Toward a Critical Humor Studies Praxis

Aaron Shellow-Lavine: How does your humor/comedy research engage with questions of community, especially with regard to race/racism/racial identity?

Beck Krefting: My research has and continues to focus on the discourses circulating about stand-up comedy and its practitioners, particularly minoritized comedians, and the economy of stand-up comedy—namely, the production, distribution, and consumption of it—and how that changes over time alongside evolving technologies, shifting political climates and public beliefs, attitudes, and values. Why is comedy steeped in social justice (what I call “charged humor”) profitable during certain moments and not in others? Another way of asking this is when and where and among whom are antiracism, gender, and sexual parity profitable and when and where and among whom are anti-Blackness, homophobia, and white nationalism profitable? What’s going on in the world when there’s an audience for marginalized stories/lives and what kinds of discourses are used to undercut the value of these stories? I explore those questions in All Joking Aside: American Humor and Its Discontents.

I’ve also published on the topic of modern-day minstrelsy, the performative and strategic deployment of racialized, sexualized, and gendered stock characters for comedic effect, paying close attention to the ways consumers reward so-called imitations of the other and the pressure comedians, particularly minoritized comedians, feel to perform in ways consonant with stereotypes that have been circulating for centuries. My work on discourses around political correctness and comedy reveal a network of rhetorical gatekeeping mechanisms informed by neoliberal market logics that are designed to defend the right to disparage others. I’m currently working on a new project that examines how comedic discourses have weaponized racialized and gendered violence, particularly in the cultural forms that spawned stand-up comedy such as minstrelsy and vaudeville. Put differently, I’m investigating how minoritized communities have been subject to violence and social precarity because of the proliferation of comedic cultural messaging vis-a-vis forms of entertainment that dehumanize minority subjectivities all in the name of good fun.

Viveca Greene: Beck, you do an admirable job of addressing “charged humor” in All Joking Aside and charting what you characterize as “its pathways from production to exchange to consumption” (Krefting, 25). That’s something critical media studies scholars aspire to do, but it’s not easy. Anyway, like you, I’ve been interested in discourses circulating about humor and comedy for a long time and especially in light of controversies around racial cartoons and memes, rape jokes, and satirical news articles. These discourses often align with racialized communities, and Linda Hutcheon’s concept of discursive communities (1995) is one I’ve returned to many times in theorizing reactions to ironic texts, such as to the cartoons depicting Muhammad in the Danish Jyllands-Posten in 2005, Barry Blitt’s 2008 “Politics of Fear” New Yorker cover, the misogynist/racist/transphobic/abelist Comedy Central show Tosh.0 (2009–20), and the rape joke Daniel Tosh told at the Laugh Factory in 2012. Humor invites some of us to join particular communities and see ourselves as insiders and often in opposition to other communities consisting of those presented as outsiders.

My current scholarship focuses on far-right online communities, specifically on how humor sustains and expands white supremacist communities in contributing to racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, and antisemitic ideologies—as well as to conspiracy theories, policies, and acts of extreme violence. There are strong communities to be found on far-right image boards where racist humor and white supremacist conspiracy theories intermingle. Such humor and theories make similar community-oriented appeals—especially to white men—and, as I discovered in my recent work on mass shootings inspired by Great Replacement/white genocide conspiracy theories and memes, they both perform many of the same social functions. They play active roles in shaping identity, creating communities structured around us/them and insider/outsider binaries, and performing boundary maintenance (in a symbolic and at times very physical/geographic sense).

Aaron Shellow-Lavine: Your work focuses on boundaries as well, J, but in a very different context, doesn’t it?

J Finley: The bulk of my research engages with questions about race, gender, and sexuality and how Black women use humor to play with and many times undercut the boundaries of these categories. As a scholar and practitioner of Black feminist comedy, from the page to the stage, I think through the promise and challenges of comedy as a tool that both enables the subversion of cultural and social norms—interestingly, norms that function to define humor in the first place—and that reinforces the status quo, especially when it targets groups who are at the social, political, and cultural margins. The notion of community looms large in my work. Black women are often targets of racist, misogynistic, and sexist discourse—especially humor—and when I’ve interviewed comics and people who work in the entertainment industry, the desire to be understood, to be taken seriously in the context of these dehumanizing discourses on our own terms usually comes up. When I’m writing and teaching, I always foreground the ways multiply marginalized, or intersectional, subjects deal with overlapping forms of domination and dehumanization in and through comedy, paying specific attention to strategies Black women comics employ on public stages and in everyday life to “fight” on several fronts at the same time.

My recent book Sass: Black Women’s Humor and Humanity employs ethnographic fieldwork and oral history interviews with Black women humorists working in various genres across time and geographical space and argues that we can and must codify the particularity of Black women’s humor. In the process of researching and writing the book I came to understand the crucial process for Black women humorists of cultivating audiences attuned to the shared (if varied) historical and cultural connections that make our humor coherent. Many of my interlocutors insist that these communities have often sustained their artistic practice and contributed to their professional survival. One of the most difficult things to contend with, according to many comedians I have spoken with, is the way those who run the comedy industry and comedy audiences alike peg Black women comedians as a monolith no matter the diversity of their comedic styles by suggesting that all Black women use vulgarity and raunch in their humor and, more importantly, that Black women’s humor is a low-brow genre of entertainment. So, one of the broader questions my research tackles is how Black women make use of humor to create and solidify communities of care and how their humor reaches toward wider audiences while continuing to take up and celebrate the aesthetic styles, rhythms, and subversive politics that constitute the beauty and efficacy of Black women’s humor.

Raúl Pérez: Much of my current research is centered on the role of racist humor in producing affective racial alignment and alienation. In particular, I examine how racist fun and amusement work to produce racial boundaries, ideologies, identities, inequalities, and violence, which shape and maintain the kinds of communities and divisions that are formed and enhanced by the use of such humor. I’ve examined how such humor takes place in the arena of entertainment, within explicitly racist and far-right groups and settings, and in everyday contexts, institutions, and organizations like law enforcement, the workplace, in the realm of politics, or online spaces. The central focus of my research is trying to show the historical and contemporary uses and impact of racist humor not only on people of color but also especially on those who take pleasure in and deploy such humor. Racist humor both degrades, humiliates, and dehumanizes racialized targets and plays a powerful role in forming and maintaining pleasurable racist worldviews, solidarities, and emotional alignment. In this way, I’m trying to make sense of what racist humor does in society by analyzing, how it functioned from early colonial US society to the civil rights era, how it changed and evolved from the civil rights period to the present, and how it remains connected to the cultural and emotional politics of racism, whiteness, and white supremacy. These are issues and themes I grapple with in my book The Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy.

