Jokes, rhetoric and embodied racism: a rhetorical discourse analysis of the logics of racist jokes on the internet

Abstract

This article outlines the racist rhetoric employed in anti-black jokes on five internet websites. It is argued that racist jokes can act as important rhetorical devices for serious racisms, and thus work in ways that can support racism in particular readings. By offering a rhetorical discourse analysis of jokes containing embodied racism – or the discursive remains of biological racism – it is shown that internet jokes express two key logics of racism. These logics are inclusion and exclusion. It is argued that inclusion usually inferiorizes and employs race stereotypes whereas exclusion often does not. The article expands this second category by highlighting exclusionary ‘black’ and ‘nigger’ jokes. These categories of non-stereotyped race or ethnic joking have been largely ignored in humour studies because of a reliance on a problematic and celebratory definition of the ethnic joke. Thus a wider definition of racist humour is offered.