Developing a rhetorical analysis of racist humour: examining anti-black jokes on the Internet

Abstract

Racist humour is frequently the subject of media and public debate in relation to issues of offence and acceptability. Despite this, little has been done to analyse it or its relationship to other forms of racism. I argue that an analysis of racist humour needs to account for the rhetorical structures of humour – to consider humour as a rhetorical device similar to metaphor or metonym – that has a persuasive potential. Using jokes from four US websites, the rhetorical aspects of humour are unpacked through the use of rhetorical discourse analysis and semiotic theories of humour. I then identify an important effect of racist humour. Zygmunt Bauman's ideas on the problem of ambivalence for dichotomous discourse and category formation are employed to argue that racist humour expresses racist dichotomies and has the potential, among others, to “hide” the ambivalence to which such dichotomies are prone. The article then considers the meaning and ambivalence of less severe racist joking.

Keywords:

• ambivalence
• embodied racism
• incongruity theories
• racist humour
• rhetoric
• rhetorical analysis

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the two anonymous referees and Michael Pickering for their useful comments on the article. Thanks also to Gregor McLennan and Thomas Osborne for equally useful comments on an earlier version. This article was prepared during an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Social Sciences at Loughborough University (ESRC ref.: PTA-026-27-2168).

Notes

1. The idea has some recurrence; for example, Freud suggests something similar with his observation of the techniques of “condensation” and “displacement” in jokes, which resemble metonym and metaphor, respectively (1991 [1905]). Condensation is, for Freud, the subsumption of many events or symbols under one object, and forms an unconscious method of disguise and expression. Displacement has a similar function but employs one object or event to symbolise another. Koestler (1949) also acknowledges the incongruous structure of metaphor, and Palmer (1987) presents a semiotic analysis of the similarity between humorous incongruity and metaphor.

2. In this quote, Attardo's omissions appear as they do in his text as: […]. Mine appear as ….

3. Eco also suggests that “[t]he comic … seems bound to its time, society, cultural anthropology” (1986, 269). Eco is referring to the content rather than the interaction of content and structure in the comic.

4. For the jokes that follow, the rhetorical triangle – of pathos, ethos and logos – will not be outlined because it is the same as that of pervious jokes, and so risks repetition.