Abstract
This essay by Raúl Pérez is a critical examination of comedian Lisa Lampanelli and the development of what Pérez calls neoliberal white racial comedy—a commercial racial comedy where the history, significance and persistence of racism and racial inequality is minimized, trivialized and monetized. This brand of comedy took root in the post-civil rights period and is upheld and reinforced through a deliberate set of comic performance practices that work to veil the use of comic racist talk as “not racist” and commercially palatable. This denial and trivialization of racism has worked to grant white comics and humorists discursive license to use and profit from racist jokes, narratives, and slurs unapologetically under the guise of humor, comic free speech, and as an attack on so-called “political correctness.” Pérez contends that this strategic deployment of racist humor by white comedians like Lampanelli contributed to the normalization of racist discourse in an ostensibly colorblind society, where racist talk was disavowed more broadly.
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