Aaron Shellow-Lavine: What are the social impact/consequences of racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic ridicule and humor within and beyond comedy and entertainment?

Viveca Greene: That’s a huge question, and such an important one. My short answer is one Raúl offers and details extremely well in The Souls of White Jokes: “Humor functions to produce racial alienation, dehumanization, exclusion, and even violence” (Pérez 2022, 48). In unpacking that answer myself, I’ll start with violence, as that’s at the center of my recent work, though really it’s very much about racial alienation, dehumanization, and exclusion as well. I’m looking at the most extreme version of racist humor and its social impact: humor that circulates in far-right online communities and promotes mass shootings targeting African Americans, Latino/as, Muslims, and Jewish people. The humor circulating in those communities is horrific, humor that calls for and celebrates largely racially motivated massacres. That said, it’s crucial that humor’s role in promoting extremist violence doesn’t eclipse its broader social impact and consequences, which get far less public attention.

As we know, disparagement humor has been used throughout history to mock minority groups, contributing substantially to those groups’ continued exclusion from public and private spaces and resources. The ideologies, worldviews, and notions of superiority and inferiority that underpin such humor—which are themselves continuously reinforced by disparagement humor—impact every aspect of social life I can think of. For example, racist humor is inseparable from racist ideologies that are used to explain and justify racial disparities in wealth distribution, educational outcomes, health-care access, life expectancy, and incarceration rates. The racist stereotypes and denigration that inform so much comedy and humor suggest and fortify the notion that these racial disparities are the result of moral degradation, individual shortcomings, family dysfunction, or cultural norms rather than the results of legal decisions and governmental policies based on race. To be a bit more specific, presenting BIPOC as inferior, dangerous, and/or hypersexual—even in a manner that’s humorous to some audience members—masks the ethnic and racialized nature of social inequalities. And with regard to sexist/homophobic/transphobic (and I’ll add ableist) humor and ridicule, much the same is true: jokes told about women and LGBTQ+ folks perpetuate stereotypes about those groups that contribute to our/their continued exclusion from public and private spaces and that make it difficult for us/them to get access to resources (Carpio 2008; Rossing 2012).

Beck Krefting: Let me insert that I recently conducted a literature review of disparagement humor for a piece I published on the use of comedic invectivity in the service of social justice, and some of the studies were really telling. Despite asking different questions and posing different theories of disparagement humor, studies concluded that disparagement humor functioning to reinforce bigoted beliefs does exactly that while also creating social and psychological dissonance among minoritized audience members, which was even more pronounced among members of the group targeted by such humor. Comedic—all in good fun—jabs at minoritized folks are public assaults on self-worth and a sense of belonging. Disparagement humor isn’t good for minoritized people nor is it good for members of dominant identity categories.

A study on “jeer pressure” by Leslie Janes and James Olson concluded that participants observing someone else being ridiculed by a stand-up comic were more likely than those in the control group to exhibit higher rates of conformity and an increased fear of failure (Janes and Olson, 474–85). In other words, the more someone fears failure the more likely they are to exercise caution when it comes to taking risks that might set them apart from their peers. In a comedy club, this might mean audience members perform their role as patrons in ways intended to avoid attracting unwanted attention from other audience members or the comic by, for example, laughing at racist jokes. Another way of summarizing these data would be to say that such humor puts listeners in collusion with the values and ideologies being disseminated and reduces the likelihood of their overtly challenging bigoted beliefs. As your scholarship on alt-right violence vindicated by racialized dehumanization in the form of humor indicates, Viveca, these beliefs don’t just remain beliefs; they are activated in insidious and violent ways including sexual and physical assault and mass shootings.

Viveca Greene: Yes, and I’m really grappling with how to write anything of journal-article length about humor’s role in perpetuating violence and white supremacy in their most extreme form in a manner that doesn’t inadvertently eclipse all the more subtle and far more standard ways particular groups are negatively impacted by racist humor.

Also, in both my humor-related courses and my scholarship I’ve focused on humor’s sociocultural rather than individual-psychological impact. But in a recent humor course one of my first-year students (Black, queer, and female identifying) told me my sociocultural approach led them to feel unseen. I’m white (based on political and social constructions) and my initial internal reaction was, admittedly, “but, but” and a flood of (defensive) thoughts of all the work we’d read by humor scholars, many of them Black and brown, who do note the impact on individuals psychologically.

But of course, we should listen to our students, especially when we’re covering racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic humor and their identities are targeted by it, so I asked the student if they’d be willing to tell me what I was leaving out. They said they wanted/needed me to do more in class discussion to highlight the damaging impact of particularly racial ridicule and racist humor on individuals, real people, so as to add to and underscore those points in the readings. I’m grateful the student alerted me to how they were experiencing the material, and the feedback they offered was valuable to me as someone who does tend to foreground the social impact and consequences of racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic humor. I must remember that my identity coordinates aren’t targeted in the way other people’s are and that I’ve had a lot more time to approach, explore, and intellectually process these topics than my students have. It’s also so important and helpful to highlight how members of targeted groups use humor to push back, address their lived realities, and make themselves and those realities heard and felt—as you do so well, Beck and J.

J Finley: You know, Viveca’s experience in the classroom reminds me of an experience I had teaching Luvell Anderson’s article on racist humor last spring (501–9). The ways students of color responded to Anderson’s taxonomy of racist humor let me know that the stakes are incredibly high for those of us concerned with the work of humor and comedy, as such humor reflects and produces not just ideas and affects but importantly attaches to people and communities. In our class discussion, students seemed to understand Anderson’s argument that certain kinds of racial humor are deeply harmful, but they were also uncomfortable with Anderson’s suggestion that a more nuanced idea of “racially insensitive” jokes is possible because for them, there was very little difference in the experience of racist and racially insensitive humor. In this moment, it was clear to me in a new way that in this work I am doing, especially in the classroom, I have to find ways to open conversations about how dehumanizing humor affects not only people students perceive to just be “out there” in the world but also them in a direct and profound manner, even as we consume it in classrooms for the purpose of analysis.

