Looking at the Latin “Freak”: Audience Reception of John Leguizamo's Culturally Intimate Humor

Abstract

In addition to his variegated acting roles, John Leguizamo has written and starred in four one-man Broadway plays to date. In these performances, Leguizamo engages in a great deal of Latino culturally intimate humor that targets the foibles and folkways of the New York City Latino culture he grew up in. In this paper, I perform content analyses of two of his one-man shows, Mambo Mouth and Freak, and then scrutinize the responses of 196 college students who watched the same performances. Latino respondents were more familiar with Leguizamo's work and expressed significantly more appreciation for Leguizamo's comedy than non-Latino respondents. They were also more likely to appreciate Leguizamo's representations of Latino life. In contradiction to my hypothesis, a very substantial majority of both Latino and non-Latino viewers thought that Leguizamo portrayed Latinos in a negative fashion. While Latino respondents were not as likely as non-Latinos to use harsh descriptives, the inability of respondents to see past the dominant cultural stereotypes of Latinos is attributed to the fact that Leguizamo exudes a working-class perspective, the overall lack of Latino visibility in popular culture, and the inherently problematic nature of culturally intimate humor.