Racial Humor Research Articles

Unraveling Implicature in Racial Humor Stand-Up Comedy on YouTube

Humor is a form of communication with the intention to implicitly express meaning by exposing a sense of comedy. The primary focus of this thesis is to investigate implicatures in stand-up comedy, which are then categorized according to the type of humor and to observe how stereotype racial issue depicted through implicatures in stand-up comedy. This thesis examines the implicatures found in stand-up comedy with the underlying topic of racial humor on YouTube. This thesis is a qualitative research using documentation techniques and data cards as a research instrument. It utilizes Yule's implicature theory and David Hector Monro’s Theories of Humor. This thesis is limited to only 4 comedians with different backgrounds; Maz Jobrani, Hasan Minhaj, Jimmy O. Yang, and Gabriel Iglesias. The study found three categories of humor: superiority, incongruity and release. Incongruity is a major finding because it aligns with the characteristics of stand-up comedy which is to express genuinely miserable concepts while combining them with humor. This thesis discovered that the comedian's punchline indicated the existence of stereotypes regarding specific racial groups. The racial stereotype humor found is dominated by the Middle East, such as Iran, Arabia, and Indian. In addition, another finding in this thesis is the construction of Chinese identity. It can be inferred from the findings that humor belongs for particular occasions. People can use humor to express implicit meaning and to define their identity.

Online Satirical News as Instances of Liquid Racism: Evidence from Greek

When discussing the relationship between humour and racism, research usually concentrates on ethnic or racist jokes or on other humorous texts which expressly target migrants or other minorities. Relevant studies more or less explicitly ascribe to critical humour studies investigating topics such as how and why humour targeting the linguistic, cultural, or religious Other reproduces and maintains social discrimination and inequality, as well as how and why the generic conventions of humorous genres do not incite the audience to think critically of their content but instead enhance their tolerance for discriminatory and racist standpoints. In this context, the present study explores humorous texts that at first sight appear to have antiracist intentions. More specifically, I analyse a corpus of satirical news coming from popular Greek websites and targeting majority people for their racist views and practices towards migrants. The analysis is based on the concepts of script opposition and target as defined in the framework of the General Theory of Verbal Humour. The findings suggest that distinguishing between antiracist and racist interpretations is not an easy or straightforward matter: humour seems to blur the boundary between racism and antiracism. In order to account for this dimension of humour, I exploit the concept of liquid racism put forward by Weaver (The Rhetoric of Racist Humour) to account for the ambiguities of humorous discourse when it involves racist and antiracist meanings and interpretations.

The Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy

The Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy

Challenging Stereotypes: Prosocial Racial Humor in Luís Valdez’s Actos

ABSTRACT This article examines how Luís Valdez uses prosocial racial humor in his collection of short plays to challenge the anti-Mexican racism directed against the strikers during the 1965–1970 Delano, California, grape strike as well as to address many of the other social issues faced by the Chicano community during this period. Drawing on social psychology research on the dynamics of racial group identification and focusing on the acto entitled Los Vendidos, the article analyzes how Valdez and his Teatro Campesino created the set of conditions that allowed audience members to confront and overcome the negative effects of the racial stereotyping and ethnic slurs they were experiencing on the picket lines and elsewhere and in the process to raise their Chicano cultural and political consciousness.

The Speech Act of English and Arabic Racial Memes of Covid19

A meme is a caption image that consists of an image and a witty message which reflects worldwide current incidents. Since the outbreak, Covid19 has received its own share of memes by fueling a pile – on excuses to promote racism on Asian's and particularly the Chinese community as being the major cause of the pandemic. The present study aims to investigate racial memes of (24) English memes and (10) Arabic memes. To achieve this, a pragmatic multimodal approach has been adopted to find answers to the following questions:1- To what category does the speech act “racialize” belong to?2- Are racial intentions expressed equally in English and Arabic memes?3- Is there any difference in the frequency of racial humor in English and Arabic memes?4- Which category of text – image combination is more frequently used in English and Arabic memes?The findings of the study, show that the speech act of racialize belongs to expressive illocutionary acts since it expresses a negative psychological state of mind and has down face since it is not accepted by everyone. Although, Covid19 memes in English and Arabic sometimes share the same caption and image but the racial intention in English memes are reflected through dark humor unlike Arabic memes which are mostly humorous.