Viveca Greene: I appreciate that, J. It’s good to be in the classroom actually teaching this material rather than just in our own heads, researching and writing about these topics. It keeps me from losing touch, or at least reminds me when I inadvertently have.

Raúl Pérez: Yes, these are great points to keep in mind, Viveca and J! And for me these issues first emerged as a topic of interest when I was an undergraduate student in the early 2000s. I witnessed the way these kinds of jokes were being routinely used by peers in the dorm rooms and how they were central in media controversies involving popular comedians and shows and then saw a similar dynamic play out in a global arena through Islamophobic humor and images during the US invasion of Iraq. But this was also a time when these kinds of issues were not being critically discussed, if discussed at all, in my undergraduate or graduate courses. So, I think it is important to critically examine how humor is implicated in issues of inequality and power with our students.

Much of my research has focused on how racist humor in particular has operated within and beyond the arena of entertainment and on the kinds of communities and ideologies that are reproduced in the process. In The Souls of White Jokes, I explore the use and enjoyment of racist humor through a theoretical concept I develop, what I call amused racial contempt. I draw on social and racial formation theories, on affect and emotion theory, and on humor studies and theory to argue that racist humor is a pleasurable social mechanism that contributes to the formation of racial solidarities and affective communities that are invested in the racial politics of “us” versus “them.” I demonstrate that this form of humor has played, and continues to play, a significant role in reproducing racialized in-groups and out-groups at the local, national, and global levels, where the collective pleasure and enjoyment of racial dehumanization contributes to the social, cultural, emotional, and political production of racism and white supremacy, past and present.

My approach over the last decade has been to link the historical usage and impact of racist humor, such as blackface minstrelsy, to the contemporary operation of racist humor across various social contexts, organizations, and settings by paying close attention to the role of power, identity, and ideology. This approach, which is sometimes described as “critical humor studies,” is different from earlier humor studies approaches that tended to downplay and ignore the messy and complicated role of power and inequality in the analysis of jokes, fun, and humor, something I point out and elaborate in my book. One of the ways I see critical humor studies developing now is by centering an intersectional approach and focusing more explicitly on how gender, sexuality, race, and class overlap in society, for example, with specific attention on the historical and contemporary connection between sexist and homophobic humor and racism, white supremacy, and class inequality.

While each of these forms of inequality has their own specific histories, social dynamics, and consequences, I think we need to start being much more deliberate about understanding how they are interconnected and intersect in ways that reproduce the unequal social dynamics and structures that shape how power and inequality take shape in society and about the role that humor plays in reinforcing these outcomes.

Beck Krefting: You are saying so many important things, and I totally agree, Raúl, that we need to focus on the ways gender and sexuality operate and intersect with white supremacy and class inequality. We can’t explore the social consequences of bigoted ridicule, consequences that, although I don’t mean to be dramatic, cannot be understated, if we aren’t looking at the ways it affects the whole person. Viveca already unpacked the connection between the proliferation of far-right racist humor and the promotion of racialized violence in the form of mass shootings, which are occurring with alarming frequency. People’s lives are made expendable through this ridicule. Our politicians problematize access to weapons/guns rather than the cultural beliefs weaponized by racist ridicule that foment such violence in the first place. Hate speech wrapped in the security of humor (it’s just a joke!) is as protected as a person’s right to bear arms. Anyone see a problem here? We have developed a system that creates white supremacy and then protects white supremacists or sees those acts of hostility and/or violence as social aberrations. Or as Christina Sharpe writes, we need to recognize this system of “antiblackness as total climate” that “has positioned us as no-citizen” (22).

What is at stake when such humor (racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic ridicule) is used in noncomedy/entertainment settings/contexts? At the micro level, such humor might result in individuals adopting the beliefs implied by this ridicule, while at the mezzo level, people might then interact differently with one another based on these adjusted beliefs, with the consequence that on the macro level, we might have to modify our systems and institutions to keep everyone safe and able to flourish.

Raúl Pérez: Racist humor has long served to justify the existing racial logic or racial order or resuscitate past ones as “common sense,” as legitimate and normative. And this problem becomes manifested more concretely when such humor takes place in everyday settings and institutions. We can see very clearly, for instance, the racist humor that is a common everyday practice in police departments all across the US. Yet we rarely pay close attention to the racist jokes of the police unless there is a larger concern over police racial violence. Should we be concerned that cops routinely share racist jokes and memes and comments with each other? Does their regular use of such humor have an impact on the ways that they police the people they regularly ridicule, mock, and comically dehumanize? I think so, and so does the Department of Justice along with various independent organizations that have undertaken investigations that spotlight this practice among police officers, highlighting the everyday jokes cops share alongside the systemic problem of racial abuse and violence in the criminal justice system. But of course, police are not separate from the broader society and culture. Police racist humor is connected to the prevalence and pervasiveness of racist humor in the culture more broadly.

Understanding how the pervasiveness and (un)acceptability of racist humor has played out in society over time is important. For instance, it is worth pointing out that while white racist humor in the pre–civil rights era was accepted as a normal feature of American society and culture, the prominence of racist ridicule in entertainment helped make white supremacist ideology “common sense,” making it possible for the civil rights movement to delegitimize it and reframe it as racist for the first time in US history. But after racist humor was redefined as racist following the civil rights era, it was then transformed into a “forbidden pleasure” in this new cultural context. This new taboo enhanced racial humor in part because white Americans could no longer engage in the “national sense of humor,” the normal and traditional forms of public racial ridicule that go back to the founding of American society.

So, while it took a massive, decades-long rebellion in the mid-twentieth century to get white Americans to seemingly accept that racist humor in public was “bad,” the private usage of racist humor and ridicule remained prevalent as a private pleasure among many whites across different contexts and settings, from the dinner table to workplaces, police departments, and college campuses, in trade publications, and among far-right groups to the political arena. And, of course, this kind of humor is widespread on the internet and on social media.

