Tapu Misa: We can enjoy a laugh at ourselves but we're no bad joke

Oh, the burden of being a brown comedian in Aotearoa. If you're not being slapped around for making the tribe look bad by reinforcing, even accentuating, its worst stereotypes, you're under suspicion for not being stereotypical enough.

The latter, I assume, was the reason behind an unsuccessful complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority alleging breaches of the liquor advertising code in the hit movie Sione's Wedding because the actors were shown drinking Stella Artois beer. This was un-stereotypical enough to hint at a liquor promotion deal: Samoan boys would drink Lion Red or Vailima, wouldn't they?

This is the other side of being a prominent brown playwright, comedian, and entertainer, as Sione's Wedding creator Oscar Kightley has found. Everything you do is loaded with meaning and consequence. It isn't enough that you're funny and entertaining, as well as commercially successful and critically acclaimed. You have to be socially responsible, too.

Kightley and his friends, who are behind the Naked Samoans stage show and the hugely popular animated series bro'Town, which begins its third series on TV3 tonight, have been accused of perpetuating negative stereotypes of Pacific Islanders with their particular brand of "equal opportunity racism".

Dr Melani Anae, director of the Pacific Studies Centre at Auckland University and author of Polynesian Panthers, accuses them of promoting the kinds of stereotypes "we fought against in the 70s" - the happy-go-lucky brown coconuts, good at singing, dancing and making people laugh. They do nothing, she says, to promote a positive image of Pacific Islanders. "We've moved beyond the stereotype of just being entertainers," she says. Only no one seems to have told all those NZ Idol hopefuls.

I've also fretted about the limited role models on offer to Pacific Island boys - although I'd be perfectly happy if one of mine became the next Oscar Kightley.

In a column last month, I touched on the negative reaction of many of my family and Samoan friends to Sione's Wedding, despite its mainstream success, and the discomfort felt by many Samoan men at their portrayal in bro'Town and Sione's Wedding. For them, the movie wasn't just a comedy about the exploits of a bunch of Samoan guys refusing to grow up, it was a commentary about them that they didn't happen to agree with and which they felt disadvantaged them. You might say that's a little precious given that no one is supposed to take comedy literally. But when you're a low-status minority, nothing is simple.

It's not that we don't know how to laugh at ourselves, or push the boundaries in politically incorrect ways - we have a tradition of doing just that.

When Samoan comedian Tofiga Fepulea'i of Laughing With Samoans runs through the health and safety requirements of turning off the cellphone before each performance - "Because if the phone rings, I hit your head with the microphone" - we laugh because we believe him. But there's a difference between the jokes we tell among ourselves and the jokes we tell when we're in a society where we are distinguished more by our failures than our successes.

Does the use of racist stereotypes reinforce and perpetrate racist thinking, or does it, as Kightley says, hold up a mirror that exposes problems in a legitimate way? It depends. To paraphrase Dame Edna, you can get away with a lot if you say it in a caring way. Despite reaching unprecedented heights of political incorrectness, not a single complaint about bro'Town has ever reached the Broadcasting Standards Authority. And that's despite a character who describes himself as "coming from a long line of proud pot-smoking dole-bludgers who are also really good singers".

Negative stereotypes don't just hurt our feelings and affect our sense of self-worth, they can jeopardise our chances of employment, and affect the quality of our education and healthcare, and the kind of justice we can expect.

Stereotypes can determine a teacher's attitude about whether a Maori or Pacific Island student is worth the effort of teaching, a social worker's assessment of whether a Pacific Island man is capable of being a responsible father, a policeman's attitude about claims of innocence.

But here's the thing about the negative stereotypes that I often wrestle with as a journalist. It's difficult to get the kind of policy action that leads to societal change without highlighting the real problems in our communities. But how do you highlight the negatives without becoming hostage to them?

It's tiresome seeing Maori and Pacific communities characterised as forever sick, poor and incapable, when it's so far removed from the dynamic culture and communities I know. Problems exist, but focusing on them to the exclusion of everything else tends to give as unreal a picture as bro'Town is often accused of doing. Like Sione's Wedding, it's not a faithful representation of Pacific culture. It doesn't pretend to be.

But in its optimism and humour it's more truly Pacific than anything else on our screens.