What Makes A Good Race Joke?

Code Switch

NPR

Society & Culture

4.6 • 14.5K Ratings

🗓️ 23 August 2023

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When a comedian of color makes a joke, is it always about race, even if it's not about race? Code Switch talks to comedians Aparna Nancherla, Brian Bahe and Maz Jobrani about how and why race makes an appearance in their jokes. Plus, one of our own reveals her early-career dabbling in comedy.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Today, we're bringing you an episode from all the way back in 2022 where nothing was bad
0:06.6	ever.
0:07.6	It's about race and comedy, which I get it, it's not cool to dissect the frog, breaking
0:14.6	down jokes and why they're funny, kind of takes the fun out of it.
0:19.4	But I've always found it interesting how a successful joke works.
0:23.1	And actually, Jean, did I ever tell you, for a brief time in my early 20s, I had a little
0:29.4	bit of a comedy career situation.
0:32.6	Wait, I did not know this Parker.
0:36.8	Tell me more.
0:37.8	Well, it was really one summer.
0:40.8	I mean, that still counts, one summer, that's more than most of us have.
0:43.7	Yeah, it was like this one summer in film school and I was an intern at Comedy Central and
0:49.5	I was actually one of these things called a rock turn, which it was called that because
0:53.7	it was a program created by Chris Rock after he said he was tired of only seeing white
0:59.3	people in these writers rooms for TV shows.
1:02.2	We never met Chris Rock by the way.
1:03.6	Never met Chris Rock.
1:04.6	No.
1:05.6	But I'm assuming you and all the other rock sounds were brown, right?
1:07.9	Well, we were people of color.
1:09.6	It was like, yeah.
1:11.0	And we were very conspicuous.
	...

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