Beck Krefting: And importantly, to take this point even further and connect back to Viveca’s examination of virtual communities rhapsodizing racism/homophobia/misogyny, we need to be aware of the ways that social media technologies are siloing us into ideological enclaves or what we might think of as homophily or tribalism. Technologies shape the economy of comedy but they also inform social interaction, and contemporary ones have the effect of pushing us to congregate in increasingly niche tribes of comedy devotees. Homophily—the idea, according to sociologists that “birds of a feather flock together”—explains why people gravitate toward others similar to them. In grade school this may break down by gender, ethnicity, academic aptitudes, popularity, body size, and dispositional qualities such as aggression (Echols and Graham, 461–88). Homophily informs weighty and life-shaping decisions like where you work, live, play, and send your kids to school, meaning it is astonishingly easy to orchestrate your life to be surrounded by people similar to you in more ways than one: educational attainment, class status, ethnicity/race, and so forth. Homophilic tendencies coalesce around entertainment/recreational activities and the values they extol.

New media, for example, help folks to find others in online forums with whom they are compatible—ideologically and otherwise—whether that is because they like wearing plushy animal costumes, have a fondness for making homemade burrata, or enjoy laughing freely (at others) with like-minded folks at the cruel humor and punditry of Joe Rogan, Shane Gillis, Greg Gutfeld, and Ben Shapiro. These new technologies raise questions about how we will socialize, make community decisions, or educate the next generation. When it comes to stand-up comedy, what makes these technologies a valuable focus is precisely the degree to which they simultaneously shape how we interact (i.e., making our interaction increasingly virtual) and dictate with whom we interact (pushing us toward the insular tribes that reinforce our ideological entrenchment).

Importantly, as a result of consumer tracking measures introduced in the late twentieth century, since the 1980s we have gone from finding our comic tribes by word of mouth to using platforms that track our consumption. This means we are no longer self-selecting for comic tribes but being tracked into tribes. Entertainment vendors are tapping into our tribes for marketing purposes, which makes me uneasy. The volume of comic tribes has also vastly increased since the turn of the century. Furthermore, with the emergence of twenty-first-century technologies like social media, podcasting, and streaming media, comic tribes have become increasingly narrower even as they have grown in number. The internet connects people who share enjoyment of certain brands of humor.

These tribes are diverse, and with entertainment providers like Netflix and Amazon investing in international content for a global audience, they have the potential to grow. Even as one nation’s economy takes a dip in comedy sales, the global business of comedy ensures the emergence of new markets, for new tribes. Growth in sales makes for a busty bottom line, but the growth of niche tribes means our points of reference are ever narrowing and that we are less likely to be exposed to ideas or values incongruent with our own, meaning we interact in echo chambers that reaffirm our beliefs. This is dangerous for everyone for all the reasons you all have been enumerating throughout this conversation.

Raúl Pérez: Really great points and examples, Beck! Yes, the culture industry of humor and comedy draws on and exploits these dynamics and technologies that Beck elaborates on to maximize profit. So the role of capital and capitalism is another aspect to keep in mind here. These dynamics played a key role in making racial humor and ridicule legitimate in the post–civil rights era. In this new context of racial rebellion, entertainers of color were granted license and given a platform to engage in and profit from self-deprecating racial humor and ridicule and the mocking of other racialized groups, including of white Americans. During and after the civil rights era, entertainers of color, Black entertainers in particular, became some of the most prominent comedians in the world.

Some of these comedians embraced a critical racial humor and comedy that focused on highlighting persisting issues of racism, relaying narratives that drew on their own lived experiences, but much of their comedy nevertheless also reinforced hegemonic racial and gender ideologies and stereotypes, legitimized the use of racist imagery, stereotypes, and slurs in public discourse, and seemingly gave license to whites to tell these racial jokes and use these same racial stereotypes or slurs in public too or at least encouraged them to question why they couldn’t. Comedians like Richard Pryor, Chris Rock, and Dave Chappelle have grappled publicly with these issues with regard to their use of the N-word, racial minstrelsy, and anti-Black discourse.

And as such humor is granted more legitimacy by both its increased use among non-whites in the arena of entertainment and its continued use and consumption among whites in public and private spaces across different settings, organizations, and social scales, racial ridicule and humor have come to be seen as acceptable features and cultural practices in society, or at the very least as forms of humor that should be treated as unproblematic, as “just a joke,” and as forms of discourse that seemingly have no social consequence. So, we come back to “common-sense” notions of race and humor and how humor can reinforce dominant ideologies, inequalities, and worldviews, underscoring the need to approach it critically. And how humor can work to subvert not only dominant and hegemonic ideologies, but can work to undermine efforts that aim towards a more egalitarian and just society as well.

Beck Krefting: Indeed, bigoted humor normalizes inequality by making it funny. Instead of changing something, we laugh at it. Think of how many comedians continue to rely on the stereotype of bad Asian drivers, capitalizing on this shared racist assumption. It seems innocuous enough in an entertainment setting, but repeatedly positioning the Asian as other or outsider makes it easier to turn entire nations and geographic regions into the target of shared national hostility, as, for example, when the media highlights China as the originating hotbed of COVID-19.

Dave Chappelle, who denies the legitimacy of trans as an identity category, jokes in The Closer that it’s safer to be trans than Black on the streets of America, disregarding and minimizing the violence exacted on trans folx. Gendered violence remains invisible to the general public because gender nonconforming people aren’t considered people. And they won’t be so long as they refuse to comply with Western social constructions of gender. It is unsafe to be Black in America. But it is the most unsafe to be Black and trans in America. Failure to push on that pressure point was a missed opportunity that resonates at all the levels–micro, mezzo, and macro.

Viveca Greene: Such good responses, Raúl and Beck. Everything is at stake on all of these levels when racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic ridicule and humor are used in non comedic settings. That said, I’m a media studies professor, so in my own work I don’t focus much on jokes that are told in everyday life. But I think there’s a point I can make here about the relationship between media and real life.

