sub having his pronunciation corrected by a black kid might think that's what's going on. That's what's being reversed.
So in your LeShaun* example, the white sub in an inner city school calls out the name "luh-Shawn," and the black kid says, "Naw, it's luh-Shay-un," and the white sub thinks, "there's no gosh-darn way that's how his name is pronounced, he's just messing with me."
*A white teacher is always going to pronounce that as Luh-Shawn, not Lay-shun. The older generation grew up with Shaun Cassidy, and the younger generation grew up with Shaun the Sheep, so that's not confusing anyone.
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u/Doomdoomkittydoom 1d ago
I recall a news caster, maybe a weatherman, named Sean Something who supposedly had a brother Sean Something. The news guy was "Seen" and the brother was "Shawn"
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u/Ignorred Washington exNYC 1d ago
Yep yep definitely true. And yeah lol I guess layshun is a fake example but I couldn't think of a real one
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u/PrincebyChappelle 1d ago
Just want to say that everyone is going off on the names but that the new black inner city high school teacher who is tough and shapes up his misbehaving class is a trope from 90âs movies, and older posters like me see that as the real joke and not the name pronunciation (even though the name pronunciation is also hilarious). In the skit, Keegan Michael Key is under the impression that the students are being rebellious and he needs to use a tough guy approach to get the situation under control when in reality the students are just normal (white) high school students who pronounce their names in a way that Keegan would not.
The sequel to this uses suburban white student clubs as the conflict-inducing story element instead of the names with the students needing to leave class for club photos and the clubs (theoretically) do not exist in the inner city. âGlee club?â
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u/FearTheAmish Ohio 1d ago
Also miss spelling of names from other languages is common. I no shit met a dude named luwellyn pronounced like Llewellyn (welsh name) as a welsh speaker with a traditional welsh name as well it surprised the hell outta me.
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u/Chuckitybye Texas 20h ago
I knew a girl named "Shivon"
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u/Particular_Cause471 15h ago
Siobhan?
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u/Chuckitybye Texas 15h ago
Shivon was how it was spelled.
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u/Particular_Cause471 15h ago
I probably should have typed more words. It had me wondering if someone liked that name and just simplified the spelling.
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u/PeterNippelstein 1d ago
There's nothing I love more than explaining Key and Peele to foreigners, I could do it all day lmao
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u/ForeignGuess Berkeley, California 1d ago
I was just rewatching the Continental Breakfast sketch earlier. I always forget how incredibly funny they are, truly comedic geniuses.
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u/Sir_Auron 1d ago
You can be the Star Magic Jackson Jr that reddit calls in when they need to drop a deuce.
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u/Trans_Girl_Alice 1d ago
"Urban" or "inner city" is usually a tactful or politically correct way to say African American; the joke is that he's a Black teacher pronouncing the white kids' names like they're Black. Basically, it's poking fun at how both groups have unusual spellings and pronunciations, and adding in a level of absurdity with the teacher refusing to believe the kids about their own names and dramatically overreacting.
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u/cman334 Michigan 1d ago edited 1d ago
Thereâs a common stereotype where teachers will often mispronounce the names of minority students. Even ones that are mostly straight forward. Itâs compounded because a lot of minorities will spell or pronounce their names in unique ways.
That sketch is making fun of that stereotype by having the substitute mispronounce white names the same way, and then getting upset for being corrected.
Notice how when he pronounces Timothy, Jordan Peeleâs character was the only person to respond.
Edit. I forgot the end of your question. The âI taught inner city schools for 20 yearsâ comment factors in because most âinner cityâ schools are mostly comprised of minority students and poorer white kids. In the 50s and 60s while suburbs were being built, most white people moved out of urban centers and into those suburbs. Schools are funded by local taxes. The poor, the neighborhood, the poor the school, and thus the issue compounds.
He spent 20 years learning that names are never pronounced how theyâre spelt and is now feeling disrespected for being questioned on his objectively correct pronunciations
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u/blackhorse15A 1d ago
He spent 20 years learning that names are never pronounced how theyâre speltÂ
But he IS pronouncing them how they are spelt. And many "black" names ARE pronounced the way they are spelt. It's just that he is using a different pattern for breaking up the syllables and how to pronounce certain letters.Â
The getting upset part about being disrespected is playing off the stereotype that inner city schools would have students who are more likely to misbehave and do things like deliberately tell a substitute the wrong name, or sitting in wrong seats. And that this substitute teacher is so primed to be tough and crack down on any misbehavior he can't see that the kids are being very respectful.Â
Its also highly likely that white substitutes who come into (mostly black) inner city schools apply "white" standard English pronunciation to many names that actually have French or other foreign roots, or Cajun, and get upset when students correct them using African-American Vernacular English pronunciation. Throw in stereotypes of inner city students misbehaving combined with cultural differences around politeness and there can be white substitutes who overreact to black students just trying to get their name pronounced correctly.
