Learning to make racism funny in the ‘color-blind’ era: Stand-up comedy students, performance strategies, and the (re)production of racist jokes in public

Abstract

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.

Your Privilege Is Trending: Confronting Whiteness on Social Media

“…@CultureIsLife: "We gave you the right to "x"#whiteproverbs-being forced to stop denying ppl rights is not quite the same thing as "giving" ppl rights These quite extensive commentaries on the proverbs indicate the seriousness of the game, despite the overall playfulness of the meme. This reduces some of the risk of irony that the audience will not understand, although in doing so it reduces the humor and makes the discussion heavier (Jacobs & Smith, 1997, p. 74 In these responses, we see explicit examples of the kind of reverse discourse that makes humor a liberating act for nonWhite people (Pérez, 2013;Weaver, 2010).…”

Locating and applying critical discourse analysis within education policy

“…Therefore, at the level of methodology, we argue that the use of discourse perspectives may be essential in helping the field understand substantive policy matters given the breadth of disciplines upon which policy research tends to draw. Across these many subfields, there are a growing number of examples of discourse methodologies being employed, including political science (e.g., Bhatia, 2006;Townshend, 2004), sociology (e.g., Perez, 2013), and educational psychology (e.g., Lester & Gabriel, 2014), among many others.…”

The rhetoric of disparagement humor: An analysis of anti-semitic joking online

“…This section of Billig's work adds to the toolkit with which to examine the discourses that surround disparagement humor and could be migrated to other contexts. A linked approach has been developed by Raúl Pérez (2013) which details the 'rhetorical performance strategies' that 'couch ethnic and racial stereotypes' (478) in contemporary stand-up comedy. Pérez records a number of strategies used by trainee comedians to make race based material acceptable.…”