In 2015 I conducted interviews for an audience study based on Comedy Central’s Tosh.0, which Raúl and I later used for a piece we co-authored (Pérez and Greene, 265–82). I set out to explore racist humor and hipster racism, but white students just wouldn’t discuss race/racism at all. They did want to talk about rape jokes though, as the host of the show, Daniel Tosh, had recently told one. In the interviews, the groups of white women initially tried hard to make a distinction between jokes told on stage or mediated by a screen and the same jokes told in real life. In their minds, jokes that centered on physical threats (like sexual assault) were fine on TV or a comedy stage but wouldn’t be at all fine on a bus. However, as the interviews went on, they started asking aloud if there really was a difference, and why was it ok to make jokes about sexually assaulting women anywhere, including on TV. The more they discussed it, the more they saw the connections between the two and realized jokes told in comedy settings and real life shouldn’t be considered separate. All these jokes contribute to what the students couldn’t find a name for but that we know as rape culture.

So I think the two spheres are connected, and everything I said earlier about the broader social impact of racist/sexist/transphobic/homophobic humor applies to jokes and ridicule shared in any environment or context. But I’m wondering (aloud) if the in-person disparagement joking interactions take an especially heavy toll on a day-to-day individual-psychological level on the people targeted by racist/sexist/transphobic/homophobic jokes who are targeted in so many other ways as well. Those are everyday and unavoidable as there’s not even the option to skip that stand-up show or watch something else.

J Finley: I think the effects of these kinds of humor on Black women, girls, and femmes cut across the macro, mezzo, and micro planes and do the work of dehumanizing and delegitimizing them, undercutting their rights, and limiting their resources. In fact, can we even make an easy distinction between the misogynoiristic humor that happens outside of entertainment venues and that which we call everyday life?

The internet and social media straddle, even blur, those lines. The kinds of humor that circulate there, as Moya Bailey has convincingly argues in Misogynoir Transformed, is unique and pernicious, functioning to mock and denigrate Black women (see the skit series “Shit Black Girls Say” and the representations of Black womanhood as excessive, loud, and ineffectual it spawned under the guise of “just jokes”). The circulation of the stereotype of the laughable and laughed-at Black woman affects the ways Black women experience the world and the way people interact with us, as they make assumptions about us or dismiss us altogether. What I both love and hate to think about in my work—are the dire consequences this “digital dragging” disguised as humor at the expense of Black women, girls, and trans women has for us in real life (Bailey, 36). Black women are comedically rendered caricatures who don’t deserve care, evidenced in the kinds of violence we are subjected to in the service of discipline and control of our behavior. The comedic dehumanization that is particular to Black women, femmes, and trans women in the entertainment arena is the framing context for how the world treats us in every other context, if we can even differentiate the contexts, to be honest, and like everybody else said, the stakes could not be higher.

Aaron Shellow-Levine: How is humor as resistance used by those on the left and the right? What is the social function of humor/comedy on the left and right?

J Finley: Humor has always been a subversive force across the ideological spectrum. Historically, as much of Beck’s and Raúl’s work so expertly demonstrates, ethnic humor has done a lot of important work culturally, socially, and politically, and continues to function as both a “weapon of the weak” and a tool with which those with more social and political power marginalize and visit violence on people under the guise of “having some fun” and “it’s just a joke.”

I teach a course that is a kind of cultural history of Black humor, and that course begins with a deep exploration of the functions of ethnic humor and the role of joking in the creation of various in-groups and out-groups. We examine how ethnic humor adapts to new circumstances based on the needs of the different communities at different historical moments or how it can be used in the same moment by two different communities in different ways—for example, Black folks in the early nineteenth century used ethnic humor as a tool of racial critique and at that same moment, whites developed blackface minstrelsy, which introduced racist stereotypes about Black people, a form of humor to do the work of entrenching the ideology of white supremacy. When it comes to the work I do, I am always concerned with how comics try to interrupt racist, sexist, and misogynistic discourse in and through comedy and also the ways humor and comedy helps to normalize ideas about Black people and Black women in particular as ignorant, deviant, incorrigible, and ultimately and most devastatingly, inhuman others.

Raúl Pérez: Yes, I think these are key points we have to continually come back to, J , while trying to keep up with this growing interdisciplinary work. If my trajectory is any indication, I think many of us who have gravitated to the study of humor were initially captivated by how humor is used, especially by comedians, to critique or expose hypocrisies, contradictions, inequalities, social injustices, and so on. Many of the most celebrated comedians in the US, for example, particularly those that are lionized as “champions of free speech” or who were known for questioning racial and social inequalities and who played central roles in the development of the genre of humor we call “stand-up comedy,” have served as models or exemplars of using humor to “resist” social inequalities and social injustices. And in that sense, there is a perception that humor and comedy have an inherently liberal sensibility or bias and that conservatives aren’t funny and don’t make good comedians.

Beck Krefting: And there is a reluctance to even classify ultraconservative comedy as comedy. I have seen this argument made by very smart people at conferences. I find this problematic because it denies the political and social power of alt-right comedy and represents humor as a form of resistance that is the sole province of left-leaning comedy. Comedy is deeply ambivalent, and its use as a tool of resistance—to deny the humanity of people or confer humanity on them—is certainly ideological and has found safe haven at both ends of the political spectrum. We see evidence of this in earlier forms of comedic entertainment such as blackface minstrelsy and vaudeville.

Raúl Pérez: Yup, I think that’s right, Beck. So I think we have to put the origins of stand-up comedy and the professionalization and commercialization of humor into social, cultural, and historical context. Beck is also right that there is a much longer history of racial and gendered humor, from blackface to vaudeville, playing a powerful role in reinforcing racial and gender ideologies, logics, and forms of control. And Beck’s and J’s work in particular has centered the humor that emerges from marginalized and oppressed communities as forms of resistance to inequality. These forms of humor, what Beck describes as “charged humor,” have been a part of oppressed and marginalized communities for centuries and are central to the development of what we call stand-up comedy. But this relationship between humor and resistance on the part of marginalized and oppressed communities does not mean that humor and comedy are naturally or inherently liberal or progressive or democratic.