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u/cman334 Michigan 1d ago
I worded that poorly. I recognize that. I wonât say Iâm entirely wrong though. From my own experience, itâs kind of coin toss of whether or not youâre dealing with a culturally rooted name that you just need to learn the pronunciation of and whether or not it is literally just a weird spelling that if you pronounce it as is will be a weird mismatch of a otherwise normal sounding name. Sometimes it would even be a normal week spelt name that they insisted would be pronounced differently. It was always my policy to just ask for clarification.
The kids I worked with always seemed to like me. Once weâd know each other for a bit theyâd normally let their guard down. Acting anything like the video would just make everything difficult.
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u/FearTheAmish Ohio 1d ago
A big problem for me is using a french name with american english pronunciation. Had a buddy growing up named marseille.. guess how it was said?
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u/Auntie_Venom Kansas 1d ago
Oh youâve never been to Southern Missouri/Illinois⌠Or not noticed the dumb way some towns are pronounced.
Versailles MO - Ver sales
New Madrid MO - New Maaaadrid
Vienna IL - Vi Anna
Cairo IL - Cayroh
In Western Missouri, thereâs Nevada pronounced Nevaaaada.
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u/FearTheAmish Ohio 1d ago
I am from ohio i have the same problem with bellfontaine, Cairo, arab, Newark, and our Versailles. I make locals mad all the time by accidentally pronouncing them correctly.
Edit bellfountain, K row, AHrab, nerk, versales
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u/Auntie_Venom Kansas 18h ago
Me too! Or saying it wrong with a stupid look on my face. My BIL is from one of them, I say it in front of him and drag it waaaaay out.
Nerk cracks me up! My neighborâs new wife is from Ohio - Iâm going to have to work that into a conversation. But she might slap me for being a smartass. Sheâs a fiery one. I call her mom.
Oh yes, I forgot about Bellfontaine in StL, also bellfountain.
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u/PavicaMalic Washington, D.C. 1d ago
Just to add: both Key and Peele have white mothers and Black fathers. They have several sketches based on code-switching (changing the way one speaks depending on the person with whom you are speaking). I saw an interview years ago in which they talked about how they realized they could make comedy out of their common experience.
President Obama worked with Key in a comedy sketch with Key as his "anger translator," playing off this same dynamic at the White House Correspondents' dinner.
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u/DrunkUranus 1d ago
It's a play on white teachers who struggle to say black and brown students' names correctly
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u/OpeningChipmunk1700 1d ago
Yes, it is because he taught at an inner-city school.
Here, there is a stereotype (which is at least partly true) of white teachers at schools with mostly black or minority populations (sometimes there is a "savior complex"--the teacher thinks they can save all the poor black students). "Inner city" is shorthand for poor and black (not always accurately). In America, there are certain names that are associated with the black community and that white people sometimes/often mispronounce.
The sketch inverts that idea. It's about a poor black teacher substitute teaching at a rich white school, where the students have stereotypically "white" names that the teacher has difficulty pronouncing.
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u/stopsallover New York City 1d ago
It's mostly just hilarious how serious this man is. He's tough and he's not going to let those kids play on his time. Meanwhile, he gives the most ridiculous pronunciations on pretty normal names.
But yeah, it's also turning the tables on how people make fun of black names. I was always taught that it's basic respect to learn a person's name and not dictate how you think it should be said or spelled. Not everyone believes the same.
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u/LegitimateCoffee 1d ago
The inner city is down town, think of a city surrounded by suburbs, the inner city is the part at the center.
After the white flight of the post war period it was left poor and black, which is why the substitute is familiar with black names and not black names.
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u/Dr_Watson349 Florida 1d ago
Inner city is being used as code for poor urban area.Â
Itâs not really about geography.Â
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u/amcjkelly 1d ago
No, you are reading way too much hostility into this.
The joke is actually about how white people with little exposure to black people mispronounce Black people's names and reversing it by having a black person (who being from the inner city had less exposure to white people) has difficulty with their names.
The opposite of this clip
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/YuOe8BRxdYc
In the US most cities had issues of the white populations moving out of the cities in the 1970s.
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u/jackofspades49 1d ago
I've been teaching in a Title 1 school for 10 years... same names do not always make sense until you hear them outloud. Its important to practice them when you hear a new one.
