On Tuesday, AP reported (“Cingular Pulls Offensive Ringtone”) that Cingular Wireless had pulled a ringtone from its website after complaints. We read the description… it sounded familiar somehow:

…the ringtone started with a siren, followed by a male voice saying in a Southern drawl, “This is la Migra,” a slang term for the Border Patrol.

“Por favor, put the oranges down and step away from the cell phone. I repeat-o, put the oranges down and step away from the telephone-o. I’m deporting you back home-o,” the voice continued.

It sounded to us like something straight out of the mind of Mencia.

Of course, there was outrage:

Hispanic activists called the product racist.

“It’s horribly offensive and a disgusting thing,” Brent Wilkes, national executive director of the League of United Latin American Citizens, told the newspaper.

Horribly offensive? A disgusting thing? What the hell is going on here? (And why is a guy with a name like Brent Wilkes the national executive director or the League of United Latin American Citizens? Or is posing that question horribly racist as well? Hell, even Gerry Rivers had enough savvy to change his name to Geraldo Rivera… although he disputes that.)

Well, the other news cycle shoe dropped today. The company that commissioned the creation of the ringtone (and then sold it to Cingular), Barrio Mobile, apologized. But, they said the ringtone, “was satire and shouldn’t be taken seriously.”

Mexican-American comic Paul Saucido wrote the ringtone that features a male voice, acting as a Border Patrol agent with a Southern drawl, saying, “I repeat-o, put the oranges down and step away from the telephone-o. I’m deporting you back home-o.”

“His position is that people of Hispanic background need to maintain a sense of humor about the immigration situation,” said Jonathan Dworkin, a vice president of Cellfish Media, which distributed the ringtone.

Saucido has a strong case here. The self-appointed guardians of Mexican-American dignity at the League of United Latin American Citizens are a gang of world-class busy bodies who are determined to stamp out fun whenever and whereever they see it.

We’re reading a fascinating book, No Applause– Just Throw Money by Trav S.D. It’s a tremendous history of Vaudeville.

While acts like McIntyre and Heath continued to be in demand through the end of the vaudefille era, the principle of ethnic masquerade based on a minstrelsy model found new modes of expression, following the major immigrant groups that continued to arive on American shores.

The Irish, for example, turned their sights on a new target: themselves. The late-nineteenth-century stage saw no end of red-wigged, freckled, clay-pipe-smoking, lazy, alcoholic, jigging, swearing Irishmen. Acts like the Four Shamrocks and the Four Emeralds threw bricks at each other, talked about “the dhrink,” said “bejaysus” and otherwise distinguished the sons of Erin. Harpo Marx was one of the last non-Irish to play such a role, known familiarly as the “Patsy Brannigan.” In time, he stopped talking and left the ehtnic outrage to his brother Chico. But he kept the curly red wig.

Were the Irish better able to take a joke? Or, without the 1890’s equivalent of Brent Wilkes around to protect them, were they permanently damaged by such hijinks?

Trav S.D.’s book recalls comics, comedy teams, comedy duos, one after another, mocking, in turn, the Jews, the Germans, the Swedes– each and every ethnic group was the object of the most ridiculous and broadly sterotypical humor imaginable. It was a rite of passage, a method by which each group’s quirks and foibles were pointed out, exaggerated, examined, beaten to death for yucks. After a sufficient amount of ribbing, the pop culture turned its attention to the next gang of newcomers. And on and on… until now.

Were we all just unecessarily cruel back then (and are we all wonderfully enlighented now?), or is this drive to protect certain groups from even the slightest discomfort from mockery counterintuitive, and ultimately counter to the process of assimilation and acceptance?