Abstract

The present study investigates the humorous representation of ethnic minorities in jokes and indicates how these texts construct, perpetuate, and naturalize social inequalities, xenophobia, and racism in the Greek public sphere. The General Theory of Verbal Humor is used to attain this, which defines humor as incongruity and places particular emphasis on the script oppositions of the jokes. The authors take a critical discourse analytic perspective, drawing upon Fairclough’s sociocultural approach, to show how the humorous conventions of jokes reproduce and enhance the racist national discourses of the cultural and language homogeneity and indirectly legitimize the unequal treatment of minority groups. Given the above, this study proposes the exploitation of jokes in language teaching based on the critical analysis of such humorous texts. Following the multiliteracies model, this teaching proposal is intended to raise students’ critical literacy by enabling them to reflect on the racist national discourse often reproduced through humorous texts and, in particular, through jokes.