Weaver 1.The 'Other' Laughs Back.pdf (84.51 kB)
The 'Other' laughs back: humour and resistance in anti-racist comedy
journal contribution
posted on 2010-09-30, 14:11 authored by Simon WeaverThis article outlines the ‘reverse discourses’ of black, African-American and Afro-Caribbean comedians in the UK and USA. These reverse discourses appear in comic
acts that employ the sign-systems of embodied and cultural racism but develop, or
seek to develop, a reverse semantic effect. I argue the humour of reverse discourse is
significant in relation to racism because it forms a type of resistance that can, first, act rhetorically against racist meaning and so attack racist truth claims and points of
ambivalence. Second, and connected to this, it can rhetorically resolve the ambiguity
of the reverse discourse itself. Alongside this, and paradoxically, reverse discourses
also contain a polysemic element that can, at times, reproduce racism. The article
seeks to develop a means of analysing the relationship between racist and non-racist
meaning in such comedic performance.
History
School
- Social Sciences
Department
- Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies
Citation
WEAVER, S., 2010. The 'Other' laughs back: humour and resistance in anti-racist comedy. Sociology, 44 (1), pp. 31-48.Publisher
BSA Publications Ltd / Sage (© Simon Weaver)Version
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publication date
2010ISSN
0038-0385;1469-8684Publisher version
Language
- en