Written By: Harry Fry
Viewer Warning: Strong, racist language, highly unacceptable without strong contextualisation.
The decision by local governments over the past few days to remove St George flags from public lampposts represents an acknowledged British issue towards overtly proclaiming a white, national identity. Moves such as these make contemporary white Britain question what can and cannot be said on the subject of race and migration, attached irrevocably to how British people consume and use past media and locutions about migrants. While one person might shame others for giggling along at a racist joke on television, another person may laugh just at how backward and problematic it is. Britain, by these actions, mimics or tries to distance itself from the former generation, and it is this entwined discourse that requires investigation. Therefore, I ask not whether viewing a sitcom with explicit or implicit racist undertones is permissible today, but what the engagement and reaction means in terms of Britain’s intellectual positioning on migration as a discussed topic and reality. This questions how and why white British people evaluate their treatment of racially charged comedy and stereotypes as a contemplative process of the self, society, and morals.
Some theoretical models on the making of racialised humour is important for studying laughing as both an act of relief and a performance of intellect. A Freudian lens would not only relate jokes to the unconscious realm but find that joking moves the body back into consciousness. By laughing along to a racist joke, the listener qualifies the teller’s joke, whereas if they do not laugh, it problematises the teller. In this sense, laughing is a restorative act of realising feelings and thoughts from the mind out through the body. Lois Leeven, in response to Freud, conceptualises this teller-listener relationship as an opportunity for tellers to use the joke’s content and any affected parties as evidence of his oratory skills and intelligence, even if someone else is the joke’s subject. This is where the notions of risk and shame enter our paradigms of a joke, since comedy made about migrants can become an intellectual device to favour white British tellers, and such can be perceived taboo because of this result.
The action of laughing, if relieving, could explain the rationale for producing Love Thy Neighbour and Till Death Do Us Part, both of which attempt to make a spectacle of racist stereotypes of migrants to lessen the taboo around the subject. The white protagonists’ racist views in the latter become the premise of the show and go unchallenged, uncritiqued, and unaltered, but are allegedly combatted in the former as the black migrant couple return racist name-calling. While the white husband refers to his black counterpart as “nig-nog”, he faces retaliation through being called “snowflake”. This idea of racism being solved on the surface, away from the jokes’ meaning but by making a counterpart, offers that mutualistic racism is a supposedly egalitarian and healing solution; diluting the subject of the joke away from its historical context.
However, jokes which stereotype different races do not consistently involve a passive duel between counterparts to somehow reduce its controversy but can be rejected by white voices to actively make a claim towards their social worldliness. From critiquing others for using racist slurs to shaming Little Britain for doing blackface, having to witness an image of racism can spark rage and disgust, making white Britain feel an innate sense of guilt and urge to reject. This likely comes from a combination of uneasy feelings of the colonial past, racist views made by the previous generation, or a desire to be progressive and globalised. Critical is the final reading as a way for some of white Britain to appear worldly or ‘better than the rest’, that can on occasion be read by migrants under a tone of unauthenticity or white egoism. This can be framed as a call of the young generation to shame the old, or of young people mimicking the old by reusing their language. Most intriguing, it makes the joke’s racism the catalyst of discourse but not its actual content.
In between these previous viewpoints, many propose that these jokes should not be read as an issue, but rather as an exemplar for how racism exists less today. In one episode of the Scottish household favourite sitcom Still Game, Indian shopkeeper Navid Harrid and his wife, Meena, are seen to illegally make moonshine and distribute it around the estate. The irony of them being Muslim touches on historical categorisation of migrants as untrustworthy and sneaky, furthered by Meena’s character only speaking in Hindi and Punjabi as a source of the show’s comedy. While the white audience may well feel a close affinity to the Harrid’s and pick up on no intolerance, this chronic depiction of migrant families under alterity makes their existence on screen only realistic when something is off or mysterious regarding their social worlds. Such visual portrayals mirror the usage of racist slurs when referring to migrant communities, such as “Pakis” or “Asians”. Some may incite this terminology into being wrong, yet others may similarly argue that they no longer carry the same issues or stigma, so then that racism is somewhat less of a contemporary reality. Thus, this language, whether deemed intolerant or not, is caught up in a sense of assumed nostalgia for Britain, connected to a way of innate nationality and Whiteness. By presenting migrants under an all too familiar light and making subconscious othering a tradition, the racialisation of non-white Britain becomes engrained within cultural memory and practice.
