No Resemblance

To the Editors of The Crimson:

Hasty Pudding Theatricals regrets that members of our audience have been offended by the character of Edgar Foo Yung in A Little Knife Music. The Hasty Pudding Show is intended to be purely funny and enjoyable for the audience. If any member of the audience leaves the show with a bad feeling, we view that as a failure on our part.

Hasty Pudding Theatricals is a group of students from very diverse social and ethnic backgrounds who come together specifically to put on a show. We abhor discrimination against individuals for reasons of sex, race or religion. We also condemn the practice of psychological discrimination, whereby women or minority groups are associated by the media with certain stereotypical characteristics. We find offensive recent films such as Cruising, which portrays homosexuals as abnormally violent, or television situation comedies which stereotype numerous segments of modern American society. Our characters do anything but that; rather, they poke fun at the stereotypes themselves by illustrating their complete absurdity.

Pudding characters are designed to be completely unbelievable. In no way can any character in the show be likened to any individual living or dead. The humor of the show derives from ludicrous characterizations at which the audience can laugh without feeling insulted. Edgar Foo Yung is such a character. He bears no resemblance to any Asian person past or present. He is designed to poke fun at an absurd 19th century stereotype. This is what the Mikado, which played this fall at the Agassiz, has been doing on a much larger scale for years. Both shows attempt to make fun of ignorance.

As a result of discussions with the Harvard-Radcliffe Asian American Association, we have been made aware that our characterizations might be misconstrued. In the future, we will be far more sensitive in the creation of Pudding characters. We are grateful to the Harvard-Radcliffe Asian American Association for bringing this matter to our attention. We welcome further dialogue and will be happy to meet with any members of the Harvard community to discuss the show. David I. Levi '80   President, Hasty Pudding Theatricals