Abstract

Over the past 20 years, stand-up comedy has been part of the public debate within a prevailing ideology of non-discrimination and inclusiveness – most notably in relation to political correctness. In this context, a trend seems to be emerging, in which a person’s taste in humour is defined by their political identity (Healy, 2016). In other words, a joke is not funny unless it meets a person’s taste conventions prescribed by a political paradigm (Healy, 2016). While the current humour and comedy research aided the analysis of this paper, they present dichotomous views that either allow or disallow joking about certain topics. This dichotomy suggests that the current humour and comedy research does not do justice to the complexity of the topic and that there is a need for further research. This major research paper examined stand-up comedy in an age of political correctness and argued that an ideology of political correctness, non-discrimination and inclusiveness influences the content of stand-up comedy performances and the audience’s responses to them. I analyzed YouTube videos containing race-based and rape jokes as well as jokes about gender stereotypes. Moreover, I examined YouTube users’ comments to the three different joke-tokens. Examining both the jokes and YouTube users’ comments gave me insight into how these joketokens are understood and perceived by YouTube users. None of the jokes can be considered politically correct. This implies that these jokes can ignite political debates, which was observable in YouTube comments about feminism, liberals, gender stereotypes, sexism, misogyny, racism, East Asian culture, rape myths and misandry. The YouTube commenters’ perception seems to be that political correctness has been attempting to influence the stand-up comedy environment with the aim to dictate the content of stand-up comedy performances. However, the YouTube users see political correctness as a “killer” of stand-up comedy and as a negative concept mainly promoted by liberals, the leftist society and feminists. The most dominant theme across all YouTube comments seemed to be the aversion to feminism. Regardless of the joke, feminism was the concept that commenters blamed for the existence of political correctness, the censorship of stand-up comedy performances, for a joke’s lack of funniness, and for the lack of awareness and importance of male rape in research and society. In stand-up comedy, it is an art and talent to convey the literal meaning of a joke so that the subtext is clearly derivable – and even then, the audience’s interpretation depends on experiences, emotions, values, beliefs and political ideologies.

Highlights

  • Rape jokes are great because they make a comic seem so edgy and dangerous, and the truth is: It’s like the safest area to talk about in comedy cause who is gonna complain about a rape joke? I mean I would say rape victims, but they are traditionally not complainers” (Humor Legendado, 2016) This research paper examines stand-up comedy in an age of political correctness

  • Regardless of the joke, feminism was the concept that commenters blamed for the existence of political correctness, the censorship of stand-up comedy performances, for a joke’s lack of funniness, and for the lack of awareness and importance of male rape in research and society

  • I argue that an ideology of political correctness, non-discrimination and inclusiveness influences the content of stand-up comedy performances and the audience’s responses to them

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Summary

Introduction

Rape jokes are great because they make a comic seem so edgy and dangerous, and the truth is: It’s like the safest area to talk about in comedy cause who is gonna complain about a rape joke? I mean I would say rape victims, but they are traditionally not complainers” (Humor Legendado, 2016) This research paper examines stand-up comedy in an age of political correctness. I argue that an ideology of political correctness, non-discrimination and inclusiveness influences the content of stand-up comedy performances and the audience’s responses to them To accomplish this argument, I conducted inductive research using grounded theory to analyze YouTube videos containing race-based and rape jokes as well as jokes about gender stereotypes by a female comedian and male comedians. Over the past 20 years, stand-up comedy has been the subject of the public debate within a prevailing ideology of non-discrimination and inclusiveness – most notably in relation to political correctness This debate implicates stand-up comedy as a tool to potentially disclose or conceal power relations and to promote political ideologies and inequalities (Pérez & Greene, 2016). Kramer (as cited in Pérez & Greene, 2016) states that stand-up comedians making jokes about rape can give the audience the impression that “rape, a brutal and violent act, can be funny, entertaining and unserious” (p. 266) and potentially result in controversy

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