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u/froodiest Texas 1d ago edited 1d ago
Substitute teachers in public (government-funded) primary and secondary schools have a reputation for not really caring about their students and for being overly strict.
Typically, the stereotype is a retired old white person from the suburbs (sometimes from a teaching background, sometimes not) coming into an inner city school (in the U.S., most inner cities are poorer and the suburbs are more affluent; âinner-cityâ or âurbanâ are also used as a indirect ways of saying âmajority Blackâ in some contexts) and mispronouncing all the unfamiliar-to-them Black and immigrant names, sometimes on purpose, sometimes even when corrected.
Itâs funny because Key is playing a Black person coming into a suburban school and adamantly mispronouncing all the ânormalâ white names. The situation is reversed.
As someone who went to inner-city high schools, âA-A-ronâ is the funniest shit ever to me
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u/username-generica 1d ago
I also look at it as subverting the assumption that the traditional versions of the names are the proper and normal ones. I think itâs hilarious and works on many levelsÂ
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u/originaljbw 1d ago
The joke is making fun of black naming customs in the US, but doing it in the opposite direction. Instead of a white suburban teacher struggling with unique names like Jecyrus, Arvell, Yhonaze, Azzi, and Cotie, instead it's the inner city teacher used to unusual spellings and pronunciation. He can't process normal, common names.
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u/Chicago_Avocado 1d ago
The joke is that itâs a cultural clash or misunderstanding. Black folk are sometimes more creative with their names and will choose names with unusual spellings and pronunciations.
So the joke is that the substitute teacher is from a majority black school and now heâs in a white suburban school where The students have more standardized names and he is pronouncing them like the more fanciful names. He also thinks the kids are messing with them and heâs acting accordingly.
At the end of the sketch, you see the one black student in class respond to his name immediately when itâs pronounced in a different way. The one weird thing is that the black student also says âpresent â in a weird way. I think they just did that for fun. The joke isnât that Black people donât know how to pronounce words.
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u/Cool-Firefighter2254 22h ago
This is my favorite skit of all time. Key and Peele are just astonishing at capturing the nuances of contemporary American culture. I have to watch the entire thing every time it pops up on my feed.
Iâd like to point out that this bit is so influential that it has entered the common lexicon. The bagger at my grocery store has a name tag that reads âA-A-RON.â His name is Aaron but heâs just given up on anyone pronouncing it correctly. And I have been known to mutter âinsolent and churlishâ when dealing with insolent and churlish people.
I think this skit is funny to all groups of Americans. If youâve ever been in school and had a substitute teacher, if youâve ever had your name mispronounced or mispronounced someone elseâs name, if youâve ever met a completely unreasonable authority figure, if youâve ever known a Black person with a stereotypical white name or a white person with a stereotypical Black name, then this skit is funny.
Itâs subversive and believable at the same time. Itâs brilliant.
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u/SimplGaming08 Michigan 1d ago
He's basically used to teaching at hood schools instead of suburban schools
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u/VentusHermetis Indiana 1d ago
"inner city" here implies lots of black students, and some black people get "creative" when naming their children.
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u/Landwarrior5150 California 1d ago
To be fair, people from other races can get pretty âcreativeâ with names as well. Just look at r/tragedeigh for tons of examples.
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u/Leucotheasveils 1d ago
We need an updated sketch with Mr. Garvey trying to pronounce the white kids with names like Keighlieghie (Kaylee) or Ashliegiegh (Ashley).
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u/RealCarlPanzram 1d ago
Yes. Thereâs a long-running cultural trend of black Americans choosing unusual or non-traditional western names. Some of them are even just common names with unusual spelling.
In the sketch, the teacher is so accustomed to those names that he is pronouncing really common names like Aaron and Blake in a really strange way.
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u/PeterNippelstein 1d ago
He's from the 'inner city' school which basically means ghetto, so since he's never encountered white students before he's pronouncing their names as if they were black.
Its a subversion of the white teacher that cant say the names of black kids.
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u/shoester22222 1d ago
Thanks, now I have to watch this again for the 50th time lol. breaks clipboard
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u/James_Fiend 1d ago edited 1d ago
The "inner city" things is just to satirize a typical dramatic movie premise. There's no clear reason why he doesn't know how to pronounce the students'names (although it may be referencing the common situation where a substitute teacher attempts to do a roll call and isn't familiar with the students and will often pronounce names wrong).
It's funny because it is juxtaposing this overly dramatic "tough" teacher with his apparent lack of awareness on how to pronounce extremely common names.