Review of “The Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy”

The phrase “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” is a common adage in the United States that suggests that people should not be affected by verbal insults or criticism. It is typically used to respond to bullying or name-calling to deflect the insult and show that the words have not caused lasting harm. The phrase is often taught to children to encourage them to ignore hurtful comments and to develop resilience in the face of adversity. However, we must ask ourselves, if a word, phrase, or joke makes you laugh out loud or puts a smirk on your face, can it still have real consequences for those it targets as the punchline? In The Souls of White Jokes, Raúl Pérez provides a compelling explanation of how White racist jokes represent a real-time measurement where Americans can see or hear the continued subjugation and disenfranchisement of Non-Whites in the United States. More specifically, White racist jokes that focus on the stark and unfounded differences between the “races” and ethnicities within America only maintain the White supremacist status quo. Based on a thorough theory discussion and using three case studies, Pérez succinctly explains that while racist jokes may seem innocuous and, at worst, a micro-aggression, there is more to it than just jestful banter. Pérez provides new explanations and evidence demonstrating how White racist jokes do much more. Whether in the past or present, these jokes create and reaffirm existing group identities and social positions, reinforce stereotypes and discriminatory practices, and allow institutions (i.e., media) to control the discourse of racial superiority and inferiority.

The Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy

The Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy

It’s Life as I See It: Black Cartoonists in Chicago, 1940–1980

It’s Life as I See It: Black Cartoonists in Chicago, 1940–1980

“What’s wrong with Blackface?”: theorizing humor ecologies and Blackface as satire

ABSTRACT In this essay, I analyze the rhetorical implications of removing sitcom episodes containing Blackface from streaming platforms. By situating Blackface performances within what I call their humor ecologies, I attend to the dynamic interplay between comedic reflexivity, racial humor ideology, comic personae, and network influence. I argue that these factors enable audiences to glean meaning from these performances that vary ideologically, and I call into question the value of removing these performances without considering them within their humor ecologies and contexts.

Reflexive racialization and discursive affect with the #VeryAsian Hashtag

ABSTRACT On 2 January 2022, Michelle Li, a local anchor in St. Louis, played a video on Twitter of herself listening stoically to an irritated caller, who complained that Li was being ‘very Asian’ for mentioning that her family ate ‘dumpling soup’ on New Year’s Day. She claimed that a White person talking about White foods would be fired. The call and Li’s response resonated among Asian Americans and prompted a viral hashtag, #VeryAsian. The essay argues that users engaged in earnest accounts of their pride and lack of shame in pan-ethnic racial belonging as well as their ethnic heritage cultures. Notably, this meant eschewing memes, a common feature of Twitter discourse, and the racial humor of signifyin’, a feature of Black Twitter. As a networked counter-public, the posts were affirmative articulations of pride rather than explicit anti-racist critique. Even when anger was mobilized and anti-Asian hate was named, the systems or people that produce it were abstracted, demonstrating the liminality of Asian American experience and the context collapse of Twitter.

‘Ted Cruz cucks again’

This article provides a multimodal semiotic analysis of the word cuck as used in online white supremacist spaces. A fundamental belief of the white supremacist ‘alt-right’ movement is an anti-Semitic narrative that positions Jewish people as a ‘global elite’ that seeks to oppress and eliminate white populations. Central to this belief is that Jewish people actively manipulate populations of colour, Black people in particular, to overtake white populations in a process known as ‘white genocide’ or ‘the great replacement’. Based on a digital ethnography of alt-right communities on Voat, Twitter and Reddit, this article demonstrates how the memeified word ‘cuck’, a pejorative term for ‘weak’ men on the US political right wing, draws from and reproduces this white nationalist conspiracy theory through allusions to interracial cuckold pornography. While disguised as innocuous, expressions like ‘cuck’ provide insight into how the alt-right weaponises misogynist and racist humour in its radicalisation efforts.

Black students' experiences of “acceptable” racism at a UK university

AbstractOur research, conducted with 30 Black students at a predominantly White institution, used mixed qualitative methods to investigate Black students' sense‐making of experiences that signalled their non‐belonging. All participants experienced both overt and covert racism including the n‐word, racist humour, and negative stereotyping; and this occurred in public and intimate spaces. Our reflexive thematic analysis centred on interactional dynamics that can explain how racism on campus is rendered acceptable; and how and why this is consequential for how Black students can act. We found that White students' practices of “acceptable” racism entailed the denial of responsibility and the privileging of White experiences to deflect responsibility. Importantly, these devices signal that the use of racist discourses does not always arise from unconscious bias or naivety. The perceived power dynamics whereby White students decide who belongs and what is acceptable contributed to Black students' inability to act on their own terms.

Consequences of Laughter: Reflections on Performing Comedic Self-Deprecation and Reacting to Deprecation in General

In this autoethnographic essay, the author draws on his experiences as a Chinese immigrant in Canada to reflect on how they shaped his style of comedy and how they revealed the limitations of self-deprecating humor, particularly when it is used as a response to jokes that imply discriminatory worldviews. While a self-deprecating response can steal the laugh from the person telling a derogatory joke, its outcomes are not always certain. Studies of audience responses to comedy have indicated that the presence or absence of laughter can be seen as an affirmation or rejection of the ideas embedded in the jokes, suggesting how, when self-deprecation succeeds in provoking laughter, it runs the risk of perpetuating the harmful ideas it aims to counteract. The author examines his own confrontations with racist humor alongside accounts of similar situations involving Asian comedians living in the West, such as Ryan Higa and Joe Wong, to illustrate the dilemma of self-deprecating humor as well as the potential personal and professional consequences for those who employ it.

