Manufacturing racial humor

Abstract

The study of the scathing content of “¿Cómo se dice X en (language) Y?” jokes is compared to the cultural use of American Mock Spanish: i.e: “no problemo” expressions. Our study analyzes the collected corpora of Cómo se dice... jokes and organizes them by regional areas and content variation. If Mock Spanish relies on the apparent social weakness of Latinos in the US, Cómo se dice... jokes revile stereotypical characters and cultures recognized as inferior by Spanish-speaking joketellers. Our surprising conclusion is not that the telling of these jokes is bluntly reprehensible but that, with cruel accuracy, the laugh they produce helps us humans know the place we occupy in a predefined scale of stereotypical cultural bias.