Introduction
When friends joke and laugh together, they share in a distinctly human practice that generates warm feelings and brings them closer together. On the other hand, what happens when millions people laugh together – at a political joke? Six million relaxed and often pajama-clad people tune in nightly to The Tonight Show with Jay Leno to laugh with the most prolific political comedian in U.S. late-night television today. In the workaday world, critical disapproval of late-night comedy is casually dismissed by saying “Jay’s only joking.” However, in scholarly circles such mass-mediated political commentary too often is also merely a laughing matter. Recent full-scale studies have claimed “the nature of late night humor is determinedly non-issue oriented” (Niven, Lichter & Amundson Reference Niven, Lichter and Amundson2003:130; Young Reference Young2004:7). These studies focus on late-night comedians’ ad hominem attacks on presidential candidates, and falsely conclude that this comedy is “more anti-political than political” (Schutz Reference Schutz1977; Peterson Reference Peterson2005a:20). I argue for a reexamination of the scope and lens of research leading to such cheerful conclusions, since this view fails to address less sanguine recent theories (e.g. Gervais & Sloan Wilson Reference Gervais and Wilson2005) and classical theories of humor stretching back to Aristotle (e.g., Freud Reference Freud1963[1905]; see Morreall Reference Morreall and Morreall1987, Billig Reference Billig2005). The chuckles and guffaws brought on by late-night comedy’s recent obsession with immigration policy are nationally broadcast expressions of the “second face” of political power (Valelly Reference Valelly2006).
In January 2004 President George W. Bush was derided by members of his own political party for stating a truism, “Immigrants are hard working, decent human beings,” when he proposed thoroughgoing immigration policy reform. Bush inadvertently set off a powder keg of public apprehension about the nation’s unauthorized immigrants. Two demographic processes have fueled the intense national reaction. One is the growth of Spanish-speaking communities across the nation that has changed the complexion and cultural mix of the United States. A large segment of the citizenry is also appalled at the size of the burgeoning underground economy, a laissez-faire labor market of unauthorized workers that now serves major sectors of the nation’s economy. Although initially overshadowed by the 2004 presidential reelection campaign and Iraq war, the immigrant antagonists sought public expression. For one, the Minutemen, a nativist group of 150 people who fear an invasion by immigrants across the Mexican border, sought to shame the President (whom they labeled “traitor” on their websites) over his administration’s lax border control and comprehensive reform proposal. In April 2005, the Minutemen took up posts as sentinels along the U.S./Mexican border to symbolically defend the country against the immigration invasion.Footnote 1 Bush called them “vigilantes,” but the Minutemen riveted the nation’s attention. By December 2005, the U.S. House of Representatives had ratified House Resolution 4437, which would have made immigrant workers, and any citizens who assist them, culpable of a felony. It also would have erected fences along one-third of the U.S./Mexican border, and enacted a number of other punitive measures to criminalize immigrant workers. The response to the Minutemen’s antics and the substance of HR 4437, as well as hundreds of editorials and letters to the editor across the country, signaled a new anti-immigrant campaign.
U.S. Latinos and political progressives contested these events in public statements and unprecedented mass marches. The first cresting of this new immigrant rights social movement came at the Great May Day Marches of 2006, when an estimated 5 million people marched in more than 100 cities across the country (Rodríguez Reference Rodríguez2006). These entirely peaceful and disciplined protesters clearly alarmed many previously unconcerned U.S. citizens.Footnote 2 In this article I focus on the immigration jokes with which Jay Leno placated his audience’s concern about this new social movement. To situate my critique of six consecutive days of Leno monologues delivered at the time of the Great May Day Marches, in the following sections I summarize the demographics of Leno’s audience and run through the pertinent discursive features of the social ritual of joke telling.
Political Economy And Demographics Of Late-Night Comedy
Leno’s audience
For 17 years, Jay Leno has consistently drawn the largest audience among his late-night television competitors. According to the New York Times (31 December 2005), about 5.9 million viewers watch Leno each night. While the television networks overall have steadily lost audience share, dropping from 77% in 1992 (when Leno began hosting The Tonight Show) to about 50% in 2003 in the face of stiff multimedia competition, late-night television audiences have grown. Thus, Leno and his comedic commentary on the news of the day reach an increasingly large television audience. Since about 9 million people still tune into each network news program each evening, this represents nearly a 50% decline in viewers over a period during which Leno has increased his viewership. Compare his reach to two other news media: Leno commands a larger audience than the combined daily readership of the top three national newspapers (5.4 million). Indeed, USA Today (9 May 2006) reported figures that indicate that in two days as many people watch Leno as read the nation’s 20 top-selling newspapers each day (13.6 million).Footnote 3 As for radio, 2005 Arbitron ratings indicate that 1.7 million listeners tune into the Rush Limbaugh Show, the nation’s largest radio talk show audience. Thus, Leno competes well with hard and so-called soft news sources.Footnote 4 By any measure, late-night comedy is doing very well.
I offer a snapshot on Leno’s audience demographics, based a commercial marketing report of 3,000 respondents who watched television, of whom 209 respondents reported watching NBC’s Tonight Show with Jay Leno one night in 1999,Footnote 5 for which I compare Leno’s demographics to the total late-night sample.Footnote 6 In brief, on average more women watch The Tonight Show than watch other late-night programs; Leno’s audience counts with somewhat fewer Whites and more Blacks; it is older, less educated, and less affluent than the average late-night television viewer. With further caveats, we can say his audience is somewhat more politically aware and polarized than other late-night television viewers. The data do not skew strongly in any direction.
