{"id":18664,"date":"2019-11-20T02:28:28","date_gmt":"2019-11-20T02:28:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=18664"},"modified":"2019-11-21T03:25:06","modified_gmt":"2019-11-21T03:25:06","slug":"was-that-joke-funny-or-offensive-whos-telling-it-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/was-that-joke-funny-or-offensive-whos-telling-it-matters\/","title":{"rendered":"Was that joke funny or offensive? Who’s telling it matters"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michael Thai<\/a>, The University of Queensland<\/a><\/em> and Alex Borgella<\/a>, Fort Lewis College<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

In September, before the start of its 45th season, \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d brought on some new cast members. The decision to hire one of them, Shane Gillis, was roundly criticized<\/a> after disparaging jokes he\u2019d made at the expense of Asian and gay people quickly surfaced.<\/p>\n

A week after announcing Gillis\u2019 hire, the show fired him.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, critics widely lauded<\/a> the addition of comedian Bowen Yang. Ironically, Yang also tends to poke fun at Asian and gay people during his sets<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So, why did Yang get to keep his job, while Gillis lost his? <\/p>\n

We<\/a> study<\/a> why some jokes land and others don\u2019t \u2013 and why the identity of the person telling the joke matters. Yang, it seems, can \u201cget away\u201d with this sort of humor precisely because he is both Asian and gay, while Gillis is neither.<\/p>\n

Being \u2018in\u2019 on the joke<\/h2>\n

Many of us intuitively understand that it\u2019s more permissible for people to openly judge or criticize social groups they belong to than those they do not belong to. <\/p>\n

For example, many Americans may feel justified in calling out the country\u2019s faults while lambasting a non-American for doing the same. This phenomenon is called the intergroup sensitivity effect<\/a>, and we wondered whether it applied to humor.<\/p>\n

To test this, we ran a series of studies<\/a> in which we examined whether people\u2019s reactions to disparaging jokes would change based on who was telling the joke.<\/p>\n

In our first study, we showed participants a mock Facebook profile belonging to either a gay or a straight man who had posted a joke about gay people. We then asked the participants to rate how funny, offensive and acceptable they found the joke. Participants considered the joke funnier, less offensive and more acceptable if the poster was gay.<\/p>\n

We wanted to know whether this effect also applied to jokes about race. So, in a second study, we showed participants a mock Facebook profile belonging to an Asian, black or white man who had posted a joke about Asian people. Here, participants rated the joke as funnier, less offensive and more acceptable when the owner of the Facebook profile was Asian.<\/p>\n

We then ran a third study in which we directly asked participants how acceptable it was for members of different social groups to make jokes about their in-group or various out-groups. We found that participants, on a consistent basis, were more receptive to humor based on gender, race and sexual orientation if the person making the joke was also a member of the targeted group.<\/p>\n

Why might group membership matter?<\/h2>\n

So why, exactly, does the group membership of the joke teller matter so much? We think it may have something to do with how an audience interprets the joke\u2019s intent. <\/p>\n

Some humor researchers distinguish<\/a> between what they call \u201cantisocial intentions\u201d \u2013 in which humor is used to inflict harm and reinforce stereotypes about a social group \u2013 and \u201cprosocial intentions\u201d \u2013 where humor is used to empower the group and challenge stereotypes about it. <\/p>\n

When humor is deployed in a self-referential<\/a> way, perhaps the audience is more prone to perceive it through a prosocial lens. <\/p>\n

For example, when Bowen Yang speaks with an exaggerated Chinese accent, audiences may more readily construe this as coming from a benign place. Maybe he\u2019s satirizing the racist ways in which others portray Chinese people, or perhaps he\u2019s affectionately parodying his own culture. But no matter the real reason, he certainly wouldn\u2019t want to inflict harm on his own group \u2013 or so the thinking goes.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, when Shane Gillis does the same, audiences may be less likely to give him the benefit of the doubt \u2013 and more likely to infer malign and racist intentions. He doesn\u2019t identify with his targets in any way. Maybe he truly does harbor disdain.<\/p>\n

Alternatively, it may simply be the case that people are given greater \u201clicense<\/a>\u201d to make disparaging jokes about groups they\u2019re a part of, irrespective of their motives. <\/p>\n

We plan to test these potential processes across a new set of studies. Nonetheless, our findings show that comedians and humorists, professional or otherwise, should be ever mindful of group dynamics. They could be the difference between a joke being met with rollicking laughter or awkward silence.<\/p>\n

[ Get the best of The Conversation, every weekend.<\/em> Sign up for our weekly newsletter<\/a>. ]\"The<\/p>\n

Michael Thai<\/a>, Lecturer, The University of Queensland<\/a><\/em> and Alex Borgella<\/a>, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Fort Lewis College<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael Thai, The University of Queensland and Alex Borgella, Fort Lewis College In September, before the start of its 45th season, \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d brought on some new cast members. The decision to hire one of them, Shane Gillis, was roundly criticized after disparaging jokes he\u2019d made at the expense of Asian and gay people […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":18660,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[293],"tags":[501,7271,6251,365,7014,7272,7269,7270,2197,498,313,461],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18664"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18664"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18664\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18665,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18664\/revisions\/18665"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}