Foreign Names Amusement at NPR

I was listening to NPR this morning when Susan Stamberg did a piece on summer reading. One of the people she interviewed suggested a John Burdett detective novel with protagonist Sonchai Jitpleecheep, which pretty much sounds the way it's spelled. Ms. Stamberg made not one but two jokes based on sneezing - acting as though the interview subject had sneezed when he mentioned the character by name and then referring to the detective as Mr. Gesundheit. What a condescending attempt at humor for someone whose family, like virtually everyone else in this country, originally came from somewhere else, and whose name it its original version might, as is true of so many others, might have been similarly difficult for an "American" to pronounce. I suspect her name might also sound - let's generously say unusual - to someone from Thailand. Hopefully people there have better manners than to mock that with which they are unfamiliar.