1574 - On the Sociology of Race and Humor

Session Submission Type: Invited Session

Description

From standup comedy to standing around the office water cooler, and from 19th century blackface minstrel shows to modern day fraternity house “racial” parties, race has long played an important role in the social production of humor. Scholars of humor, meanwhile, have long known and shown that the line between racial play, and racist joke telling, is blurred and often transgressed. This Special Session Submission for the 2018 ASA aims to explore how positive effects, including joy, pleasure, happiness, and even community, are produced, circulated, and distributed through humor, and the role these affects play in enabling and constraining dominant racial ideologies. We will also examine how negative effects, such as othering, exclusion and anxiety are coexisting features and byproducts of race based humor. Papers in this session will examine the intersections of humor, migration and racialization, how race based jokes and cartoons reinforce and disrupt dominant racial ideologies, the prevalence of racist humor in an ostensibly colorblind society, and the relation between racial humor and ‘serious’ discourses and ideologies of race.

Sub Unit

• Special Sessions

Session Organizer

• Raúl Pérez, University of Denver

Individual Presentations

• Joking in Colors: Is Racial Teasing Racist Teasing? - Gary Alan Fine, Northwestern University; Corey D. Fields, Georgetown University

• Dutch Racial Humor: Between Cultural Archive, Collective Embarrassment, and Embattled Identity - Giselinde Kuipers, University of Amsterdam

• The Humor of White Supremacy: Then and Now - Raúl Pérez, University of Denver

• Comedy, Racism and Brexit - Simon Weaver, Brunel University London