Laughter is social communication and enhances social affiliation among participants, social cooperation, social bonding, increases social affiliation and group formation. At the same time, humour and laughter can be used to marginalise and "other" groups and individuals by ridiculing and insulting them and reinforce an ethnocentric worldview. Humour can help popularise and spread ideas of ethnic superiority and inferiority. It can also challenge asymmetrical power relations in society.
Racist humour played a crucial role in reproducing white supremacy in the U.S. by using stereotypes. Blackface minstrel shows, for instance, were a popular source of entertainment that contributed to the inferioraistaion of blacks and cultivated a proslavery imagination. It also allowed working-class whites to feel superior despite their lack of power and status in society. They were poor and exploited but at least not black. Later, overt displays of racism in public were no longer socially acceptable. After the civil rights movement, racism was "no longer funny". (Perez, 2017)
Abstract: The article examines the links between humour and hatred - a topic that is often ignored by researchers of prejudice. The article studies three websites that present racist humour and display sympathies with the Ku Klux Klan. The analysis emphasizes the importance of examining the 'metadiscourse', which presents and justifies the humour, as much as studying the nature of the humour itself. The meta-discourse of the sites' disclaimers is studied in relation to the justification of a joke being 'just a joke'. It is shown that the extreme racist humour of the KKK is not just a joke, even in terms of its own meta-discourse of presentation. The meta-discourse also suggests that the extreme language of racist hatred is indicated a matter for enjoyment. The sites portray the imagining of extreme racist violence as a matter of humour and the ambivalence of their disclaimers is discussed. As such, it is suggested that there are integral links between extreme hatred and dehumanizing, violent humour. (Billig, 2001)
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- Billig, M. (2001). Humor and hatred: the racist jokes of the Ku Klux Klan. Discourse & Society, 12(3), 267-289.
- Pérez, R. (2017). Racism without Hatred? Racis Humor and the Myth of
"Colorblindness". Sociological Perspectives,
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- photographs by Charles H. Traub
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