These habits are bolstered in parallel tropes of migrants as sneaky, resultantly making them something for White people to decide over or solve. During the Only Fools and Horses episode that Del and Rodney presume a man they have trapped into a warehouse while on shift is an illegal immigrant, they kidnap him back to their home and assign him the name “Gary”. It is this visual programming of non-white people when quiet or appearing to be in the wrong place as consequently immigrants and illegal, that produces them into a deceptive issue passive to white Britain’s responses. Not only does this reading perhaps evaluate the reasoning behind those who feel discomfort at such representations but cannot specify why, it also elucidates an important acknowledgement that white Britain still holds the autonomy as to how race is constructed and weighed up. The similarly popular scene in Come Fly With Me at airport security, where a non-white British man is assumed to be a foreigner, is attached to humour and designates migrant status as both satire and an accusation. This humour is irrevocably under white ownership, and whether harmless or harmful, it draws a border around what is and is not white Britain, querying what crosses a boundary versus what is perceived as not and by result, moralised. Perhaps then, the impetus of white British awkwardness when handling these scenes is due to their own sustained agency in carving out others’ identity.
A final concern surrounds migrants who themselves endorse or indicate no issue with such portrayals. While their represented tropes may cause even them to laugh, it must be said to still neglect an intended depiction of an accurate migrant family. White morals may be loosened when someone of the same race laughs at a stereotyping of themselves on screen, yet I argue a secondary theoretical approach can explain this dilemma. Baudelaire and Cixous find self-mockery to severe the speaker from their self and make the joke a relegated object of laughter. So then, when migrants laugh about how they are comically marginalised, they break this link between them and white prejudice on them, producing both a mental relief over it and restoring the act under their self’s agency. This exists in a paradox, for instance in the 1979 BBC show entitled It Ain’t Half Racist Mum, where white presenters use and locate themselves in the headspace of migrants receiving these jokes. These actions, which move closer towards understanding the representations of migrants as media and not reality, re-draw a sense of self-consciousness by white hosts when taking migrant perspectives and using them to legitimise more white voices as gospel.
In a 1970s survey, alongside the heyday of sitcoms involving migrants, white Britain estimated that there were two-thirds more migrants living in the UK than there were. These families were studied as excessively reproducing and thus being an impending risk to the peril of white Britain, yet migrants themselves remained outside of these conversations. This epitomises that racism continually exists as a contemplation, debate, and issue for white Britain itself. Perhaps most conflictingly, then, white affects determine what terminology can be incited, past racialised media consumed and rejected, and under what terms both are regurgitated today.
Bibliography
Davies, C., 1982. ‘Ethnic Jokes, Moral Values and Social Boundaries’, The British Journal of Sociology 33, pp. 383-403.
Leveen, L., 1996. ‘Only When I Laugh: Textual Dynamics of Ethnic Humour’, Melus 21, pp. 29-55.
Open Door, It Ain’t Half Racist Mum, 1 March 1979 { https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0jy3ytj].
Schaffer, G., 2014. The Vision of a Nation: Making Multiculturalism on British Television 1960-80. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Wallman, S., 1978. ‘The Boundaries of ‘Race’: Processes and Ethnicity in England’, Man 13, pp. 200-217.
Featured Image Credit: The Love Thy Neighbour Conundrum, https://televisionheaven.co.uk/articles/love-thy-neighbour
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