North American Muslim Satire on YouTube: Combatting or Reinforcing Stereotypes?

ABSTRACT

Based on interviews with a racially diverse group of 10 college students and the textual analysis of two episodes of a 2016 web series, Guess Who’s Muslim, produced by Canadian Muslims shown on the YouTube channel West Dawn Media, this paper illustrates how humor can be used to challenge Islamophobic/Orientalist myths and invite viewers to reflect upon commonly held Orientalist/Islamophobic notions that are largely taken for granted in Western nations where Muslims are a minority. Kumar’s five discursive frames of how Islam is articulated by the “primary definers’“ and “secondary definers” of U.S. media are discussed, illustrating how GWM attempts to counter them. While noting that the internet provides a space for alternative media representations of Muslims, created by Muslims themselves, the interview data reveal that the use of humor is not unproblematic and, for certain people, may teach or reinforce the very stereotypes the show aims to combat.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Although it could be said that the comedic appeal of Youssef’s sitcom, streaming on Netflix, is the show’s tendency to mock Arab and Muslim identity using the Orientalist stereotypical tropes of Muslims and Arabs that it is supposedly combatting (Fahim, 2020). Because Youssef’s show is beholden to a corporate media conglomerate – Hulu, it may be more likely to rely on well-known stereotypes for success (Jhally, 1989; Turow, 1992).

² https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKJTcIutU_8.

³ Although a curious Internet user may discover refined documentaries about Islam which originally aired on Western television outlets such as Inside Islam (2002) on the History Channel or Paradise Found (2005) produced by Channel 4 in the UK, these documentaries still include images of Muslim terrorists and terrorist groups engaging in hateful activities or some reference to terrorist acts done in the name of Islam. For example, less than three minutes into Inside Islam (2002), a machine gun-toting Osama Bin Laden is seen in the desert practicing his aim. In the first two minutes of Paradise Found (2005), the host of the program, art critic Waldemar Januszczak, mentions the 7/7/05 London terrorist attack in which 52 Brits died.

⁴ The reason that only two episodes were selected was so interviewees would not be deterred from participating due to time constraints.

⁵ None of the students recruited had any previous relationship with the P.I. Their professors offered extra-credit to the students who agreed to be interviewed.

⁶ Two of the participants did not feel comfortable being recorded.

⁷ According to the article titled, “NYC Bear Guide” in the April 15, 2015 issue of Time Out New York written by columnist Ethan Lacroix, a “bear” in Gay culture refers to a gay man with face fuzz [a beard] and a bit of extra meat [husky in size] on his bones (LaCroix, 2015).

⁸ Islam is a faith, rather than a race, and members of any racial group can practice it. However, as scholars of race and Islamophobia have demonstrated, through government policy and U.S. popular culture, Islam has become racialized in the U.S. (Bayoumi, 2010; Chan-Malik, 2018; Sheehi, 2010).

⁹ Sylvia Chan-Malik’s Being Muslim: A Cultural History of Women of Color and American Islam (NYU Press, 2018) provides an excellent historical account of why Islam as a faith appealed to women of color in the United States from the 1920s-1960s.