Leno is not a niche comedian, but appeals to the widest swath of U.S. television viewership. Leno’s official NBC website offers the network’s own spin on his audience: “Leno has created his own unique late-night style [for] the wee hours when viewers want to wind down with a few laughs before drifting off to dreamland. Leno’s ‘everyman’ style and personality have helped him earn millions of fans worldwide, but primarily in the regions where people can relate to his personable style.” Television scholar Bernard Timberg confirms this description when speaking about broad appeal of Leno’s predecessor: “As Everyman … he is directly on beam with the sensibilities of his viewing public” (in Peterson Reference Peterson2005b:para. 10). Leno cultivates a television audience that by and large does not require “mediated visibility” (Gross Reference Gross and Seiter1989), viewers whose sociopolitical stance is taken to be normal and all-pervading on the screen and who are most likely to naturalize the edicts of the hegemony. To sustain his large audience, Leno cultivates a sleepy everyman viewer who takes for granted being at the center of an All-American world order (Saenz Reference Saenz1992), and who, at the end of another workday, is comfortable with the nation’s status quo. Given this characterization, we expect that large portions of this audience would be greatly perturbed by the televised reports of the nation’s largest political demonstration in three decades.
As the audience share of the late-night talk show has grown, so has its political impact. Long before news content was mixed into entertainment formats, communication scholars recognized two sources of news media’s power over public perception. First, news media can focus the attention of the public on certain issues and ignore others. The media effectively determine what the public accepts as the important issues of the day – that is, Valelly’s second face of power, to set the public’s policy agenda. Second, communication scholars also have worked to characterize the magnitude of the “priming” power of the network news, its ability to affect the public’s assessment of political issues. Late-night political humor also can set an agenda and “prime” its audience’s evaluation of that agenda. I argue that via humor, certain media personalities and programs have even greater power to get their message across to their vast national audience. In contrast to news reporting practices, the discourse practices of humor establish a more personal relationship with the audience, making for more compelling communication. Within comedy (a genre that simplifies narrative), joke-telling discourse reinforces political messaging by way of its verbal felicity and conciseness (which facilitate memory) and with its ability to divert counter-arguments by reducing critical thinking among its audience.
Leno’s audience consistently is larger than those of his competitors, and he engages in more political humor than his peers. In the most extensive studies on the political content of late-night comedy, Niven and his collaborators studied the genre during the period of the 1996 and 2000 presidential elections. They found Leno to be “by far the most prolific political jokester, offering 1275 political jokes per year” compared to his rivals, David Letterman, Bill Maher, and Conan O’Brien, who respectively delivered on average 870, 342, and 310 such jokes (2003:121). Thus, since Leno’s avowed goal is to entertain by making his audience laugh with him, I argue (pace Peterson Reference Peterson2005a, Reference Peterson2005b) that his stand-up comedy monologues about immigration qualify as a political issue:
Russell Crowe: “How do you deal with the politics? … I feel like you do try to make your point now and then without actually putting up some sort of banner.”
Leno: “I think that is fair to say. But the idea is to tell the joke first and get a laugh. If you want to get a little social commentary in there, then that’s fine, but your first job as a comedian is to get the laugh. I don’t think anyone can figure out what my politics are. I try to walk the line, and humiliate and degrade Republicans and Democrats equally. … I get hate letters from both sides” (Crowe Reference Crowe2006).
The study of the power of mass-mediated political comedy has not kept pace with its growth. The communication director of the 2000 John McCain for President campaign said that it is “incredible, and it’s growing. During the campaign season, you’re often cowering at 11:30 – What are these guys going to say?” (Niven et al. Reference Niven, Lichter and Amundson2003:119). Indeed, political commentary draped in humor is not lost on media critics such as Wolf Reference Wolf2004, who writes that part of late-night television’s success “clearly lies in comedy’s ability to say things that traditional media sources aren’t saying about the news of the day.”
In late-night comedy, what is said is indeed different. How it is said and how it is judged also differ. “To get the laugh,” Leno deliberately lies, but his audience does not consider him a liar. Schaefer & Avery Reference Schaefer and Avery1993 find that Late Night with David Letterman audiences interpret television texts according to genre-derived expectations; that is, the audience interprets the comedian’s monologues as entertainment rather than broadcast news content. If Leno utters a politically charged comment during his monologue, “It’s just a joke,” because the discourse practices of joke telling and reporting operate by different rules. Nonetheless, the joke still conveys political information that Leno’s audience is more apt to recall and act on, because the television viewer has a more intimate communicative relationship with a late-night comedian delivering jokes than with a network anchor delivering the news.
For a window of time, a good joke teller can shut down a friend’s critical judgment. So it goes for a television audience of millions, one household at a time, in the “privatized reception” of a centrally broadcast interaction (Williams Reference Williams, Askew and Wilk2002 [1974]:39). In genre studies terminology, comedy’s conventions “discourage viewer’s critical engagement.” Park and his collaborators quote Stuart Hall describing it as “a licensed zone disconnected from the serious,” and Mick Bowes’s assertion that “comedy affirms the dominant ideological positions because it diffuses viewer’s critical interpretation” (Park, Gabbadon & Cherin Reference Park, Gabbadon and Cherin2006:160). Pragmatically, this critical disconnection occurs because in order to share a laugh, the members of an audience must align themselves emotionally with the comedian, while distancing themselves from the butt of the joke. Most people cannot remain conceptually judicious while simultaneously participating in a joke-telling session. The discernment of critical thinking requires a psychological distance that conflicts with the pursuit of the collective that underlies laughing together in a group, as will be taken up below.
