Do you speak English?

I do. I think that anyone who speaks a "national" language creates their own language in the process of adhering to the national standard. For instance, regional dialects and slang can be considered their own languages. Language is personal. In my opinion, the government invades privacy by mandating a national language. Some would argue that a national language should be mandated for convenience, but the concept of a universally spoken language within a region is mythical to begin with. The national language, as Anderson points out, is tool for exclusion and oppression. Latin was used to both extend the powers of the Catholic church and quell the voices of the uneducated and non-Catholic. Printed language helped sustain the facade of a nation state. No one really speaks this national language that our country has. It appears only to exclude.
 I found the following quote yesterday and I thought that it pertained to the questions of humor and oppression that our class discussed the other day: "Laughter must liberate the gay truth of the world from the veils of gloomy lies spun by the seriousness of fear, suffering, and violence..." The quote comes from a larger piece by Mikhail Bakhtin called "Rabelais and His World". Humor must approach what it is evil in the world in order to liberate truth. This is the kind of humor at work in The Colored Museum. The pastiche narrative the play adopts is used to excite its audience and to make them feel some level of discomfort, particularly white people. It clearly succeeds, otherwise we wouldn't have had such a quiet discussion on Tuesday.
I think that the way in which Macadoo used minstrelsy can also be viewed as pastiche.  The danger of using pastiche, however, is that your audience will not rise to the intellectual demands of the performance. They might miss the veil. Indeed, although Macadoo used uplift politics, it's probable that many white South Africans missed the boat or looked the other way.  In a similar, modern way, I think that a large portion of Chapelle's audience missed the boat. What was meant to be perceived as a commentary on racism was translated as racist commentary. At their core, however, these pastiche performances utilize uplift politics to expose the truth of the world.