Laughing At? Or Laughing With?

Before this class, I

have never seen episodes of South Park or the Chappelle Show. I didn’t know too much about either, I just knew a basis for each of these comedy shows was to make fun of certain ethnicities, races, and

subcultures. I understand that both of these shows are very different in some respects, but a main similarity is that they both share a common audience. Whether that can be a good thing or not, is debatable. W

hile watching segments of each clip I started to realize what Ted was saying about why Dave Chappelle stopped his show; because he couldn’t tell if people were laughing at him and with the jokes, or laughing with him and at the jokes. After Ted said that I started to think about that a little more about comedy in general. When people, ethnicities, races, subcultures, etc. are being made fun of there is always a change that at least one person in the audience is laughing at the criticism of the stereotypes. Knowing this, are certain comics promoting racism? I just

thought it was funny to think that even after the strides people have made to overcome racism, it still strongly exists.