Racial jokes and humor

SIGNIFICANCE: Racial and ethnic jokes and humor can centralize or marginalize groups by making them the butt of mockery or satiric comment. Because much of this comedy deals with stereotypes, it offers some insights into the dynamics of intergroup relations (including their stratification and boundaries of identity) and the possibilities of a multi-ethnic community.

The last half of the nineteenth century in the United States saw the growth of dialect humor, particularly the Double Dutch of Charles Godfrey Leland’s Hans Breitmann, which was a parody of German English, the “Dutch” being a phonetic approximation of Deutsch. The confused vowel sounds, extra consonants, and intermingling of German words with English made for lively vaudeville entertainment on the printed page or on stage, where actors impersonated German American characters.

American vaudeville in the 1870s was a large brotherhood of dialect comics, some in blackface, others portraying Irish, Jewish, Scottish, English, or “Dutch” characters, who mocked predominant ethnic traits. The Irish, for instance, were shown as belligerent, bewildered, comic drunks; Italians were represented as promiscuous, irresponsible, hyperemotional rascals; Black people were lazy, dishonest, promiscuous, and irresponsible; Jewish people were canny and manipulative; and Germans were stodgily conservative. All ethnic groups shared the quality of “dumbness,” that is, stupidity or naïveté. The reason is that “stupid” jokes, unlike jokes about religion or sex, are universally transferable because everybody seems to have a common view of stupidity. “Stupid” jokes export their qualities from joke tellers in one group and pin them on some other regional, ethnic, or national group. For instance, “dumb” Irish jokes can be turned into “dumb” Polish jokes by a mere change in name or accent.

The reverse of the “stupid” is the “canny,” which is a label attached to groups whose members are stereotyped as urban, mobile, innovative, and entrepreneurial (such as Jewish, Armenian, Scottish, and Dutch people) by their respective competitive opponents. For example, a Pakistani person can tell a “stupid” or “canny” joke about an Indian people, or a Finn about a Swede, and vice versa. Such jokes are a means of attributing human deficiencies to or making other criticisms of rival groups, and as in the days of vaudeville, they continue to propagate stereotypes.

Values of Ethnic Humor

Ethnic jokes about another group reflect joke tellers’ perceptions of themselves and their own merits. Jokes told by one group about another magnify differences of language, culture, behavior, and values, but they are told because of basic similarities between the groups, for the butts of these jokes (who are regarded as comic anomalies or imperfect people) tend to live on the periphery of the joke tellers’ society. In the case of the Double Dutch jokes, the comedy and anti-immigrant bias were correlated. In the late 1880s, the United States was a rapidly growing nation that distrusted linguistic diversity in the fear that “foreigners” would subvert the American way of life. However, on the other side of the issue was the fact that dialects and ethnic jokes were attempts to find ways of expressing conditions of life in the New World. The comic accents represented people struggling to find a language that would help them cope as small communities within society at large.

Some jokes dealt with immigrant assimilation. In one such joke, Cohen thanks a gentile friend for a nice salmon dinner. When his host corrects him, saying it was ham, Cohen retorts, “So who asked you?” The joke works two sides of the issue: On one hand, it expresses the non-Jewish people's hospitality, while on the other, it marks an underlying problem in assimilation. In this case, the “ethnic” wins, for while Cohen is targeted for hypocrisy and glib manipulation, he is obviously able to eat his salmon and have his ham too.

Ethnic humor has been judged acceptable when it is not ruthlessly insulting, for, like racial joking by individuals within a homogeneous group, it serves as a safety valve to let off steam and reduce ethnic tensions, as in this multiethnic definition of foreplay:

Italian version: Yo, baby, get ovah heah!

Irish version: A six-pack.

Jewish version: Two hours of begging.

This type of joke actually builds a sense of community among disparate groups by drawing on multiple ethnic groups in the joke context. It confirms how individuals receive their impressions of others from folkloric sources and enables one to appreciate minority idiosyncrasies and restrictions by recognizing stereotypes—as in the following case: “How do we know Jesus was Jewish? Because he lived at home with his mother until he was thirty; he went into his father’s business; and he had a mother who thought he was God.”

