This article contends performance comedy serves as a mechanism for expressing ethnic and racial stereotypes in public and presents a challenge to studies of contemporary racial discourse which suggest overt racetalk in public is on the decline. In this ethnographic study on the training of stand-up comedians, I probe how comedy students learn to use rhetorical performance strategies to couch ethnic and racial stereotypes in more palatable ways, in order to be 'funny' rather than 'offensive' in public. Using critical discourse analysis (CDA), this study illustrates the role elites play in managing racial discourse. It is found that white versus non-white comedy students are taught to engage in racial discourse in different ways. Whites are taught distance and denial strategies which allow them to engage in overt racial commentary and deny racism or racist intent, while non-whites are often encouraged to engage in racial stereotypes uncritically. This study shows how strategic use of humor allows the 'constraints' on current racial discourse, on whites in particular, to be broken, suggesting a new phase of color-blind racism may be underway.

Critical Race scholars contend that the current period of “race relations” is dominated by a “color-blind” racial ideology. Scholars maintain that although individuals continue to hold conventional racial views, today people tend to minimize overt racial discourse and direct racial language in public to avoid the stigma of racism. This essay identifies racist humor as a discourse that challenges such constraints on public racist discourse, often derided as “political correctness,” in ways that reinforce everyday and systemic forms of racism in an ostensibly color-blind society. While humor research generally highlights the “positive” aspects of social humor and celebrates the possibilities of humor to challenge and subvert dominant racial meanings, the “negative” aspects of racist humor are often overlooked, downplayed, or are viewed as extreme and fringe incidents that occur at the periphery of mainstream society. Moreover, race scholars have largely ignored the role of humor as a “serious” site for the reproduction and circulation of racism in society. I contend that in a post-civil-rights and color-blind society, where overt racist discourse became disavowed in public, racist humor allows interlocutors to foster social relations by partaking in the “forbidden fruit” of racist discourse. In this article, I highlight the (re)circulation of racist jokes across three social contexts (in mass market joke books, on the Internet, and in the criminal justice system), to illustrate that racist humor exists not in a bygone past or at the margins of society but is widely practiced and circulated today across various social contexts and institutions in an ostensibly color-blind society.

While recent scholarship has examined the capacity of race-based humor to "upend" racial inequalities, or has focused on comedic "heroes" who use humor "subversively" to challenge racism, less attention has been paid to the evolution of racist humor and its continued role in supporting dominant racial ideologies. This article reviews key works on the historical and current functions of racist humor in the United States, in order to situate racist humor as a

This study examines US comedian Bill Dana, of Hungarian-Jewish descent, and his Latino minstrel character, “José Jiménez,” during the civil rights period. By situating Dana and Jiménez within the social and political context of Latinos in the US during the 1960s, I argue Dana’s comedy continued the tradition of racial ridicule at a time when blackface minstrelsy was increasingly unpopular: a result of contestation by African American civil rights groups. Analyzing primary sources (oral histories, news articles, and audio/visual media), I examine the initial popularity of José Jiménez in the early 1960s, the mechanisms used to ridicule Latinos, the role of media in constructing narratives of non-racism and acceptance by Latinos, and the resulting contestation of the character by Chicano/Latino media activists and civil rights organizations. I conclude that public racial ridicule of Latinos has not been constrained as some have suggested, but that it has changed since the civil rights era.

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