When ethnic humor goes digital

Abstract

This article explores new forms of ethnic humor as emergent in a salient arena of contemporary culture: our electronic mailboxes. We argue that two processes underpin the manifestations of ethnic humor as it ‘goes online’: the global turn and the turn to genre plurality. We examine the implications of these processes through (1) content analysis of 1000 Israeli humorous ‘forwards’ and (2) a grounded analysis of 130 texts representing ethnic groups with varying degrees of proximity to Israeli culture. Regarding the global turn, we found that non-local ethnicities are ‘imported’ to the local symbolic sphere via new forms of humor. Regarding the turn to genre plurality, results indicate that while old forms of ethnic humor typically include explicit stereotyping, new forms introduce a wider variety of stances towards ethnic stereotypes, ranging from their reproduction in visual language to a polysemic stance, and finally to their neutralization.

Evasive Targets: Deciphering Polysemy in Mediated Humor

“…The corpus for this study comprises 130 short humorous texts (jokes, photos, cartoons, YouTube clips, etc.) selected randomly in a previous study for an intercoder reliability test from a large‐scale dataset numbering 1,000 texts (Boxman‐Shabtai & Shifman, ). Compiled for the purpose of quantitative content analysis of Web‐based humor, these texts were forwarded to the research team by 95 Israeli participants from a wide range of socioeconomic and political backgrounds, between April and October 2010.…”

Globalisation and ethnic jokes: A new look on an old tradition in Belarus and Estonia

“…Online humour tends to be visual and relies on language play. Other points that Kuipers and van der Ent (2016), as well as Boxman-Shabtai and Shifman (2015) have suggested, are reinforced, for example that a meta-level approach to producing humour is often used. Memes and jokes play with the stereotypes, targeting implicitly both the targets mentioned in the text or image as well as the people who believe such stereotypes are true.…”

“…Joking at the expense of other groups reinforces their own identity (Fine & Soucey 2005). In a slightly earlier study of Israeli humorous forwarded emails, Boxman-Shabtai & Shifman (2015) have studied the changes involved in the process of ethnic humour going digital. They conclude that non-local joke targets (e.g., the Chinese in Israel) are more often shown visually through entrenched stereotypes, while locals are targeted through more traditional humour forms, e.g., jokes, and the used stereotypes are more detailed.…”

Looping out loud: A multimodal analysis of humour on Vine

“…The theme of prejudice is connected to the author's research interest in socially just uses of social media and technologies, with a focus on new literacies and youth cultures. In this context, this study aims at contributing to the body of research on humour in relation to stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination in computer-mediated settings (Weaver 2011;Boxman-Shabtai & Shifman 2015;Yoon 2016).…”