"The whole time I thought he sounded like Pedro/Pablo from 'Napoleon Dynamite.'"

One comment from a community college student who was pranked, along with the rest of his  Speech 101 class by classmate Jose Barrientos, who faked a Mexican accent for 4 months, and then, comically, dropped the accent:



One girl knew he was a fake. You see her at about 3:00. I think it's not a mere coincidence that the young woman is strikingly beautiful. Well-tuned bullshit detector.

If my older readers don't get the "Napoleon Dynamite" reference, you could get the highly amusing movie at Amazon, which, as you may know, I'm hoping you will enter through the Althouse portal when you do any shopping you might need to do. But if you don't want to get up to speed on Pedro from "Napoleon Dynamite," I'll bet you remember Bill Dana doing the Mexican accent as Jose Jimenez. Here's Bill Dana as Jose Jimenez playing an expert in how Santa Claus is supposed to speak:



Dana retired the Jimenez character in 1970. It was considered in bad taste to get laughs playing a dumb ethnic stereotype with an accent. But it's not the 70s anymore, and maybe it's okay for Barrientos — who is a standup comedian — to do this routine, since his agenda is to expose the prejudices of the audience and to critique them and dispel stereotypes. I don't know. It seems to me that there was some real hostility in doing the accent for 4 months on the theory that people would think ill of him. He could have been building relationships. Going public now, he's leveraging his comedy career on deceit and betrayal, which only seems worthwhile if they really were small-minded bigots. In that regard, note that the 2 most fooled students were a couple of black guys — highlighted at the very end, for maximum comic effect.