Racist Humour and Racist Ideology in British Television, or I Laughed Till You Cried

Abstract

A capacity for humour and laughter seems to be a genuinely universal facility of human kind, one which transcends different cultures. However, the means of expressing humour, the stimuli which are potentially humorous and, indeed, the significance attached to the possession of ‘a sense of humour’ clearly vary with culture. In Britain, there are strong cultural sanctions for those lacking a demonstrable capacity for humour, and humour itself is valued as a medium of communication and a lubricant for social interaction. The benign, and even cathartic, properties of humour are celebrated in folk-wisdom through such utterances as ‘if we can laugh together we can live together’ and ‘it’s not so bad if you can laugh about it’. This is a position which has received support from psychologists of varying persuasions. There is the unqualified statement of Grotjahn (1957, p. viii): Everything done with laughter helps us to be human. Laughter is a way of human communication which is essentially and exclusively human. It can be used to express an unending variety of emotions. It is based on guilt-free release of aggression and any release makes us perhaps a little better and more capable of understanding one another, ourselves and life. KeywordsRace RelationBlack ImmigrationSelective PerceptionBlack ExperienceSituation ComedyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.