What we call stand-up comedy emerged in the midst of overlapping social justice movements and political struggles in the mid-twentieth century. The free speech movement on college campuses, which played a pivotal role in stand-up’s development, unfolded simultaneously with a slew of other movements (civil rights, antiwar, feminist, Black power, Chicano, Indigenous, Asian American), all of which fundamentally questioned and challenged the entrenched inequalities in US and global society. This is the context in which humorists, comedians, and joke tellers who were highlighting these communities, issues, and injustices from a liberal perspective appear.

But at the same time this “charged humor” and comedy was being professionalized and commercialized in the post–civil rights context, white conservative American society were feeling the sting of racial integration in schools, neighborhoods, and workplaces and finding themselves constrained by efforts to limit and penalize public displays of overt and explicit racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination that were normative in the pre–civil rights contexts. There is deep resentment and resistance to these changes, which has come to manifest itself in private and increasingly in public spheres in the usage of racist, sexist, and homophobic humor and discourse that aligns reactionary conservative values, ideologies, and worldviews. This is something Matt Sienkiewicz and Nick Marx illustrate in a compelling way in their recent book That’s Not Funny: How The Right Makes Comedy Work For Them (Sienkiewicz and Marx). And it’s something Viveca’s work on what she calls “deplorable satire” illustrates as well.

Humor and comedy, in other words, are not the purview of those on either the right or left. Humor, at the end of the day, is a means of bringing people together and forging a “community of laughter” in ways that can contribute to social and emotional alignment and alienation, the preservation of group boundaries, and identity formation and maintenance. And these communities can come about in different ways and serve different social, political, and ideological interests and forces.

Viveca Greene: Yes, comedy and humor are tools all groups have at their disposal, and I appreciate the way you write in your book about how humor creates social alignment and alienation, Raúl. I also deeply appreciate critical humor scholars who, like Beck and J, highlight the ways humor has been used as a “weapon of the weak.” The comedians you focus on affirm the experiences of historically marginalized groups, draw attention to unequal status/treatment, and educate all audiences about inequality, injustice, violence, and so forth, in a form, or rhetorical style, that audiences are receptive to. For me your scholarship is highlighting, amplifying, and extending the critiques embedded in—or fundamentally informing—the work of these minoritized comedians.

I often think of humor’s transideological nature in terms of “speaking the unspoken,” a phrase I’m borrowing from Bambi Haggins (2009, 233–51). Haggins and others have used it to refer to humor and comedy that resists dominant ideologies and other oppressive forces. For me, it’s also useful in thinking about those who are aligned with those forces and what humor and comedy give them permission to say—especially in the wake of the social justice movements Raúl just described.

But, in response to the left-right question, I’ll start with how resistance to dominant ideologies and in particular nationalism, racism, and Islamophobia speaks the unspoken. Many years ago, I coedited a collection about humor and 9/11, which largely foregrounded humor from the left that resisted dominant discourses and ideologies and offered counternarratives. For example, Jaime Warner drew attention to how The Onion at the time was actively disrupting the us/them, good/evil, with us/with the terrorists binary framing that was alarmingly dominant, and Lanita Jacobs demonstrated that the Black and brown stand-up comedians she was watching and interviewing in comedy clubs were likewise questioning these binary oppositions as well as drawing much-needed attention to racist policies and practices (Warner; Jacobs-Huey). For a time, comedy appeared to be the only place anyone could challenge the dominant framing of the attacks or the Bush administration’s response to them (remember what happened to Bill Maher?). So, that’s one way the left, if that’s what we want to call it, has used humor as resistance and to speak the unspeakable.

The flip side is, of course, that humor also gives people—often but not always people on the political right—comedic license to say things that shouldn’t be said or laughed at, for all the reasons we’ve discussed in response to earlier questions. I tend not to call that “resistance,” but I suppose it is resistance in a way; it’s resistance to recognizing the historical forces that result in horrendous violence and inequality and to showing basic human decency.

Aaron Shellow-Lavine: What is something you are trying to better understand, or wrap your head around, through your current project on race/racism/racial identity and comedy? What tensions are you working with?

J Finley: Right now, I’m working on a couple of projects concerning contemporary Black women’s stand-up comedy that feel disparate in some ways yet are deeply connected on an epistemological level given that they both center on public performance, affect, and interiority. One of projects deals with the expression of a politics of joy in Black women’s stand-up, what it looks, sounds, and feels like on stage as a counter to Black women’s experiences of antiblackness and misogynoir, which are often accompanied by feelings of pain, cynicism, and hopelessness. My goal is to look closely at how joy and pleasure manifest on stage and how those affective experiences can give us insight into the practice of stand-up itself—that is, the doing of stand-up as the epistemologically significant moment of performance rather than the content itself.

The other project explores Black women, stand-up comedy, and shame. Black women comics have a long history of using their art and voices to address difficult and sensitive topics, and in the last few years, mental health challenges have emerged as a salient issue in the content of their onstage performances. Stand-up comedy is a form of entertainment, but this project looks at the ways it functions as a site of therapeutic revelation, confession, and healing. Specifically, I am trying to think through how stand-up enables Black women to reflect on and share stories of their lives, process complex and often traumatic experiences and emotions, feel seen and heard, and be taken seriously.

The art form of stand-up can be a tool that empowers Black women to bring shame to the forefront in a supportive community and can serve as a valuable means through which (Black) audiences can understand mental illness and the importance of seeking psychological support. So, this project explores the confessional and revelatory aspects of stand-up comedy that enable Black women to discuss trauma and mental health in ways that challenge their stigmatization and insists at the same time on drawing attention to Black women’s joy in the process of revelation.

Beck Krefting: I want to commend and underscore the importance of J’s work on how stand-up comedy can offer a space of “therapeutic revelation, confession, and healing” in which comedians and audiences alike can grapple with personal experiences and issues that tend to be publicly stigmatized and mitigate the shame that stigmatization inflicts. Psyche Williams-Forson just published a book in 2022 titled Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America about the ways anti-Blackness fuels racist measures like food shaming (and derision). Both of these projects center the role that shame–foisted on Black communities by white people and the social and political institutions they have created–has played in undermining the humanity of people of color. This is important work and so is focusing on Black joy, pleasure, and creativity, which you do so well in your forthcoming monograph Sass: Black Women’s Humor and Humanity.

