THERE COMES A MOMENT in every race-conscious TV viewer’s day when you’re not sure whether to laugh or cringe at an image that straddles the line between offensive stereotype and painful truth. That moment has been happening a lot more often due to a recent spate of TV spots featuring Asian-Americans. Here’s how they rate on TMM’s Cringe-O-Meter.

NEW YORK STATE LOTTERY/ENGLISH CLASS

In this spot for the lottery’s Cashword game, an exasperated ESL teacher is trying to get her foreign-born students to say “one million dollars,” but they keep shouting out the most random words, like “goat” or “kumquat.” Hmm, do we detect a whiff of anti-immigrant feeling here? When a young Indian fellow shouts “Monkey,” echoes of “macaca” bounce in our heads. Then the voiceover explains, “Ordinary words can mean up to one million dollars.” Okay, so it’s the frazzled teacher who doesn’t get it. Just when we think we’re out of the woods, the wide-eyed Indian guy gives an earnest ear-to-ear smile and blurts out in the thickest accent, “Orang-GEE-tang.” The Cringe-O-Meter swings wildly toward “Racist” but eventually settles on “Discomfiting but Amusing.” Once we get over ourselves, we recognize that it’s a funny even touching spot about dream-chasing immigrants. Plus, it stars comedic actor Debargo Sanyal.

GEICO/CHINESE WAITER

Given Geico’s genius for memorable ads, we give them the benefit of the doubt when we initially see a Chinese waiter attending to a middle-aged white couple. The two are being stared down by a pair of goggly eyes set atop a stack of cash. The waiter explains in wimpy deadpan, “That’s the money you could be saving on Geico.” Cue: Rockwell’s synth classic “I Always Feel Like Somebody’s Watching Me.” It’s so weird, it works. The Cringe-O-Meters settles on “Benignly Surreal.”

HALL’S COUGH DROPS/SUPERMARKET WORKER

While restocking a supermarket freezer, a schlubby Asian-American woman stops to wipe her nose with a tissue and pop a cough drop. In storms a tough-as-nails drill sergeant who tells “Shorty” to man-up, to show her sniffles who’s boss. “Show me your war face!” he says and this meek Asian woman lets out a roar that blows him away. The tag line: “A pep talk in every drop.” This spot just feels all sorts of wrong. First of all, the woman has a cold and really shouldn’t be handling food anyway! Second, the sight of an American soldier browbeating an Asian woman just raises the specter of Korea and Vietnam, ya know? And third, the docile Asian woman morphing into a dragon lady is too Madonna/Whore for our taste. The Cringe-O-Meters settles on “Creepily Inappropriate.”

NIVEA FOR MEN BODYWASH/ASIAN NERD

The set-up: A number of teens react negatively to a utilitarian bottle of Nivea bodywash presumably because they bought into the Axe Effect marketing and are, therefore, not ready for “a bodywash for grown ups.” One of these beta-males is a nerdy Asian college student with glasses and uneven teeth, who looks at the bottle and goes, “That’s not going increase my chances of mating.” Harsh characterization, man! But there’s something sweet about his geekatoid syntax (and his innocent belief that his getting laid depends on a grooming product and not on, say, sex appeal) that has us chuckle all too knowingly. The Cringe-o-Meter settles on “Hah! Good one!”

Or as Erma Bombeck once said, “There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.”

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