An Avar (from Dagestan) is driving through the Caspian port city of Makhachkala with a Lakh in the passenger seat.
Spotting a red light, he pumps the accelerator and speeds through it. "You just ran a red light!" the Lakh says. "Avars don't stop for red lights," the Avar explains, and speeds through another. In a few minutes, they come to a green light, and the Avar stops. "Why did you stop?" the Lakh asks. "You can't be too careful," his friend says, "an Avar might be coming the other way."
Magomedkhan M. Magomedkhanov's scholarly works include "Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Dagestan". An ethnographer from the Russian republic of Dagestan he was surrounded by distinguished colleagues at Harvard University recently and he tried to put everyone at ease with a favorite joke about a Jew in a pit full of wild animals.
A grim politically correct silence "congealed into something approximating hostility," writes Ellen Barry in today's New York Times and Magomedkhanov was reminded that he was no longer in Dagestan...or on the set of Borat one assumes.
Read on here
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