- PewDiePie is back after a 37-day YouTube hiatus.
- And he’s back to his old ways right off the bat.
- His return video is rife with racially “edgy” humor.
PewDiePie, the king of gaming YouTube, took a break last month. It was a momentous event for his channel after ten years of daily uploads.
But he made an awfully big production out of it for essentially a month-long break. He gave his fans the impression he’d be gone much longer.
Anything to juice those views. It worked. Fans binged watched his final video over 23 million times by the time Felix returned Friday.
But it doesn’t look like Felix did much self-reflection while he was gone. PewDiePie is back to his old ways.
In his first video back on YouTube, Pewds makes the same racially edgy jokes that got him into trouble with the press in the first place.
PewDiePie Laughs About Coronavirus, Mocks Chinese
It wouldn’t be a classic racist PewDiePie moment without mocking Chinese. Or having a good laugh at the expense of people dying and having their livelihoods ruined.
Pewds starts off the video saying:
Since I was in Japan during the time of the thingy. I bought about three boxes of these. I was like, it’s going to happen, I’m going to die.
He also calls coronavirus “coronachan.”
What if coronachan got me?
In Japanese, “chan” is a term of endearment.
After dismissively calling the worst pandemic since SARS “the thingy” and “chan,” PewDiePie displays a box of 3M surgical masks. Then he actually puts one on and dabs.
And starts mockingly speaking Chinese:
Xinghua fuzhou!
You can tell it’s just mockery because he isn’t saying anything that makes sense. He says something like, “apricot blossom town” in Mandarin Chinese.
After that, he puts on three more masks covering his eyes and the top of his head, and asks, “Does this look cool?” Knowing how this looks, PewDiePie adds:
You can joke about stuff right? Yeah, I remember you can joke about stuff. We’re cool.
You can joke about stuff, but the humor has to have some intelligible meaning to it. Otherwise, it’s just a crass way to trivialize someone else’s real suffering.
PewDiePie’s joke is something like: “Isn’t it funny how scared everyone is?”
No.
Pewds Makes Racial Comparisons Between Europeans and Japanese
Then PewDiePie left his calling card when he referenced Lord of the Rings and compared different human races to the different races in J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy Middle Earth:
Still not as good as Japanese toilets okay? The biggest disappointment of all time coming back from Japan. Every time. Every time I set on the toilet here the disappointment hits you. It hits your buttocks.
It’s cold, and it doesn’t spray, and you have to wipe. And you realize that you’re the savage and they are the elves. Just like in Lord of The Rings.
It’s fascinating Felix would make this reference.
Tolkien was dogged by the same criticisms that his work featured cryptic racist undertones. In 2003, the Chicago Tribune published an article headlined: “‘Lord’ of racism? Critics view trilogy as discriminatory.” The author wrote:
In the nearly five decades since ‘Lord of the Rings’ was first published, Tolkien fans were willing to overlook parts of the text some condemned as racially insensitive.
Others have asked, “Was Tolkien really racist?” and examined the possibility of “Racism in Tolkien’s Works.” Could this be a coded message from Felix, that he sees himself as willfully misunderstood – by fringe racists and overly politically correct intellectuals alike – the same way J.R.R. Tolkien was?
Either way, that one was a pretty funny joke.
And if anything, he’s wise-cracking on his own race for not being as elevated as the high-tech toilet civilization that made a pair of plumbers some of the world’s most iconic heroes.
Kudos, by the way to the PewDiePie fan who called the real reason why PewDiePie took a break from YouTube. Pewds says in his return video:
That’s a good first update. Beard. Alright. There’s beard now. We’re going to have to get used to this. That’s fine. I’m sure everyone will comment about it anyway.
It really was all about growing his beard through the awkward phase off-camera the whole time.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of CCN.com.
This article was edited by Josiah Wilmoth.