Why We Laugh at Jokes
Jokes have been told for as long as we have been human, and since at least Aristotle’s time we have debated why we laugh at jokes. Nearly 25 years ago, Victor Raskin Reference Raskin1985 catapulted humor theory from speculation to formalization when he uncovered the basic grammar of jokes, which allowed him to integrate long-unreconciled views of humor. In this article, I will not formally analyze Leno’s joke telling beyond what is necessary to discuss the sociopolitical effects of his nightly monologues.Footnote 7 For this purpose we will review the disparate aspects of joke telling that Raskin brings together: a distinctive discursive practice that stimulates psychosocial processes and is used in group formation rituals.
First, it is clear that at the start of his monologue, Leno’s audience does not expect him to converse with them, nor do they anticipate a report of any kind. Rather, they expect him to make them laugh. When people talk, they make a set of assumptions that the philosopher of language Paul Grice termed the cooperative principle: Make your contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged (Levinson Reference Levinson1983:101). Grice designed the Cooperative Principle for what Raskin called “bona fide communication,” such as conversing, requesting, or reporting.
Raskin characterized joke telling, in contrast, as “non-bona fide communication [which] clearly involves a cooperative principle which is quite distinct” (1985:102–3). No doubt we have all experienced such a change of assumptions: Consider the shifts that take place when one person begins to tell jokes at some point in what had been a regular conversation. The roles, rules, and success criterion all change. As for role, all other individual interlocutors become a single audience. As Raskin revealed, the grammar of joke telling can be specified. Leno and any other joke teller sets up an imaginary scenario with two “scripts” that often do not fit together in a typical narrative sequence; they are somehow conceptually incongruent. Of course, the audience fully knows it is participating in a joke-telling session, expects this incongruity, and eagerly anticipates its resolution. For example, on 24 April 2006, Jay Leno delivered a joke that his audience loved:
#1 “At a speech in San Diego this morning, President Bush said that proposals for massive deportation of illegal immigrants are unrealistic. ‘Unrealistic,’ he says … … Funny, isn’t that what Mexico has already done?”
So, why did Leno’s audience laugh? Leno set up a story with incompatible scripts that he resolved with a well-timed punch line. In joke #1, the two scripts are: (a) 12 million people cannot be deported; and (b) 12 million people have been deported. In the first script, Leno quoted Bush. In the second, he called into question the President’s claim. By attributing to Bush a suddenly revealed contradiction, Leno said in effect that the President was stupid, and the audience laughed. The punch line resolves the incompatibility – at Bush’s expense. He is the “butt” of the joke, because Leno focused the audience’s attention on Bush and they laughed at him (Attardo Reference Attardo1994:224). Since jokes involve incongruent scripts, entirely unrelated topics can be brought together for a laugh. Leno’s script employed Bush’s national immigration policy initiative, and as the audience laughed at the butt, Leno also ridiculed Bush’s initiative. When Leno told this political joke, he ascribed to Bush’s immigration policy proposal the same evaluation he ascribed to Bush in this joke, as the butt of laughter. The scope relationship can be represented as follows:
butt[Bush [Bush’s policy]]butt
The fact that every joke has a butt has long fueled speculation about its fundamental nature: Is it joyful or spiteful? Across history many well-known commentators have debated whether joking laughter is a release of simple elation, or a socialized reflex of the primordial human’s victory roar over an enemy. From the jokes-as-aggression position, Arthur Koestler quotes Hobbes: “The passion of laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from a sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves by comparison with the infirmity of others” (1964:53).Footnote 8 Recent scholarship sustains the aggressive humor tenet. In a wide-ranging synthesis of physical anthropological, neurological, and evolutionary studies, Matthew Gervais and David Sloan Wilson argue that human laughter had a benign beginning. For them, humor was ritualized in prehuman hominids as far back as 4 million years ago “as a medium for playful emotional contagion” (2005:396). However Gervais & Wilson hypothesize that around 2 million years ago humans coopted this entirely joyful play-laughter that had always permitted prehumans to share emotional release. Humans invented “aggressive laughter … that came to occur in aggressive, nervous, or hierarchical contexts, functioning to signal, to appease, to manipulate, to deride, or to subvert.” Such aggressive laughter makes it possible for people to derive pleasure from the misfortune of others, “downright laughing at people that are not liked” (2005:418). Thus, humor and laughter have a compassionate prehuman etiology, but when humans laugh at the butt of a joke, we aggressively assert superiority over someone who we deem to be our inferior.
The third perspective on joke telling that continually rivets our attention is its psychosocial effect, the emotional release that an audience experiences laughing at jokes. In his review of humor theories that argues for a benign (rather than antagonistic) foundation for laughter, John Lowe (Reference Lowe1986:442) describes Freud’s crucial observation that effective jokes “succeed in liberating an otherwise suppressed or ‘censored’ thought … thereby releasing energy.” When we laugh at jokes, we release psychological pressures of different sorts. Consequently, successful jokes tend to invoke topics that carry emotional weight for the audience. Leno’s immigration jokes addressed the social tensions created by the 2006 May Day political actions. People with progressive politics were enthralled by the potency of the immigrant rights marches. These demonstrations elicited corresponding levels of anxiety and even fear among previously complacent U.S. citizens who possibly had only thought of immigrants as those silent workers who rise to the level of recognition only when parking the family car or bussing tables at the local coffee shop. Leno knew the immigration issue would work for him in 2006. Comedians focus audience attention and emotions on these issues to joke about them. Topics that generate greater tension make better material for comedians, who want to joke about things that give their audience “a good laugh.”
