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Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter Mouton November 22, 2021

Using humor to disguise racism in television news: the case of the Roma

  • Petre Breazu

    Petre Breazu is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Institute for Diplomacy and International Governance, Loughborough University, London. Dr. Breazu’s research lies in the area of discourse and racism, with special focus on the representation of the Roma in European media and political discourse. He works under the framework of multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) to examine practices of discrimination and social exclusion with regards to Roma and other marginalised communities. Petre’s previous research has been published in international peer-reviewed journals, such as Discourse and Communication, Discourse and Society, Ethnicities, Language in Society, and Social Identities.

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    and David Machin

    David Machin is Professor at Department of Linguistics, School of International Studies, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, People’s Republic of China. Professor Machin is a leading scholar in (Multimodal) Critical Discourse Studies and is the author of Introduction to Multimodal Analysis (2020), Doing Visual Analysis (2018), and How to do Critical Discourse Analysis (2012). David is co-editor of the peer reviewed Taylor & Francis journal Social Semiotics, which publishes papers in the wider field of discourse and critical multimodal studies, and the Bloomsbury books series Advances in Critical Discourse Studies.

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From the journal HUMOR

Abstract

It has been argued that more research is needed on the role of humor in the expression of racism. One reason is that, in the ‘post racial’ society, overt racism has become publicly unacceptable and, therefore, tends to appear in more concealed forms. In this paper, as part of a larger project on media representations of the Roma, we look at the role of humor in a Romanian television news clip reporting on the financial rewards of begging. We draw on the critical scholarship in humor research and carry out a multimodal critical discourse analysis of a news report selected from a larger corpus. We argue that through humor a recontextualisation of the Roma’s situation takes place, transforming their actual situation of poverty and social marginalisation into a humorous account of cultural failure, incompetence, stupidity and calculated money grabbing. We show that humor is one way by which culture becomes represented as embodied by ethnic minorities.


Corresponding author: David Machin, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China, E-mail:

About the authors

Petre Breazu

Petre Breazu is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Institute for Diplomacy and International Governance, Loughborough University, London. Dr. Breazu’s research lies in the area of discourse and racism, with special focus on the representation of the Roma in European media and political discourse. He works under the framework of multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) to examine practices of discrimination and social exclusion with regards to Roma and other marginalised communities. Petre’s previous research has been published in international peer-reviewed journals, such as Discourse and Communication, Discourse and Society, Ethnicities, Language in Society, and Social Identities.

David Machin

David Machin is Professor at Department of Linguistics, School of International Studies, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, People’s Republic of China. Professor Machin is a leading scholar in (Multimodal) Critical Discourse Studies and is the author of Introduction to Multimodal Analysis (2020), Doing Visual Analysis (2018), and How to do Critical Discourse Analysis (2012). David is co-editor of the peer reviewed Taylor & Francis journal Social Semiotics, which publishes papers in the wider field of discourse and critical multimodal studies, and the Bloomsbury books series Advances in Critical Discourse Studies.

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Received: 2021-05-18
Accepted: 2021-10-26
Published Online: 2021-11-22
Published in Print: 2022-02-23

© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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