We Used to Laugh at Each Other and Still Be Friends
Before we were fluent in offense, we spoke a rawer, funnier language and it somehow made room for understanding.
The State of Offense
Hi, I’m no-one.
In 2025, offense is a kind of performance art. It’s sharp, strategic, refined. There’s status in being the first to flinch, in calling something out. Offense used to be a reaction, now it’s often a position. A kind of distance.
We’ve learned how to name harm, and that’s progress. But I sometimes wonder if, in protecting ourselves from all the ways things can go wrong, we’ve lost some of what used to make things go right: the unpolished moments, the honest stumbles, the laughter that wasn’t always comfortable but was real.
We were allowed to be messy together. And sometimes, that mess became friendship.
A Black School, an Asian Kid, and Bruce Lee
In the early 1970s, I was one of the only Asian kids in a mostly Black elementary school. The names I got called weren’t accurate. They weren’t even cruel, just loud, clumsy, borrowed from pop culture. Bruce Lee was huge then. So even though I wasn’t Chinese, that’s who I became in the minds of a few classmates.
We didn’t have the language of “racial microaggressions.” We didn’t know about identity politics or representation. We were just kids, curious and confused, working things out in real time. And somehow, it worked. We laughed. We ate together. I got invited to their houses.
I never fired back. The harshest comeback I had was “dumb-dumb” or “stupid”. It was all surface-level stuff, without the weight of real malice. And through all the noise, trust formed.
TV Dinners and Unfiltered Laughter
Sometimes I’d sit down to dinner in a friend’s living room and All in the Family would be on the TV. Or The Jeffersons. These shows didn’t pull punches. Archie Bunker said things that would get you cancelled today. George Jefferson gave just as good as he got. And we, Black kids, Asian kid, laughed.
We didn’t laugh because we agreed with the characters, we laughed because the jokes revealed a truth we all felt, even as kids. Racism wasn’t hidden. It was aired out, mocked, exaggerated, and strangely humanized.
It was how we learned about the world. Not through lectures, but through punchlines.
Later, as a young adult in the ’90s, I saw the baton passed to shows like In Living Color and Married with Children. These were different kinds of irreverent, edgier, sharper, louder. In Living Color roasted everyone with joy and precision. Married with Children dismantled the American family fantasy with a shrug and a beer. Nobody was spared, and somehow that made it fair.
Then in the early 2000s came Chappelle’s Show. Dave Chappelle pushed the edge even further: race, class, politics, nothing was off-limits. He made people laugh by making them uncomfortable, and somehow, that discomfort made the truth land harder. The jokes were sharper, but so was the insight.
Even as the culture evolved, the humor stayed raw. What changed was the world’s tolerance for it.
The Table Is Still There
Today, that kind of honesty is harder to come by. There’s more fear. More silence. A kind of tiptoeing around difference that looks like respect but often feels like distance.
I get why. We’ve seen how words can hurt. We’ve learned the cost of being careless. But not every awkward moment is oppression. Not every stereotype is hate. Sometimes it’s just the rough collision of people trying to understand each other.
And from that friction, something real begins to grow.
I don’t look back on those early days with pain. I just smile. Sure, the jokes were off, but the friendship was solid. And even when we got each other wrong, we just kept showin’ up.
This is not nostalgia for ignorance. I just miss the room we used to have to mess up without being erased. The space to say something imperfect, get invited to dinner and laugh at each other.
The world’s changed. But the table is still there, waiting for us to sit side by side.