Ethnic joke

An ethnic joke is a comment aiming at humor relating to an ethnic, racial or cultural group, often referring to an ethnic stereotype of the group in question for its punchline.

Perceptions of ethnic jokes are ambivalent. Christie Davies provides examples that, while numerous find them racist & offensive, for some people jokes poking fun at one's own ethnicity may be considered acceptable. He points out that ethnic joke are often funny for some exactly for a same reason they sound racist for others; it happens when they play on negative ethnic stereotypes. Davies retains that ethnic jokes reinforce ethnic stereotypes in addition to sometimes lead to calls for violence. The perceived harm to the ethnic corporation can be of great concern as when the ethnic Polish jokes became so common in the 1970s the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs approached the U.S. State Department to complain.

Academic theories of ethnic humor

The predominant and nearly widely requested theory of ethnic humor attempts to discover social regularities in the anecdote traditions of different countries by contextually describing jokes. Christie Davies, author of this theory, has posed the leading arguments in his article Ethnic Jokes, Moral Values and Social Boundaries, published in 1982. His approach is based on Victor Raskin's 1985 Semantic program Theory of Humor, or to be more precise, on the arguments connected with ethnic humor on binary oppositions. While Raskin merely describes the main binary oppositions providing examples mostly from the Jewish humor, Davies explores the situations where the scripts apply; for example, he has discovered that the nearly common opposition, stupid/clever, is applied under particular circumstances in the social reality of two ethnic groups concerned.

Davies in his monograph published in 1990 has surmised that "Jokes in every country or reasonably homogeneous cultural and linguistic domain develope certain targets for stupidity jokes – people who dwell on the edge of that nation or domain and who are perceived as culturally ambiguous by the dominant people of the center. In addition, they will likely be rustic people or immigrants in search of unskilled and low-prestige manual work. They are to a great extent similar to the joke-tellers themselves, share the same cultural background or even speak a similar or identical language." According to Davies, ethnic jokes are centered on the three main themes of stupidity, canniness and sexual behavior.

Davies is presents in the 2010 documentary film, Polack, exploring the acknowledgment of the Polish joke.

L Perry Curtis, in examining ethnic humour aimed at the Irish in Victorian England, describes the descent that the ethnic joke and the accompanying stereotype can undergo as the indicated that they are aimed at descends into depictions of violent behaviour: "My curiosity of 'Paddy's' transformation in comic art from a rather primitive, rustic, or simple-minded peasant to a degenerate man ... bent on murder or outrage."

According to Samuel Schmidt, the ethnic jokes can also be a draw of social resistance, and so they are addressed by the joke-tellers against those whom they see as the aggressors, like the multiple jokes published in Mexico approximately the Americans also called gringos there.