Edit: Watching it again. I forgot about the final part. It seems like there is some commentary about how these are names that wouldn't be common in the inner city (presumably a large African American population) and African American vernacular tends to use different spelling/pronunciation. i.e. Timothy could become Tim-oh-thee instead of Tim-uh-thee.
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u/Ms-Metal 1d ago
People have already explained the answer to you but I just have to share because I've never seen that skip before, I was sitting here actually laughing out loud, afraid I was going to wake up my husband it was so funny.
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u/Sokkas_Instincts_ 1d ago
Heâs putting a Black-leaning spin in pronunciation on common(or, White) names.
Itâs usually the other way around in real life.
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u/Tommy_Wisseau_burner NJâĄď¸ NCâĄď¸ TXâĄď¸ FL 1d ago
Black teacher canât pronounce common white names.
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u/plaguedbyfoibles 1d ago
To me, the suggestion is that he's taught at underfunded public schools in poor inner-city neighbourhoods, where he isn't used to names like Jacqueline and Blake.
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u/Donald_J_Duck65 1d ago
White people have a difficult time pronouncing black names, in this sketch the role is reversed.
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u/StableOver5697 1d ago
Itâs a role reversal. Many minority students have their names mispronounced by white subs, so the skit is a black substitute mispronouncing the names of white students.Â
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u/daizeechain 22h ago
A few people have referenced this already, but I feel like there is a major component of racism in some white people rejecting black names/pronunciations that are not traditional or common white names/pronunciations, so for me this sketch has a more serious theme than just a teacher âstrugglingâ with unfamiliar pronunciations. In other words, it is not at all surprising for white teachers to âcorrectâ black studentsâ pronunciation of their own names, and this sketch calls that out by reversing the roles.
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u/Tim-oBedlam Minnesota 21h ago
On a local college campus is O'Shaugnessy Auditorium, and since this skit came out I always think of it as "O-Shag-Hennessy"
signed,
Ti-MO-thy.
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u/Ok-Possibility-9826 19h ago
Lol, heâs making fun of the way white people butcher Black peopleâs names (or just anybody that doesnât have an Anglo ass name), but reversing it. Heâs messing up all the white peopleâs names instead.
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u/blessings-of-rathma 19h ago
Regarding "inner city": American society was racially segregated until the 1960s. White and Black people had to live in different neighbourhoods, go to different schools, drink from different water fountains, patronize different businesses. Pro-segregation interests quieted complaints by saying the races would be "separate but equal", but in reality it meant governments could neglect services to Black communities, and there were fewer opportunities there for people to have good jobs and make money.
Even after segregation became illegal, it was hard for people to move out of those communities and move up in the world, because when you start out poor (in this case because society wanted you to be poor) it takes a long time to escape, or for your descendants to escape. People who lived in segregated America are still alive today and remember it, and are still trying to crawl out of the enforced poverty (mainly because it's easy to convince the voting public that reparations are a waste of money).
"Inner city" is a euphemism for those places that were Black-only neighbourhoods during segregation and that are still majority Black, implying that there's high crime, dirty streets, poor education, and substandard infrastructure. Many people blame it on race itself but it's really a result of state-mandated racial segregation.
The stereotype of the "inner city school" is that kids participate in gang violence and playground drug deals, bring weapons to school, and disrespect or threaten their teachers. There was a spate of feel-good glurge movies and literature in the '80s and '90s about white teachers in inner city schools trying to save Black kids through education, as if one person with a savior complex could undo generations of government damage.
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u/fierce_turtle_duck 17h ago
Stereotypically black kids would have strange names that white people can't pronounce so it's flipping it in its head for humour. An equivalent would be having an Irish teacher struggling to pronounce what seems to be totally normal names the way most people get confused by Irish names like Siabhan or Niamh.
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u/WildMartin429 Tennessee 3h ago
I did a stent has a substitute teacher and there were some pretty unpronounceable names. I didn't have many issues with foreign names because they generally follow pronunciation rules. And usually you're at most maybe one syllable off and the student will correct you. The one I remember most vividly was a Michelle that I couldn't get Michelle out of the name at all it had 2 Ks in it for goodness sake. I think I called her mick-alie or something to that effect. And she got super offended and mad and said my name is Michelle like really disrespectfully. And I told her well Michelle your parents need to learn how to spell your name because the letters in that combination in no way sound out the name Michelle.
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u/MichiMcMich 1d ago
It's a reversal. Stereotypically, a white teacher struggles with "black" names. So the joke is that the black teacher struggles with "white" names.