Critical Intersections and Comic Possibilities: Extending Racialized Critical Rhetorical Scholarship

Communication scholars conducting work on race must engage work from complementary critical communities to bolster their own critiques and further advance progressive racial coalitions. Critical, rhetorical scholarship and Critical Race Theory (CRT) share principle aims that provide significant ground for interdisciplinary racial projects. Together, these interrelated disciplines can find reinforcement in comedic discourse. This essay locates racial comedy as a space for transformational critiques. More specifically, the author argues that critical rhetorical scholarship and CRT taken jointly can illuminate parallel comic discourses and advance their important correctives pertaining to race and racism

Emancipatory Racial Humor as Critical Public Pedagogy: Subverting Hegemonic Racism

This essay identifies emancipatory racial humor as a disarming critical public pedagogy that confronts racial hegemony. Acknowledging the interpretive quandaries of humor and the possibilities of racist humor, this essay tells an often overlooked story of the comic “heroes” who struggle against dominant racial meanings, power relationships, and identity constructions. The essay analyzes the pedagogical possibilities of critical humorists who creatively confront hegemonic racism and whose work participates in critical projects of social, political, and cultural transformation. Such emancipatory racial humor serves as a critical public pedagogy that exposes dominant public pedagogies, injects counternarratives into the struggle over hegemony, and subverts naturalized racial meanings and privileges

Prudence and Racial Humor: Troubling Epithets

Prudence is an essential virtue in a contemporary racial culture marked by the contingencies and the paradoxical in/stability of race and racism. Recurring controversies surrounding racial epithets exemplify this clash between deeply entrenched racial meanings on one hand and shifting conventions on the other. I argue in this essay that racial humor presents a valuable site for understanding and practicing prudential reasoning and performance. Analyzing three episodes from popular texts—The Boondocks, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and South Park—I illustrate the way racial humor resists prescriptive reasoning and creates possibilities for audiences to practice prudence

Critical Race Humor in a Postracial Moment: Richard Pryor’s Contemporary Parrhesia

Racial truth-telling becomes a difficult project given the current sociopolitical context that privileges postracialism and neoliberal individualism. Critical race humor, however, remains a public and popular discourse where people not only speak but also engage powerful racial truths. This article presents critical race humor as a contemporary form of parrhesia, or frank and courageous criticism. As a critical practice, parrhesia resonates with tenets of critical race scholarship and critical communication scholarship. Using the truth-telling comedy of the late Richard Pryor as a case study, this article suggests that critical race humor could be understood as parrhesia for our time. Moreover, critical race humor as a form of public pedagogy might provide people with the skills and habits of thought necessary to think critically about and transform racial knowledge and reality

Improv(ing) learning environments: How to Foster Belonging through Play

poster abstractApplied improvisation is a field in which practitioners apply the principles and practices of improvisational theater to enhance and transform relationships in real-world arenas. Applied improvisation practices have gained popularity in business and professional settings, including professional education such as medical school, law school, and management training. However, currently no research examines how applied improvisation might augment college learning environments by promoting greater student connection, focus, and presence. This research project examines how principles and practices of improvisation can be used to address two classroom challenges: 1) distraction or lack of focus/attention and 2) disengagement and disconnection from peers that hinders the development of a learning community. First, mental distractions hinder student engagement: from smart phones and online social networks to larger concerns such as academic anxieties (worrying about an upcoming test) or stresses in persona life (i.e. a troubled relationship). These distractions displace students’ attention from the immediate task of learning and limit their mental presence in class. Second, learning often remains a radically individual endeavor rather than a process of engaging with and supporting peers in a learning community. In response to these challenges, I have adapted improvisation games to use as “warm-up” activities in every class session throughout the semester. The goal is to understand whether applied improvisation promotes greater student focus and attention as well as foster connection and trust among learners, both of which result in a stronger learning community. These outcomes are particularly significant at a commuter campus where students find fewer opportunities to develop community and connection. This poster will report the results of a mixed-methods study featuring both quantitative and qualitative data. Results indicate that applied improvisation improves learning environment factors such as students’ sense of community, belonging, focus, and attention

Dick Gregory and Activist Style: Identifying Attributes of Humor necessary for Activist Advocacy

Human rights advocacy is often austere, if not funereal. Nevertheless, humorists have long engaged human rights activism through their art. Against claims that humor weakens action or conservatively maintains the status quo, this essay argues for humor as necessary element in human rights activism. At its best, humor awakens communities by providing new perspectives on reality and sharpening understandings of injustice. It provokes dialogue and action and humanizes all parties in a struggle. This essay explores humor as a necessary, if not sufficient, component of an activist political style through a case study of comedian and activist Dick Gregory. Using evidence from Gregory's performances and speeches as well as public discourse about Gregory, this essay establishes humor as an integral characteristic of an activist political style

Enriching Group Communication through Applied Improvisation and Meditation

poster abstractThe ability to mindfully listen to others and oneself fosters the healthiest environment for group discussion. This study explores how applied improvisation and meditation might enhance group communication. Applied improvisation is the use of principles and practices of improvisation in nontheatrical settings. One of the many benefits of applied improvisation is that it teaches students how to fully listen to what others are saying. Meditation is the practice of consciously turning inwards and focusing the thoughts for reflective purposes. Meditation teaches students mindfulness and the ability to listen to their inner monologue. Together applied improvisation and meditation builds community, encourages risk taking, removes judgment of self and others, and promotes acceptance through its joint focus on holistic listening. These concepts will be applied to group discussions/reflections occurring on an educationally-meaningful service trip (alternative spring break) to the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago during spring 2015. This is preliminary research using a mixed methods design. First, self-rating questionnaires will be given to the participants. As a participant observer, I will record notes immediately after each reflection session. Finally, qualitative interviews will be conducted the week immediately following the trip with a former trip leader and former trip participants who were also on this specific trip. Mixed methods, or pragmatic research, allows for both quantitative and qualitative data to be gathered in a complementary way. The results will be gathered at the conclusion of the spring break trip. Our anticipated results are that the quality of the group discussion will be enhanced for a safer and more enriching learning environment for participants. If so, these methods can be refined and applied in future service-learning experiences

Trumping Tropes with Joke(r)s: The Daily Show “Plays the Race Card”

The race card is at once a trope and a topic that reductively prefigures racial meaning and performance. As a trope, it frames most racial discourse as a cheat or violation and thus prevents deliberation over material realities of race. As a topic, it exists as a resource for diminishing the social and political significance of persistent racial problems. We argue that The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (TDS) deploys political humor as a troping device that disrupts the contradictory logics of race card rhetoric and disorders a range of reductive commonplaces and figures of racial discourses. Specifically, we maintain that TDS pushes the boundaries of everyday negotiations of race, performs alternative conventions, and models manners of thinking, speaking, and acting useful for contemporary understandings of race. This essay therefore enhances the contemporary body of scholarship on politics and humor while expanding upon analyses of the rhetoricity of race and race relations