“Son, I can’t handle this anymore. Your mother and I are getting a divorce. Where’s my booze?”

Thus ends a lighthearted skit I witnessed this morning in my Chinese conversation class. The father, an alcoholic, had been attempting to explain to his son why getting an arranged marriage was the best course of action for his future. In the process, however, the father had let slip his personal deep-seated hatred for the boy’s mother. As the mother started to cry, the father raged off backstage in an alcohol-induced fury. And when it was all over, the room was filled with laughter... Really, it was.

There is a weird dynamic about skits in language classes. No matter the language, no matter the level and no matter the group dynamic, a characteristic pattern emerges every time.

It has been demonstrated through empirical analysis that the probability that a male will cross-dress in this setting increases ten-fold over the norm. Along with this rise, there is a requisite corresponding increase in the use of high falsetto voices. Although such voices often get in the way of correct language pronunciation, their use is strikingly prevalent in the average language skit.

What’s worse, the stark reality remains that you run a much higher chance of accidentally offending your teacher and his/her culture. In the rush to create a language skit, German classes get Nazis, Chinese classes get abandoned female children, and Arabic classes get terrorists. This cultural insensitivity is further exemplified by the audience itself, which adds what seems like an out-of-sync laugh track to the whole event.

Along the same vein, it also becomes increasingly likely that your skit will involve overly-lighthearted treatment of a serious issue. Diseases, eating disorders, dysfunctional families and unfortunate historical events ended up liberally sprinkled in this five-minute presentation.

And it’s not just the skit. Maybe it’s using a foreign language at all. I find that my personal views on everything suddenly become 10 times more extreme when I try to converse in a foreign language. “Do you like Chinese food better or American food?” A friend asks. “Chinese food is the best food in the world!” I loudly yell back, a googly-eyed, smiling expression on my face. “What do you think about thievery?” “Thieves should be punished by having their hands cut off!” I snap back, punching a fist into an open palm. And when asked “what do you think about China’s economy?” I reply: “The Chinese Communist party will accomplish an economic turnaround the likes of which the world has never seen!”

Instead of taking the time to form a nuanced opinion, I utter the first thought that pops into my head, often out of fear of an awkward foreign language pause. Writing a skit is really the same as having a conversation with your language teacher and maybe we’re afraid of this same pause when we’re delivering the skit.

Something about using another language to express reality brings out the insensitive, racist and sexist bigot in all of us. And for some reason, this becomes funny. I’m not writing to pass judgment on this phenomenon — after all, in my personal group this morning, I was a drunk, cross-dressing frat girl who happened to be ruining an arranged marriage.

But I wonder how all of this happens. Language classes do, in a sense, put us in the position of children, learning a language for the first time. Is this bigotry similar to the kind that little kids show on the playground? In the end, are we just parroting daddy’s dislike of foreigners? Or is it all indicative of the opinions we think foreigners themselves should have?

Either way, the alcoholic, arranged marriage victims and crying mothers must, in the end, be dismissed as simply a short and meaningless skit. When the curtain falls and the child realizes that he’s doomed to a life of forced marriage, we can’t help but laugh. After all, the presentation was in Chinese.