The final aspect of the social practice of joke telling that Raskin brings to bear is that laughing at a butt defines social boundaries. This is a key social discourse practice. Laughing at George W. Bush in #1 reinforces the social boundary between the President and regular folks, like themselves. Janet Holmes & Meredith Marra (2002:395) describes humor as
an effective strategy for constructing group cohesion, cementing in-group solidarity, and building team spirit. It typically exploits and strengthens shared attributes, values, and beliefs. But it also contributes to in-group versus out-group boundary maintenance by making it safe to explore the nature and limits of the boundaries. Poking fun at the out-group is comfortable and entertaining when the out-group members are safely out of range. Challenging out-group members in face-to-face interaction is a much riskier enterprise.
Thus we can study humor to evaluate group formation and division, in this case Jay Leno’s national audience, on the basis of current political issues. In its highly competitive late-night network time slot, it offers insight into group-identity formation for a good portion of Leno’s devoted audience. The viewers are in charge, one click of the television remote control away from switching off his program. When late-night comedians focus on immigrant rights marchers, their jokes must be viewed as political issue commentary, and as a commercial product of mass mediated popular culture.
In the following two sections I describe two classes of jokes based on type of butt. This six-day sample of jokes provides a clear sense of Leno’s political position on immigration. Leno made specific political points unsympathetic to the immigrants’ cause in all these jokes. I will first talk about the standard butts of Leno’s jokes. Then I will take up immigrant jokes that differ qualitatively from the standard butt.
Anti-Hegemonic Humor
In 17 out of 35 jokes, Leno used a standard butt with a regular format. The “stupid president” joke was his most frequent theme. In his review of wit and politics, Speier (Reference Speier1998:1376) deems stupidity “the universal basis” of political jokes. George W. Bush was Leno’s favorite whipping boy for all manner of topics, and Leno unwaveringly scorned the President’s immigration policy initiative. In joke #1, Leno scoffed at Bush’s assertion about the unfeasibility of deporting millions of immigrants because Mexico has already “deported” these people.
Leno depicted Bush as oblivious to the facts. On April 25 in joke #2, Leno set up another stupid-Bush joke. The scripts were: (a) Bush proposed loosening U.S. immigration policy at a small political rally near the U.S./Mexico border in San Diego; (b) as he spoke the crowd grew with more and more newly arriving immigrants. The implied conclusion (and resolution of the incompatible scripts) is that Bush was stupid to have made such an unrealistic proposal. By making his audience laugh at Bush, Leno relieved the conceptual tension he set up by juxtaposing the semantically incongruous scripts. The laughter also relieved a portion of the sociopolitical anxiety that his audience harbored toward Bush’s proposal to reform immigration policy, since Leno’s jokes #1 and #2 depicted Bush’s initiative as unreasonable. In this six-day sample of monologues, Leno repeatedly joked about Bush’s policy initiative, lambasting the President’s apparent refusal to recognize the rapidly increasing number of immigrants, and in other jokes implied that Bush’s guest worker program would only paper over the underground economy, or claimed that Bush’s naturalization proposal amounted to unwarranted amnesty for criminals.
Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, is another standard butt of Leno’s anti-immigrant wrath.Footnote 9 In joke #3 Leno made a pun on the Great May Day Marches, “or as Wal-Mart called it, ‘May Day! May Day!’ We have no cashiers!” Leno played on the homonyms for a radio distress call and International Labor Day. Leno role-played a hysterical Wal-Mart worker, effectively dishing his audience’s anxiety about Great May Day political protests onto a frantic floor manager screaming into his public address system. Leno mocked the corporation synecdochally through a lowly manager, since it profits by disregarding U.S. laws and employing unauthorized workers. In this joke, the Wal-Mart employee deserved the chaos that this “Day Without Immigrants” brought.
Leno regularly attacks another politician, Hillary Rodham Clinton. As a culture-wars icon, Rodham Clinton has long been one of Leno’s favorite butts. In joke #4 Leno’s indignation was fueled by Senator Rodham Clinton’s nominal support for building a massive “Smart Wall” at the international border, presumably to keep immigrants out of the country. In the first script of this joke, Rodham Clinton was associated with building the wall. In the second script, immigrants will circumvent the wall. Since such a barrier obviously will not stop immigration, Leno insinuated that Rodham Clinton was either cynical or derelict in her senatorial duties because she knew that immigrants will still enter the country.
In joke #5 Leno redirected his audience’s attention to another of his standard butts: “That’s what they called it: ‘A Day Without Immigrants’. . . . . . I’d like to ask: Did Governor Schwarzenegger go to work today?” Leno generated a good deal of audience laughter by juxtaposing the image of the lowly immigrant worker to a powerful governor. Leno regularly mocks the larger-than-life persona of the “Governator,” and in this case Leno allowed his audience to relieve its anxiety about the unprecedented marches of the now-not-so-lowly, by laughing at the popular and powerful California governor.