Historians of ethnic humor disagree about the value of such comedy. Joseph Boskin argues that such humor allows cruel, hostile, negative sentiments to directly or indirectly sanction and frame oppressive social control, whereas Constance Rourke, leading historian of American humor, contends that the object of ethnic humor is to create fresh bonds of fellowship in society. Ethnic jokes can also be a form of social resistance, according to Samuel Schmidt, a professor in Mexico. Scholars have noted that Mexican jokes making fun of Americans serve as a form of resistance to growing pressure to adopt American culture and also work to strengthen ties between the Mexican people. The most incisive view comes from Christie Davies, who maintains that the oppositional pairs that form the basis of ethnic humor (stupid versus canny, lazy versus relentlessly ambitious, cowardly versus aggressive) allow a society to establish boundaries of approved or scorned behavior from within its own circumference. Moreover, the social and cultural factors are subordinate to their cognitive value or the ways in which they contribute to acculturation. Davies points out that the uses and scope of ethnic humor depend on a number of variables, including who says what to whom under what circumstances.

Ethnic Jokes and Stratification

Social and political factors account for the nature of some ethnic jokes. Anti-Semitism, the cyclical incompetence of Italian governments, and the ferocity of uniformed Germans are facts in themselves and serve to shape the perceptions of joke tellers. Social pecking order also determines the nature of jokes. For instance, sixteenth-century and early-seventeenth-century jokes about the belligerent Welsh were based on a satirical English view of an impoverished small gentry in a backward rural society who cultivated excessive pride in their ancestry and martial tradition. Similarly, the earliest joke about German militarism dates back to a Prussian belief in order, discipline, obedience, and a determined use of force. Such jokes reveal which group is at the center of power and which is not. They also show that the culture of the mocked group is subordinate to or derived from that of the joke teller.

What Jokes Reveal about People

Ethnic jokes about the “stupid” are jokes told at the expense of certain groups who are seen as the antitheses of those telling the jokes. The dynamic of joke telling is competition, but ethnic jokes are not necessarily good indications of the joke teller’s feelings toward the butts of the jokes. Performers do not necessarily dislike those they caricature or debunk. Ethnic jokes may indicate that it is not an individual who is ridiculous, but rather the stereotype itself—as in Phil Nee’s joke about himself as a Chinese American: “It’s not always fun being Chinese. My girlfriend left me last week for a guy who looks exactly like me.” The self-reflexive humor has a point: Members of a stereotypical group cannot even tell themselves apart because their identity is blurred by a stereotype. This is an acknowledgment of a certain reality, and it is not a snide dismissal but a coping mechanism. It confirms the fallibility of categorizing and generalizing, even in jokes.

Bibliography

Attardo, Salvatore, ed. Encyclopedia of Humor Studies. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2014.

Boskin, Joseph.Humor and Social Change. Boston: Boston Public Lib., 1979.

Davies, Christie. Ethnic Humor around the World: A Comparative Analysis. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1997.

Fine, Gary Alan, and Christine Wood. "Accounting for Jokes." Western Folklore 69.3–4 (2010): 299–321. PDF file.

Pérez, Raúl. The Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy. United States, Stanford University Press, 2022.

Rappoport, Leon. Punchlines: The Case for Racial, Ethnic, and Gender Humor. Westport: Praeger, 2005.

Schmidt, Samuel. Seriously Funny: Mexican Political Jokes as Social Resistance. United States, University of Arizona Press, 2014.

Sue, Christina A., and Tanya Golash-Boza. "‘It Was Only a Joke’: How Racial Humour Fuels Colour-Blind Ideologies in Mexico and Peru." Ethnic & Racial Studies 36.10 (2013): 1582–98. PDF file.

Weaver, Simon. The Rhetoric of Racist Humour: US, UK and Global Race Joking. Burlington: Ashgate, 2011.