Navigating Black Identity and White Desire: Seven-Eleven and the 1920s Crossover Musical Comedy

Navigating Black Identity and White Desire: <i>Seven-Eleven</i> and the 1920s Crossover Musical Comedy

Humor Racista: Uma Revisão Sistemática de Estudos

he present study aims to analyze the scientifi c production of studies from diff erent areas that focused on racist humor. For the analysis, a systematic review was carried out in the Scielo Brasil and Portal Periódicos CAPES databases in April 2021. The search used the keywords racism, humor and joke. After applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria, 42 articles remained in the sample. For the analysis, the abstracts of the articles composed a textual corpus that was submitted to lexical analysis with the help of the IRAMUTEQ software. The results indicate that the topic has been researched from six diff erent thematic axes: racist humor on platforms, critical discussion of racist humor, blackface, racist Araujo, C. L., Gois, D. F.2Cadernos de Psicologia, Ribeirão Preto, vol. 2, nº 1, p. 1-13 - Abril/2022and everyday humor, racist humor and interracial groups and racist humor and politics. However, we identifi ed a small number of scientifi c publications ahead of the need for debate on the topic of racist humor and racism, especially in the fi eld of psychology. Furthermore, there is a need for studies that aim to analyze the impact and understanding of the phenomenon from the perspective of those aff ected

Rapport Management in Online Racial Humor

The present paper aims to investigate how racial humor, posted on Twitter affects rapport between interlocutors at both the interpersonal and intercommoned levels. Thus, the main problem this thesis attempt to address is English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) users' potential lack of awareness of the racially sensitive issues and how to deal with them in (online) intercultural communication. The paper aims to advance the understanding as to how the social and technological affordances of the medium (Herring, 2007) can shape the contexts in which racial humor is morally perceived and attitudinally assessed (in terms of politeness and impoliteness) by the audience on Twitter. After in-depth reading and a systematic coding process, a dataset totaling (312) racial jokes and (956) responses from various users, racial jokes circulated online were found to orient rapport either towards challenge or enhancement. These two rapport orientations were found to be (im)politeness-implicative on two different levels; the interpersonal level between the account administrator and his/her followers, and the societal level between social groups targeted by racial humor and the dominant social group in the society.

Pragmatic analysis of racial humor in online discourse

The present paper aims to investigate how racial humor is triggered in racial jokes posted online. Racial jokes and the ways it is triggered is an under-researched topic in comparison to the quickly developing literature about other types of racist language. Thus, one of the main problems this thesis attempt to address is English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) users’ potential lack of awareness of the racially sensitive issues and how to deal with them in (online) intercultural communication. The paper analyzes (312) racial jokes, collected from eight different racial Joke accounts on Twitter. After in-depth reading and a systematic coding process of the dataset, three types of racial jokes were distinguished. These are superiority-based triggers, incongruity-based triggers, and blended triggers. These three different types were found to perform two different functions: racial stereotype reinforcement and racial stereotype challenge.

Armado or the Other speaking the Native’s Language: Racialising the Spaniard in Love’s Labour’s Lost

In Love’s Labour’s Lost, Armado is the only foreigner – a resident alien – living among the native people. From his own point of view, he speaks the Other’s language throughout the play because English is not his first language. Characters on stage laugh at his linguistic mistakes, use of archaisms, neologisms, unintelligible prose and invite the audience to mock him as well. Armado is turned into ridicule for speaking an incongruous kind of English that bewilders and entertains the native speakers. He is racialised through his use of English marked by barbarisms. As a non-native speaker, Armado alienates the English language by marking it with his Spanishness – in his mouth, English is turned into a bombastic, fantastical, pretentious, and hermetic language. Moreover, Armado is also typecast as the braggart soldier or the Italian stock character of Il Capitano from the Commedia Dell’Arte. Shakespeare draws on the representation of the Spaniard from the Italian dramatic tradition. This paper aims at examining the extent to which we can speak of ethnic or racist humour concerning the way Armado is marginalised as the butt of the joke in the play. The issue at stake is to explore the articulation of language and national identity through the character of Armado.

Ethics in Comedy: Essays on Crossing the Line

Ethics in Comedy: Essays on Crossing the Line

Ethics in Comedy: Essays on Crossing the Line

Ethics in Comedy: Essays on Crossing the Line