Democratizing function
M. H. Abrams (quoted by Bogel Reference Bogel2001:1) defines satire as the art of using “laughter as a weapon,” to derogate the powerful by evoking the public’s contempt.Footnote 10 According to Bayles Reference Bayles2005, students of democracy “from Aristotle to Tocqueville” have noted how this power is used to support democracy. Bayles says that making pompous individuals the butt of jokes is the “bread and butter of comedy … debunking the high and mighty, those with great vanity, the arrogant, the false moralist, or the person with overweening ambition.” Laughing at the powerful takes them down a notch and relieves audience tensions about senators, governors, and presidents whose actions are beyond the audience’s control. Moreover, in a society that honors celebrity, those individuals who live life on the public stage, such as Paris Hilton, are also fair game for the comedian’s derision. Laughing at these powerful or celebrated individuals diminishes them and makes the average viewer feel better about himself or herself. However, Leno’s butts are not always the rich and powerful.
Hegemonic Humor
On 27 April, Leno exclaimed:
#6 “It’s terrible! Gas now costs $3.85 a gallon. You know it’s cheaper to have illegal immigrants push your car than to fill the tank.”
The political impact of joke #6 was different from that of Leno’s standard butt jokes. When the audience laughs at standard butts such as Clinton or Bush, Leno helps his viewers emotionally raise their own perceived status at the expense of exceptionally powerful individuals. However, the script of #6 did not involve abstract policy proposals, but strikingly concrete activities. Its setting was not the Senate floor, but the family car. Most of us have come across the sight of someone struggling to move a disabled car out of traffic. Such a figure gains our sympathy in an instant; we might even empathize with the immobilized motorist. However, for joke #6 to work – following traditional “socialized roar” theorists, and today’s discourse practice theorists – Leno’s audience could not have connected with the lives and fortunes of unauthorized immigrants. The viewers must have had negligible sympathy for immigrants, notwithstanding the pitiful image that they will immediately recognize.
If Leno’s viewers did not laugh, it may have been because they sympathized with the immigrants. To succeed at laughing out loud, conversely, viewers could not have identified with immigrants. Through laughter, they further distanced themselves from those anonymous brown-skinned workers. Leno’s joke pinned the donkey’s tail on people with lower socioeconomic status than the audience. This is strong evidence that Leno’s viewers sustained significant cultural and political anxieties about them. In this sample immigrants are the butt of 18 Leno jokes.
Attacking the social movement
It is premature to characterize the ultimate nature of the fledgling immigrant justice movement, but its outline is clear. Its initiating event was George W. Bush’s 2004 address introducing his immigration policy reform initiative. This speech to the nation generated heated conservative reaction, and a liberal/progressive counter-response that led to the Great Marches. The scope, size, and discipline of these demonstrations signaled the potency of the new social movement to both its adherents and its detractors. Leno’s articulated ire can be organized in various ways. I have classified these jocular attacks on the cause of immigrant justice as Leno’s tacit recognition of the elements of a social movement.
Tarrow Reference Tarrow1994 hypothesizes that four key elements make up a successful social movement: the publicly perceived Worthiness or moral rectitude of the people and their cause, the political Unity of purpose of huge Numbers of individuals with different life experiences and values who come together to challenge an unjust status quo. Finally, each individual must demonstrate private Commitment to potentially real personal sacrifice for the cause, passing over the easiest course of action to be a “free-rider” who benefits from the social movement without participating. Tarrow uses an acronym, wunc, to refer to these elements of success. Leno attacks each of these elements in his monologues.
Rejecting worthiness
Leno attacked the moral and legal legitimacy of the immigrant rights marchers in several jokes. He articulated his concern with the work-stoppage theme in joke #7: “Businesses were closed, streets were closed. Everything was closed . . . . . except that big hole in the fence.” Leno contrasted the national work stoppage to continuing border crossings. His barb against the immigrants was direct. As in other jokes, he stated in effect that unauthorized immigrants cannot justifiably call for any consideration, since they have broken the nation’s laws. This was the sixth immigration joke of his May Day monologue. On the day of the Great Marches he worked overtime to ensure that his audience was effectively inoculated against any lingering anxiety regarding the televised images of immense assemblies of people protesting the status quo.
In the very next joke of this monologue, #8, Leno continued talking about work stoppages as he brought out another standard butt who was entirely irrelevant to the day’s political issue. “Everybody is affected by the walkout. Even Charlie Sheen was forced to hire an American hooker.” Leno incongruously linked the work stoppage to a well-known actor with a personality flaw. This move effectively dissolved his audience’s anxiety about the protesters, diverting attention from their call to the nation to reflect on its unjust economic system, by referring to one man’s debauchery.Footnote 11
The skeptic might suspect that when the butt of the jokes is not explicitly the immigrants that they, as a group, and their political position are not affected negatively. This view is most untenable in the case of the Sheen jokes. The only reason Leno referred to Sheen is to diminish, by false association, the demands of the immigrant rights marchers. Likewise, each time Leno criticized a non-punitive immigration policy proposal that he attributed to Rodham Clinton or Bush, in the context of the unprecedented pro-immigrant rights marches, the key implication that Leno’s audience could draw is that the immigrants’ petition had no merit.
It might appear futile for one person to attempt to contest the political force of disciplined marchers in hundreds of cities and towns. For Leno, it’s simple. In joke #9, Leno said that Kevin Federline was in solidarity with immigrants who chose not to work on May Day: “Federline said if he had a job, he would have stayed home also.” As his audience laughed, then Leno spoke as if he were Federline, mockingly raising his fist and proclaiming “Power to the People!” Federline was an apt choice for Leno’s purposes because as a public figure, Federline was not highly regarded. He pursued no gainful employment or creditable avocation. Federline may have best been known for cultivating a trailer-trash sensibility, apart from being the (now-former) husband of pop singer Brittney Spears. Leno’s audience laughed away their anxieties, as they laughed at Federline. In ways similar to the Sheen joke, joke #9 effectively dissipated audience anxiety by associating the national work stoppage with one notoriously indolent man.
