Using humour to call out racism

Pragmatic accounts of speaker’s accountability over the intended import of utterances recognize that, when engaging in a non-serious, humorous mode of communication, speakers may not be held committed to what they have said (or implicated). Still, the overt signalling of jocular intent does not rule out the possibility of humour being perceived as offensive. In this paper, we pursue the argument that the perception of humorous text and talk is determined only in part by the original intention of its producer, with the general audience’s eventual reception being additionally affected by further input from influential social actors, whose trustworthiness is automatically assessed as high. Our analysis is centred around a satirical skit delivered by Trevor Noah, the then host of The Daily Show, which was heavily criticised for insinuating that Rishi Sunak’s assumption of the Prime Minister position in the UK was met locally with racist backlash on the basis of Sunak’s ethnic origin. Given this discursive shift, which we showcase using quantitative and qualitative measures, we argue that the humorous frame and jocular intent are fundamentally affected by processes of recontextualisation, which may bypass the audience’s cognitive mechanisms of epistemic vigilance.