For my current research examining how comedic discourses have functioned to support racialized and gendered violence, I’m looking to Black newspapers published in the 1800s, specifically how writers publicly responded to the emergence and popularity of blackface minstrelsy. But this is a tricky undertaking because these newspapers only provide me with a narrow cross-section of source material. Enslaved and free African Americans weren’t encouraged to be literate and it was, in fact, dangerous to be so. This means that the majority of the Black population in the US wasn’t able to leave us a record of their reaction to BIPOC mockery for entertainment on the minstrelsy stage. The few Black newspapers that circulated during slavery and Jim Crow along with the people who wrote articles for them faced white backlash unless the publication was curated so as not to offend white sensibilities. So I have to question how forthcoming these reports could be in such circumstances and to what extent negative reactions to public mockery were stifled by racist political and social institutions. But I also want to be cautious not to insert criticism or resistance when I cannot point to evidence to corroborate those claims.

Raúl Pérez: Great points here by everyone. On Beck’s last point here, I’m reminded that Fredrick Douglass critically described and rejected blackface entertainers and popular minstrel groups like the Virginia Minstrels, Christy’s Minstrels, and the Ethiopian Serenaders as “the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow-citizens” (1848).

One tension I’m exploring now is how racialized individuals and groups who have long been and continue to be ridiculed, marginalized, and abused can also be active agents in the use of amused racial contempt and in the othering and marginalization of other groups. I’ve been paying attention to this incongruity over the last few years, and I briefly note it in my book and other works. White people are not the only ones to use racist humor. How do racialized groups use racist humor, and what is the impact of this usage of racist humor among racialized groups? The beginning of my answer to this question is that the ridicule and denigration of marginalized and oppressed groups by those who are also marginalized and oppressed works as a kind of discursive and affective behavior that makes an appeal to the idea that the group in question belongs to the larger group or social fabric. Through what I am calling an “othering to belong,” the targeted group seeks to align itself with the center or mainstream, going along with the normative marginalization of traditionally oppressed communities.

So, for example, I live and grew up in Los Angeles, a city where about half of the population is Latinx and a majority of that half is of Mexican origin or descent. The city, the state of California, and the larger region has deep Mexican roots; the city’s name is Spanish, as are the names of many of its major boulevards and neighborhoods. But Mexican American and Latinx communities more broadly have very limited social, political, and economic power. I mean collectively, we have a large amount of purchasing power, which is why we have taco trucks on every corner and the Dodgers would go bankrupt if they didn’t sell Mexican beer (ok, that’s a bad self-deprecating joke). But given these demographics and the deep ties of Latinx folks to the city, this lack of political power has fueled deep resentment among some Latinos in the political class in the city.

A 2022 recording of three Latino city council members and a local labor leader obtained without their consent during a political strategy meeting on how to lock in Latino political power in the city reveals this deep resentment. What immediately stands out to me in the recording is the amused racial contempt the leaders show for Black and Indigenous communities in the city. The content wasn’t shocking to me, as I’ve heard the same from family and peers growing up in a segregated Los Angeles. But that this kind of humor was being shared so freely and casually among these political leaders in this larger context, and at this specific political strategy meeting instilled an immediate need in me to try to make better sense of it.

Viveca Greene: I’ve read news articles about far too many similar incidents, Raúl, and what you’re saying leads me to think I should devote more attention to racist humor outside of comedy settings and online forums as well as to racist humor within/between racialized groups. The neo-Nazi who killed eight people and wounded another seven in May of 2023 in Allen, Texas—one of Dallas’s most diverse suburbs—was Latino/Hispanic and wore a patch reading RWDS (right-wing death squad), which is a popular meme in white supremacist circles. We often assume white supremacists and Nazis are non-Latino/Hispanic “whites,” but white is a malleable category, as you noted earlier, and all tied up in power relations.

Raúl Pérez: That’s right. And we see how support of whiteness and conservatism and of Christian and religious nationalism can be found more broadly in right-wing multiethnic and multiracial coalitions. Such coalitions are a factor in the case of support for Trump in 2016 and 2020 and the January 6 insurrection in DC, where meme culture and amused contempt were weaponized by Trump and MAGA supporters.

Viveca Greene: Unfortunately, yes. In laboring to finish my chapter on far-right joking cultures and extremism for Pete Kunze and Will Costanzo’s edited collection on screen comedy, I’ve been trying to wrap my head around something a little different, though perhaps related: affect theory and structures of feeling in relation to what I’m calling a ‘cultural style of aggrieved entitlement’ (Kimmel).

Discussing emotions and affect tends to humanize our subjects, and I’m uncomfortable doing that with racist/xenophobic/sexist/homophobic/transphobic people. Nevertheless, if we’re going to do anything about the proliferation of far-right violence and mainstreaming of conspiracy theories like Great Replacement/white genocide (already woven into mainstream Republican discourse to an alarming extent), it seems we have to better understand why it’s happening and what’s beneath it. There are white supremacists who understand how to appeal to people on an affective level to an unsettling degree. The emotional appeals, often communicated through humor (including but not limited to internet memes), mix anger and amusement: two emotions that generate high levels of physiological arousal that make for a potent combination.

Aaron Shellow-Lavine: What, if anything, concerns or frightens you about what you research and how you present it? Is there anything you find yourself approaching cautiously or with trepidation?

Beck Krefting: I worry the most about misrepresenting people, communities, history, you name it. I am aware that I can read as much as possible, source my arguments with evidence, and acknowledge the limitations of those arguments, but I’m also still human. I’m pregnable to biases, and I’m filtering the research through my own ideological framework and understanding of the world. Being transparent and reflexive in the process of conducting research and writing helps mitigate this as does having other readers who can point to gaps and lacunae. But even with good intentions, rigorous research, self-reflexive processes, the building of complicated stories, and peer vetting, I worry that I will misrepresent someone somehow, and the consequences are more grave when writing about vulnerable and minoritized subjectivities.