Rejecting numbers
A mocking Leno got testy in the next joke. He enumerated in #10 the numbers of marchers participating cities across the country, starting with a million in Los Angeles, 300,000 in Chicago, and so forth. At the end of his list, after mentioning Salt Lake City, he hesitates: “ . . . . . Three guys. Just three guys showed up.” The semantic opposition set up in this joke was a numerical contrast, which when the joke was resolved allowed viewers to reduce the immensity of the march to a disgruntled few. The effect was to diminish the political potency of the protests. Leno again twisted the news of the day for an easy laugh. He would not have gotten even a chuckle with the actual figures (as will be addressed below), so he broadcast lies across the country to “get the laugh.”
Rejecting commitment and unity.
Leno attacked the other elements in Tarrow’s characterization of effective social movements when he laid into the marchers’ commitment and unity. In #11 Leno quipped that with the success of the Great May Day marches, immigrant leaders said they “made their point and will not have to leave work in large numbers again . . . . . until Cinco de Mayo.” With his punch line Leno transformed the awesome march into a carefree Mexican-American holiday. Leno neutralized the political menace by invoking trivializing stereotypes that his audience could easily dismiss.
Leno also contested the marchers’ commitment and solidarity in joke #12. Again he ridiculed the nationwide work stoppage, openly mocking the immigrants’ speech as they announced their work-action: “Sicko de worko. Sicko de worko.” Hill Reference Hill1993 has characterized this kind of purposefully ungrammatical, derisive simulation of Spanish. She first recognized the verbal practice as a covertly racializing discourse and defined its function to aggrandize Whiteness and the English language by disparaging Mexicans and the Spanish language. Hill coined the term “Mock Spanish” for this racist discourse, and notes that while amused listeners might not admit that they participate in a discourse that articulates racism, “it is impossible to ‘get’ Mock Spanish – to find these expressions funny or colloquial or even intelligible – unless one has access to … profoundly racist images of members of historically Spanish-speaking populations” (1998:683). Whenever Leno used Mock Spanish during these monologues, he got bigger laughs.
This Mock Spanish concoction plays on both sick out and sick of work and sets up a semantic opposition. The May Day marches were nation’s largest political demonstration in 30 years and must have been disconcerting for most of Leno’s audience. Leno’s goal was to alleviate their anguish. With his Mock Spanish phrase Leno transformed the nationwide call for justice into one person’s laziness, which released the audience’s emotional tension, as it expressed disdain for the marchers’ commitment to their social movement. Leno followed in quick succession with a series of similar jokes that also scorned the demonstrators’ commitment to the immigrant justice movement.
In joke #13 Leno continued by asking, “So, how many people today ‘called in Mexican’?” Here Leno produced an effective pun on the phrase to call in sick. By converting the actions of millions into the act of one person, Leno tried to relieve his viewers of any need to hold themselves to account to immigrant workers. In the same way that the Sheen joke dispersed audience anxiety, Leno transformed the work stoppage, which was a legitimate political action, into a fraudulent excuse to skip work. With the joke, his audience could dismiss the marchers’ claims as easily as they could set aside a slacker’s scheme. In the same phrase Leno also falsely associated Mexicans with laziness.
This sequence of jokes built up resentment toward immigrants. Ever the cheerful entertainer, Leno used the next jokes to ease audience tension. In joke #14, he recruited more ne’er-do-wells: “My grandmother was Mexican, so I’m not coming in.” Leno delivered this joke with an antagonistic tone. His tone suggested anyone can join the ranks of the irresponsible – not just Mexicans. In joke #15, Leno modulated his voice: “I’m only half Mexican; I’ll come in for half a day.” He softened his running gag by invoking partial conciliation; his Mexican half ended up sounding even more comically belligerent. As Leno toyed with illicit sick-day jokes, he diminished the marchers in the eyes of his audience. The sacrifice and commitment of a multitude was replaced by self-serving acts of a lazy individual.
Stereotypes
As noted above, Leno does not mind invoking false stereotypes to get the laugh. A full article could be devoted to the welter of images projected in Leno’s six-monologue sample, so we will touch on only two. In the final joke of his May 1st monologue, joke #16, Leno cited the Wall Street Journal, saying: “In 1968 the average Mexican woman had seven children. Today, she has two children in Mexico. . . . . . The other five are in the U.S.” He restated the old stereotype that Mexicans are excessively fertile. Leno quoted an authority, but not the facts, to create the mistaken impression that the country is in imminent danger of being overrun. The comedian passed over the humorless reality that the economics of globalization, not demographics, is the engine of today’s unauthorized immigration, to let his stereotype stand.
He also used visual metaphors to resurrect the immigrant as invading soldier stereotype. In joke #17 he said that these immigrant demonstrations “were scary, even in downtown Burbank. They were . . . . . Well, we have some footage.” Then his audience was shown an old movie clip of nineteenth century Mexican troops scaling the Alamo – with the modern-day NBC logo digitally emblazoned on the mission wall. In an instant Leno recast the enormous entirely peaceful protests as well as unauthorized immigration into a military invasion. However, Leno did not upset his audience. He allayed apprehensions by juxtaposing the political marches to silent movie images that he further softened with an anachronistic digital overlay. This diminished the force and immediacy of the day’s political events, rejected as unworthy the demonstrators’ demands, and reinforced stereotypes. Over the marked laughter of his audience, Leno couldn’t help but chortle about the visual reference to clambering immigrants: “Yea, they’re scaling the wall. Yea.” Leno effectively equated the May Day marchers with today’s border-crossers and the 19th century Mexican soldiers – all in a manner that could not frighten Leno’s audience. It is no wonder his audience loves Leno. His joke released his audience’s anxiety of viewing protesters in the streets by providing an amusing image of the familiar stereotype for immigrants.
