2022-07-04
31 分钟Ted audio collective.
You are listening to.
How to be a better human.
I'm your host, Chris Duffy.
And today on the show, we're talking about comedy and immigration.
Now, those are two topics that you probably don't think go together, but our guest today, Maeve Higgins, is a comedian and an author who moved from Ireland to the US, and she's made a career out of using humorous to get people to see borders and migration differently in general.
One of the things that I love most about comedy is how a good joke can take something out in the world that you've noticed but maybe never fully articulated to yourself.
And then a comedian comes along and their punchline makes you laugh, but it also crystallizes the way you see that thing, and you can never see it the same way again afterwards.
In Maeve's comedy, she tells her own experience of leaving home, and she uses jokes to complicate the narratives that we sometimes hear about immigration, particularly the idea that there are some immigrants who are.
Quote unquote good and others who are quote unquote bad.
Now, I'm, I'm really kind of analyzing maybe joke a lot here.
And as Eb White once said, explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog.
You understand it better, but the frog dies in the process.
And so in the interest of not killing any more frogs, I'm going to stop talking and just let you hear from me for self.
Here's a clip from her talk at.
Ted women I won the Alexander Hamilton immigrant achievement award for contributions to Manhattan and New York state.
Thank you.
So Alexander Hamilton himself was an immigrant, and all he had to do was set up a banking system, help to win the war of independence, and generally found the United States to be considered a good and welcome immigrant.
That's a lot to live up to.
You know, I can't even remember my online banking password.