Are entrepreneurial underdogs (and their silly business signages) giving the multinational big boys a wedgie?

Mabuhay Funeral Homes. Cooking ng Ina Mo. Cooking ng Ina Mo Rin. Kiskisan Motel. These are legal, re-gistered names of Filipino business establishments. Filipinos celebrate these flights of wordplay as emblems of two things: (1) proof of our creativity, (2) our refusal to take things seriously, a quality that can fortuitously be denoted by the word flippancy. The first we will also celebrate without comment, for now. The second we will get picky over.

Flippancy can be the mark of three things: (1) a kind of combat, (2) a kind of cool, or 3) kookiness/wackiness. Kookiness is pure behavioral burloloy, trivial, inconsequential departures from the norm. Kookiness is Tessa Prieto-Valdez’s wigs. Kooky flippancy is the opposite of combat flippancy. Perhaps because there isn’t a strong tradition of heroic comedians here, it’s hard to make the point that being funny can be a warrior’s business. I know of only one story of heroic Filipino comedians. One is the one about Pugo and Togo satirizing the Japanese during the Occupation. Apparently, some of the Japanese soldiers saw wristwatches as valuables and would wear several as a sign of wealth. Pugo and Togo played a pair of Japanese soldiers who wore watches up to their elbows, a piece of cha-racterization that landed them both in jail. Some people would count the one that tells of Ariel Ureta satirizing the Martial Law slogan. “Sa ikauunlad ng bayan, bisikleta ang kailangan,” he said. (“National progress requires bicycles.” The original slogan said Progress required Discipline.) But I would say that second story is not as neatly heroic, as they say that Ureta paid for his joke by riding a bicycle at high noon in Camp Crame, a detail which makes him out as the butt of the joke. It’s not fair that he is, because his opponents literally needed an army to pull off their joke while Ureta only needed his wiseass mouth. There would have been guys with guns standing around to make Ureta ride the damn bicycle, but jokes are not known for carrying those kinds of fine distinctions. Like it or not, some officer with an impish streak to his sadism succeeded in giving the government the last laugh. Humor is a fickle mistress.

There is an element of self-deprecation in the signs, and it is precisely because of this element that we perceive them as witty, and this wit that makes us curious about them. We feel they are enterprises that were possibly erected by someone we might like to know.

Then there’s number two: flippancy as cool. Or maybe “cool” is the wrong word, because it’s a style characterized by understatement and impassiveness. It’s an aesthetic of mirrorshades. “Cool” is James Dean, Marlon Brando, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus. Poker faces not famed for their sense of humor. I’m thinking of flippancy as a sign of an Adept’s sense of proportion. This idea is probably even harder to get across because churches like their saints with pokers up the ass, but maybe it will help if I say that I’m looking for trickster figures. Jes-ters and holy fools. The former Health Secretary, Dr. Juan Flavier. Bugs Bunny, Axel Foley, Lupin III. Maybe early Abbie Hoffman, in print and deed. Ambrose Bierce. Northcote Parkinson. Early to Mid-Career Nonoy Marcelo. Pol Medina when his characters were still capable of not talking about Politicians and The State of The Nation. Someone who knows what’s what, and who still has the time and grace to amuse and be amused while keeping his eye on the ball. I want to quote Russell Baker and say that someone who is flippant in this way is serious but not solemn, but I have come to the conclusion the word “serious” just cannot be used in the way Baker wanted to use it. We cannot use “serious” to talk about the opposite of solemnity: It just has too much history as solemnity’s twin. We need another set of syllables, something to help pin down the idea that the subject is aware of all the factors in play. Something like “on the ball” or “tuned in,” or “in touch.” As in “Nonoy Marcelo was not solemn, but he was on the ball.” Something like that. Something that would be particularly apt to describe say, a Ping-Pong player who, despite his clowning and banter, just keeps sending the ball back, time after time.

Funny business names in particular can seem a bit shocking because of the sheer amount of life force they need to fuel them. All that time, money, worry, sweat, and perseverance. Naming an investment of that magnitude flippantly seems to be some sort of existential declaration. It’s like you have to be saying, “Nothing really matters” or, “Names don’t really matter” or at least, “Funny is good.” I still remember the first time I drove by the now-legendary Petal Attraction in Teacher’s Village and the confidence and the sense of bravura that the sign’s outrageousness projected.

Mayon Vulcanizing, James Tailoring, Leon King Video Rental, and Sylvester Salon raise the bar in terms of execution. Petal Attraction puns on Fatal Attraction, but mangles the first word, whereas the aforementioned names perform their wordplay either by the words’ legitimate etymological resources (as in Leon King Video Rental and Mayon Vulcanizing) or with generic words (as in the case of James Tailoring and Sylvester Salon) that incorporate functional references to the actual business activity, and perhaps even the owners’ names.

Mabuhay Funeral Homes could be read as being profoundly in tune. It could be a joke Jesus or the Buddha would make, if Jesus or the Buddha were Pinoy and running a funeral parlor in Cubao. However, most Filipinos would probably say that no declaration is involved, i.e., that Filipinos are just frivolous. Kooky. Well, I don’t say that none of us are kooky. However, you can’t talk about kookiness, because it denies its own significance, it denies that it is worth talking about. At the most, you can just record/collect instances of it, like the bloggers do. Like the Philippine Daily Inquirer does every time it prints another picture of Tessa in another wig. I’m positive, however, that not all of our humor can be ascribed to kookiness. That some jokes are, in fact, scratching some sort of psychological itch.

It is a comedic commonplace that the best humor is rooted in pain. Comics address things that pain, irritate, and oppress them. We laugh because their jokes address what pain, irritate, and oppress us. Pugo and Togo addressed the Occupation. Laughing is a kind of judo, by which the mind overcomes or shelters from what obsesses it. It is inevitable that at least some of the names will address some peculiarly Filipino concerns.

Caintacky Fried Chicken. Chichahut. Mang Donalds. Big Mak. Starback. These names in particular resist being dismissed as kookiness. The most casual reader senses something stirring beneath the words. These names are funny because they import the image of monolithic multinational franchises, and in so doing, import also the contrast between the jerry-built carinderia on the corner. The Chichahut sign, for example, seems to be saying: “They are Pizza Hut!!! We are Chichahut.” There is an element of self-deprecation in the signs, and it is precisely because of this element that we perceive them as witty, and this wit that makes us curious about them. We feel they are enterprises that were possibly erected by someone we might like to know. The wit makes them local, personable, and accessible.

But when we ask what itch those signs are scratching, we discover ourselves concluding that the itch is nothing less than economic imperialism! Who knew the jokers were so serious? Imperialism on the streets: all those sleek, shiny, air-conditioned franchises, staffed by their perky clerks reciting perky English lines from the corporate handbook. Hi! But we all live with that itch. If we’ve got business signs addressing that itch, hundreds of thousands of Pinoys have been scratching that itch every day for years. Mga Bata! I just got back from New York! New York-Cubao! Padumpum!