J Finley: Something that doesn’t quite frighten me but gives me pause is dealing critically with and trying to reconcile the homophobia, transphobia, and misogyny rampant in certain stand-up comics popularly seen as politically progressive. So, when I talk about a comic like Sam Jay, for example, who discusses racism, homophobia, and misogyny in subversive ways, how do I account for and critically engage with her material on trans women that perpetuates and reinforces ideas about gender that are counterproductive to the Black feminist ethos of doing work that moves toward the elimination of all forms of structural, ideological, and concrete forms of dominations? How can we talk about comics whose work on stage champions social justice and equity on some fronts but that also unfortunately undermines it at the same time? What might it mean to embrace nuance in our analyses while also acknowledging the material harm that dehumanizing humor on stage in comedic characterization causes real people?

Viveca Greene: J, I’d really love to read any/everything you’ve written about Sam Jay and Dave Chappelle.

Also, I share your concerns, Beck, about misrepresenting people, communities, and history (especially vulnerable and minoritized subjectivities, to use your helpful language) and, as I alluded to earlier, I’m also concerned about representing people and ideologies I don’t want to give any more attention to. As factually incorrect and delusional as they are about, for example, crime statistics or what actually accounts for demographic population shifts, many white supremacists are doing all kinds of “research” (though too often on dark corners of the internet). Some leave or send me comments in response to my published works. And so many of these white supremacist mass shooters’ posts and manifestos reference (and often reproduce) those of others who carried out brutal attacks before them. White supremacists online might comprise the most active and expansive global joking culture in history. So, I can hope that every single person who reads my work will approach the topic from a perspective similar to mine, but what if even one person doesn’t and instead gets excited about a white supremacist conspiracy theory or discovers an 8chan board?

One more related concern I’ll mention: Studies in American Humor published my “Deplorable Satire” piece in 2019 in a special issue that became available on JSTOR the day after the Christchurch mosques shootings and a few months after the Pittsburgh synagogue shootings (Greene, 31–69). Shortly thereafter, I started receiving invitations to speak to international intelligence and security organizations about memes and how the far right uses humor. The first time I thought there’d been a serious misunderstanding, as I’m in no way an intelligence or security expert, but the director of that organization convinced me that law enforcement and military communities really need to hear from critical humor scholars and academics.

I accepted two such invitations and found myself speaking (virtually) to large international audiences of people in uniform, as well as quite a few others I couldn’t even see. I named the elephant in the (zoom) room and addressed as fully as I could the fact that quite a few white supremacists are or have been employed by law enforcement agencies and/or the military. But I’ve since turned down similar invitations, as I’ve felt so conflicted about whom I’d be talking to and the groups they typically surveille and harm, which aren’t composed of white men.

As a critical humor scholar, I’ve always argued intentionality matters far less than most people assume it does; what we should be concerned with and focus on is effect, right? Ultimately, academics can’t control what different audience members will take from our work any more than comedians can, and I’ve become increasingly conscious of who might be paying attention in light of all these mass shootings. All that said, I genuinely believe critical humor scholars have a role to play in combating white supremacy and related violence, and perhaps talking to people in armed forces and law enforcement is a good idea.

Raúl Pérez: As I’m writing up my responses to these important questions, which we discussed at the 2023 AHSA conference, I can’t help but think about how many of them are relevant to the brutal situation taking place in Israel and Gaza. While the matter of humor in connection with the conflict must be approached carefully and cautiously, I believe it needs to be addressed by humor scholars because dehumanizing humor consistently plays a role in justifying support for imperialist wars and racial and religious violence. During the week of November 6, 2023, for example, the Washington Post published an editorial cartoon that many on social media saw as Islamophobic, racist, and dehumanizing. The cartoon in question drew on Arab racial stereotypes and imagery, depicting a Hamas leader using his family as “human shields” strapped on his body like suicide vests.

This derisive representation reflects the same knee-jerk Islamophobia and dehumanization that took center stage in the post-9/11 context, when powerful efforts were made to force support for the invasion of Iraq and silence dissent. This particular image was produced by the Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Michael Ramirez, a conservative editorial cartoonist of Japanese and Mexican descent, two racialized communities that have faced and continue to experience racial dehumanization and violence in the US. In other recent images, Ramirez uses his comic talents to depict Hamas, and by extension Arabs, Muslims, and Palestinians, as vermin and rodents and renders the growing mass of antiwar demonstrators and student protesters, many of whom are progressive Jewish activists and Black Lives Matter supporters, as terrorist sympathizers. These degrading and dehumanizing comedic images and rhetoric fuel the current crisis, and the editors at the Washington Post pulled the image only after the inevitable protest and uproar on social media.

But other current forms of comic dehumanization of Palestinians also appeared on social media in November. Several similar dehumanizing images and viral TikTok videos reflecting the longer history of Islamophobic rhetoric and propaganda in Western societies circulated imagery that ridiculed and mocked the violent murder, destruction, and displacement of Palestinians underway in Gaza. Some of these images and videos have also been produced and shared by Israeli officials, soldiers, and civilians (Smith; Lidman). The distressing and disturbing irony here is that the way Palestinians are currently being derided and mocked are reminiscent of the racist dehumanization and rendering of Jewish people in Nazi German propaganda. Antisemitic imagery and rhetoric served to justify and legitimize the genocide and brutalization of Jewish people by Nazi Germany and was fueled by a deep antisemitism that has been a feature of Western societies for centuries. This destructive iconography persists today in global white supremacist ideology and imagery, much of which is also presented and circulated under the guise of humor, as we have discussed above.

Racist rhetoric, ideology, and humor has a long history in Western settler colonial societies, where nonwhites and those positioned on the margins of whiteness have been rendered and portrayed as objects of racial ridicule and amused contempt. Amused racial contempt, as I’ve tried to argue, plays a critical role in reinforcing power relations, dehumanizing ideologies, group boundaries and identities, affective alignment and alienation, and in fostering cultural and systemic violence. This is the case even when dehumanizing rhetoric and humor is being used by those who have also long been, and continue to be, victims of dehumanization, displacement, and violence.

Fully addressing the role and range of humor in this particular conflict is beyond the scope of this discussion and my response here. These thoughts merely aim to start a conversation about the dynamics at play in this crisis and about the powerful efforts to silence, repress, and deny a full and honest understanding and recognition of the brutal and violent events underway. I believe humor scholars need to play an active role in developing sustained and systematic analysis of devastating and demoralizing crises like this.