Stereotypes: The Backbone of Stand Up Comedy

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Best known for portraying Tom Haverford on NBC’s Parks and Recreation is Aziz Ansari a standup comedian and actor. He previously starred on and created the MTV sketch series Human Giant, and stars as Dev Shah on the Netflix series Master of None, which debuted in 2015. Ansari has embarked on several major comedy tours, including 2013’s Buried Alive. His fourth major comedy special, Live at Madison Square Garden, was released on Netflix in 2015, and his first book, Modern Romance: An Investigation, was released in June 2015. The video clip I will be analyzing today will be from Aziz Ansari’s 2013 Buried Alive.

Aziz Ansari’s standup comedy comedy approach is largely active, engaging, and fully enthusiastic like most standup comedians. Like most of the mainstream comedy in the media, a substantial amount of jokes and personal stories rely heavily on poking fun at certain people, retelling a funny experience, impersonations, and rants. Most noticeably however are the stereotype jokes aimed at minorities. There is a plentiful amount of asian jokes, hispanic jokes, black jokes, indian jokes, etc. that comedians can draw content from -and most of them do. Aziz Ansari is no different in his standup comedy performances.  Although stereotype jokes are meant to be comedic in nature, they only serve to reinforce the negative association of being non-white because of the stereotypes that are associated with certain ethnicities. Stereotype jokes are easy to use and their funny. Because stereotypes are often perpetuated in standup comedy, their jokes are perceived as not racist but instead funny (and even sometimes true). The Netflix special Buried Alive by Aziz Ansari embodies this very issue and acts as a prime example of negative effects due to hipster-racism that is present in stereotype jokes in the media.

Aziz Ansari’s Buried Alive focuses on his unique viewpoint on pending adulthood, babies, marriage, and love in the modern era. The show follows Ansari’s successful live tour of the same name, during which he performed in front of sold out crowds in over 75 cities all over the world at venues including New York’s Carnegie Hall, London’s Hammersmith Apollo and the Sydney Opera House. In a short clip from that show, Aziz Ansari is shown telling jokes about how his favorite stereotype joke is about black people. The dialogue presented in the clip shows Aziz making a comment such as “black dudes are blown away by magic tricks”. After stating that this is his favorite stereotype the crowd responds with laughter. He explains that this stereotype is superior than other asian and jewish stereotypes jokes.  He shows this by exaggerating the reaction that black people get when they see a magic trick: “when a black person sees a magic trick, his mind explodes”. He exaggerates his point even further by saying that “when a black person sees a magic trick, for a few moments he thinks it’s real, like there’s a sorcerer on earth!” By doing this, Aziz is using black stereotypes in a negative way to prove that black people are gullible and always overreact when they see something mindblowing. The nonverbal behaviors of Aziz Ansari in Buried Alive include his facial over exaggerated expression of amazement as he impersonates a black person who has just seen a magic trick. This includes him mimicking a stereotypical black person (who has just been amazed by a magic trick) intensely walking away with his/her hands up in astonishment and disbelief “at least 30 feet away.” The sound elements include the comedic laughter in the background of the audience after Aziz makes his stereotype jokes towards black people. This reinforces the idea that using stereotypes as jokes is okay because it’s a joke – that joking about it doesn’t make the person who said it racist because of the idea that racism is behind us now and no longer exists. This clip is only one of many times in Buried Alive and countless number of other standup comedy acts by celebrities (such as George Lopez, Chris Rock, Kevin Hart, and much more) where stereotype jokes are used to poke fun at other racially stereotyped groups. Since everyone is making these stereotype jokes, it somehow makes it okay to continue the cycle.

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This represents the criticism of hipster-racism as described by Catherine Squires in “Postracial Mystique: Media and Race in the 21st Century”. Squires writes, “Sitcom writers, stand-up comics, and others ‘ironically’ spew racial epithets and stereotypes as part of their jokes, all the while winking at the audience that they’re not really racist—they’re making fun of racists, right? In the post-racial entertainment world, anything goes because we ‘all’ know it’s inappropriate to be racist—so the racist jokes are a hip way of pushing boundaries. Anyone who protests is uptight and humorless” (Squires 9-10). As part of the visual elements, the audience can see that Aziz Ansari delivers a comfortable and relaxed performance. This helps contribute to the comfortable and normalized tone of his standup and comedic performance. As a consequence, this further perpetuates the casual use of stereotype jokes in comedy as a standard practice in entertaining people.

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• Catherine R. Squires. Postracial Mystique: Media and Race in the 21st Century. New York: NYU Press, 2014. Project MUSE. Web. 20 Apr. 2016. http://muse.jhu.edu/.