Using humor to disguise racism in television news : The case of the Roma

• It has been argued that more research is needed on the role of humor in the expression of racism. One reason is that, in the ‘post racial’ society, overt racism has become publicly unacceptable and, therefore, tends to appear in more concealed forms. In this paper, as part of a larger project on media representations of the Roma, we look at the role of humor in a Romanian television news clip reporting on the financial rewards of begging. We draw on the critical scholarship in humor research and carry out a multimodal critical discourse analysis of a news report selected from a larger corpus. We argue that through humor a recontextualisation of the Roma’s situation takes place, transforming their actual situation of poverty and social marginalisation into a humorous account of cultural failure, incompetence, stupidity and calculated money grabbing. We show that humor is one way by which culture becomes represented as embodied by ethnic minorities.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Media and Communications (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

humor

multimodal critical discourse analysis

racism

ridicule

television news

Media and Communication Studies

Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap

Lingvistik

Linguistics

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

art (ämneskategori)