Leno’s Politics
In the six-day period under study, Leno fired off 35 jokes that made three political statements. First, the marchers and their supporters deserve no respect. Leno never conceded the ethical standing of the marchers. Leno sardonically noted that as millions marched, others of their group were unlawfully crossing the border. To be consistent, he should be contemptuous of Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her bus seat in Montgomery Alabama in 1956 because she also broke the law. Leno repeatedly dismissed the immigrants’ call to change unjust policies. He disregarded the moral legitimacy of millions of peaceful marchers in several jokes when he targeted the nationwide work stoppage that they undertook. It made no difference to Leno that it was the only political tool at their disposal, and that workers undertook this action at their own expense, and often at the peril of their miserable jobs. The comedian who earns $17 million a year mocks people at the very bottom of the economic hierarchy when they conducted a work stoppage.
Further, when unauthorized immigrants and their supporters stood in unison in the light of day to call for greater respect and a more just economic arrangement, Leno told his complacent audience to ignore their petition: “If we don’t meet the illegal immigrants’ demands, what will they do? Leave?” It must have been very comforting for his audience to hear that the right response to the marchers was no action whatsoever; that they should feel no anxiety about the unjust socioeconomic status quo. Leno asserted that they owe these workers no consideration. Last, he resorted to a joke that this national work stoppage was merely the warm-up to just another day off. The Great May Day Marches, in Leno’s hands, became just an early start of a weekend beer party.
Second, Leno states that the immigrant, as a human being, is relatively unimportant. The mildest of his jokes (not described here) compared the workers to the children of his audience. Elsewhere immigrants became beasts that push the family car, worth less than a tank of gasoline; or he alluded that they are prostitutes.
Finally, he depicted the immigrants as a national danger. In one of his most effective jokes, Leno used old film clips to recast the nonviolent marchers as an invading Mexican army scaling America’s fortress walls. He resorted to a false stereotype that Mexicans have so many children that they will soon overrun the United States. In joke #18, Leno played on the paranoia of monolingual English speakers who suspect the worst when Leno translated Cinco de Mayo as “We outnumber you five to one.”
Misinforming by omission and commission
Leno is a partisan comedian, notwithstanding his claim to be an equal opportunity insulter. He did not repudiate punitive immigration policy proposals, only those he depicted as liberalizing. He attributed the so-called Smart Wall proposal to a senator who did not initiate the proposal. Leno somehow overlooked far richer fodder for political sarcasm when he passed over legislation conservative senators proposed in 2006, such as completely walling off the nation, fully militarizing the border, or incarcerating 12 million immigrant workers.
Beyond evasion, for the sake of the laugh Leno omitted pertinent information of news events he mentioned. His punch-line in #10 was that while over a million marchers took to the streets in Los Angeles, in Salt Lake City “. . . . . just three guys showed up.” Utah’s newspapers unequivocally repudiated his claim. For example, the Salt Lake City Tribune reported that the city’s May Day multitude numbered between 5,000 and 10,000. It went on to say:
A crowd of up to twenty people wide nearly encircled the park as marchers chanted “USA, USA” and waved or wore American flags. Elsewhere in Utah, a peaceful crowd in Ogden estimated at 500 to 1,500 listened to speakers and waved signs reading “We are not terrorists” and “Born in USA.”
The Tribune also noted that “in tiny Wendover, more than 500 Latinos marched Monday afternoon carrying placards and American flags while chanting ‘USA, USA, USA’…to mark a nationwide effort to underscore the economic and labor clout immigrants wield in the United States.” Since this rally represented one-third of the total population of Wendover, Utah, Leno left out the facts.
He was also willing to fabricate falsehoods. In joke #16, he revived the outdated stereotype that Mexican women are excessively fertile by saying “In 1968 the average Mexican woman had seven children. Today, she has two children in Mexico. . . . ” Leno was correct: in 1975 Mexico had over 45 births per thousand people. However, since then the country has significantly reduced its birthrate. In 2006 Mexico’s total fertility rate was 2.42 children born per woman.Footnote 12 This decrease represents a tremendous success, since Mexico is closing in on the United States rate of 2.08 children born per woman. In fact, according to the Wall Street Journal article Leno apparently cited (Kronholz & Lyons Reference Kronholz and Lyons2006), U.S. figures have risen in recent years. Nevertheless, for the sake of the laugh, Leno concocted the punch line “the other five … in the U.S.,” a fiction that can only stoke nativist fears that Mexican mothers endanger America. Leno misrepresented the global nature of immigration, making it out to be a simple function of the criminality of unauthorized individuals and the ineptitude of politicians. Of course, many elected officials also scapegoat immigrants, so it might be too much to ask Leno to laughingly ask his viewers to consider their exploitative role.Footnote 13
Leno’s worst fabrications about immigrants should be called to account, as have his attacks on other non-White communities.Footnote 14 However, one should not expect Leno’s audience to find fault with him, because the success criterion for joke telling is not Grice’s Maxim of Quality of bona fide communication. He does not have to be accurate; he is a jester who must give his audience what they want. Leno’s cleverest joke would fall flat, and his viewers not obtain emotional release, if they sympathized with the butt of the joke. He can only joke about policy issues that his audience allows.Footnote 15 Timberg states that the late-night comic host is neither the audience’s slave, nor its master, but its representative (Peterson Reference Peterson2005b: para. 14). Leno’s hegemonic jokes do not create new social divisions, but work to restore his audience’s belief that the status quo is natural and appropriate – an idea the Great May Day Marches disrupted.
