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Article published In:
Pragmatics, Humour and the Internet
Edited by Francisco Yus
[Internet Pragmatics 4:1] 2021
► pp. 28–51

Greek migrant jokes online

A diachronic-comparative study on racist humorous representations

ORCID logo | University of Patras
ORCID logo | National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

This study adheres to critical humor studies investigating how humor targeting the migrant ‘Other’ may reproduce social inequalities in the form of racist stereotypes. We examine two datasets of online migrant-targeting jokes from two different time periods in Greece. Our first collection of jokes comes from the period 1990–2010, i.e., when Greece, enjoying financial prosperity, received mostly Albanian migrants, while the second one comes from 2014 onwards, i.e., when Greece, facing a severe financial crisis, received mostly Muslim migrants. Our analysis shows that the local sociopolitical context plays a significant role in shaping the ways migrants are humorously represented and targeted: the incongruities identified in the first dataset are different from those of the second. In both cases, however, migrant-targeting jokes seem to reinforce national homogenization by circulating racist stereotypes for migrants in a light-hearted manner and by naturalizing the latter’s marginalization and/or assimilation.

Keywords: critical humor studies, migrants, racist jokes, Discourse Theory of Humor, sociocultural assumptions, Greek
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Humorous representations of migrants
  • 3.Data collection and analytical tools
    • Analytical Focus 1: Sociocultural Assumptions
    • Analytical Focus 2: Genre
    • Analytical Focus 3: Text
  • 4.‘Old’ racist jokes targeting Albanians
  • 5.‘New’ racist jokes targeting Muslim migrants
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 24 July 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ip.00063.tsa
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