that African Americans struggle with, and they
too have a similar trajectory of reclaiming once
hurtful words. But the immigrants of the 1960’s
in Australia were met with a whole suite of words
that let them know they didn’t belong.
And now? Wogs are us. We are wogs. To hear a
person talk about how their family lineage goes
back to the first fleet is not only impressive, in a
lot of cases, it’s rare. Like finding a four leafed
clover. So to a large extent, using the word ‘wog’
doesn’t hurt as much as it used to. But a lot of
toil went into that process. And it’s a process that
new immigrants are discovering more and more.
white, brown, yellow, purple all have permission
to step up on stage at the Comics Lounge to
celebrate that otherness and remind people, as
Tahir put it, ‘That we’re all Australians at the end
of the day’.
Covering events like this remind me how powerful
comedy can be. How it can unite people from all
persuasions, truly. It reminds me how walking a
tightrope can mean that people fall off sometimes
but that it’s worth it, always. Most of all, it reminds
me that there is a massive divide between the
racist humour that seeks to cut out the other and
the racial humour that brings us all together. ‘A
Very Woggy Christmas’ was very much the latter.
Now, to be in ‘A Very Woggy Christmas’, you can It created an electricity in the room that night that
be anybody. It is about celebrating otherness. you don’t normally sense in a room containing
The word ‘wog’ is becoming redefined to mean such diversity. It brought up a feelings in m