Leno is a master of the comedic monologue. For a span of time before the bedtime of his vast audience, he can reduce the ominous sociopolitical implications of the Great May Day Marches to a trifle. Or he can feed his viewers’ fear, as in joke #18 when he mistranslated Cinco de Mayo. Speaking in the first person, Leno projected the image of a Latino who threatened this largely White audience by saying, in effect, “We will bury you.”
Laughter and Hatred
Billig Reference Billig2001 offers a powerful critique of how laughter and hatred are related in an analysis of websites set up by Ku Klux Klan members to relate brutal racist jokes. Billig recommends looking at the social function of such joking. To use Freud’s terminology (Reference Freud1928), Leno’s joke-work sustained the status quo, in this case, by promoting intolerance. He offered in-group psychological reassurance by sharing laughter at the expense of the butt, now insubordinate immigrants. To confront people seeking justice, Leno worked to undermine their social movement by belittling their moral rectitude, by berating their one political tool, the work stoppage, and by reducing the individual worker to an animal. If, after recognizing the humanity of the marchers call for justice, his viewers had had second thoughts about the status quo, Leno’s jokes would serve as a moral-duty pressure-release valve. At the end of an exceptionally unnerving day that witnessed unprecedented protests across the country, Leno’s monologues were emotional backrubs for his demoralized audience.
Leno did not think twice about resurrecting stereotypes. He visually depicted these peaceable workers as an invading army. The skill of the late-night comedian resides in his ability both to invoke the stereotype and to momentarily disarm it for his audience’s peace of mind. To do this, he called it up with self-evidently harmless trappings. Leno brought images to mind for an audience who may harbor elements of the Minutemen’s nightmare of a southern invading army, while inoculating his viewers against sustaining any great fear of the immigrant.
After the marchers expressed their power and made their political point on May Day 2006, a good portion of the nation’s television audience tuned into The Tonight Show, where they could expect some relief from any concerns generated by the demonstrators. With Leno’s help the Great May Day Marches became as immaterial as a silent movie. Leno transformed disciplined demonstrators into weekend party-goers. By deliberately calling up stereotypes to assuage his audience’s anxiety about a demographically changing nation, Leno illustrates why Michael Billig said the “joke cannot just be laughed at” innocently, detached from its societal context.Footnote 16 Billig further emphasizes that the tellers of hateful jokes not only call up stereotypes, but design them so their audience accepts the stereotypes as relevant and suitable. Armando Morales (Reference Morales1971:289) described this sort of racism as preconscious, rather than unconscious. While unconscious thoughts are usually repressed, preconscious thoughts, such as stereotypes, are readily available whenever Leno calls one to mind.Footnote 17
Some readers might find unduly harsh the parallel I draw between brazenly racist Ku Klux Klan jokes and Leno’s immigrant humor, but an extensive scientific literature decries the pernicious social effects of portraying stereotypes on television. Such portrayals – particularly in comedy routines – lead viewers to make discriminatory social judgments about people who are stereotyped. For one, Ford Reference Ford1997 conducted an experiment on four variations of a comedy skit featuring one lead character who might have hurt his roommate. At levels of statistical significance, Ford’s viewers more often judged guilty an African American when his character was portrayed stereotypically, while judging the white characters guilty at the same rates, whether portrayed stereotypically or neutrally. Ford surmises, “One possible hypothesis is that disparagement of social groups through humor increases our tolerance or acceptance of discrimination against out-groups [because] humorous communications are not meant to be considered in a serious, critical manner” (1997:272).Footnote 18The Tonight Show audience’s responses might adhere to these patterns, since Leno’s humor utilized debasing racist stereotypes targeting Latino immigrants.
The Power of a Joke
In his original study of 20 Leno immigrant jokes, Flores Reference Flores2006 found that Leno used the term illegal 19 times when referring to unauthorized immigrants. Further, Leno was vehement that it is “stupid” to refer to them as undocumented, the usage that liberals and political progressives prefer. When Leno insisted on the word illegal, his comedy had far greater consequences than can be dealt with by the toss-away phrase, “Jay’s only joking.” If someone uses the term in everyday conversation, he or she primarily expresses personal feelings. When a mass media news source employs the phrase illegal immigrant, it invokes immigrant as criminal, a politically charged conceptual metaphor (Santa Ana, Treviño, Bailey, Bodossian, & de Necochea Reference Santa Ana, Treviño, Bailey, Bodossian and de Necochea2007). Still, the news functions discursively as a report, no matter how authoritative the messenger, or how widely the message is disseminated. On the other hand, Aristotle, Hobbes, Freud, Koestler, and other students of humor noted what Raskin described: The pragmatics of telling jokes make it a qualitatively more powerful discursive practice than conversing or reporting. When Leno’s audience laughs, their shared laughter releases pent-up anguish by constituting a social boundary. As they push the butt aside, they draw themselves closer into an in-group. Holmes & Marra (Reference Holmes, Marra and Duszuk2002:378–379) say humor instantiates social identity, because the laughing audience simultaneously confers a social reality to itself.
With public laughter, Leno’s national audience constructed not just what illegal immigrant means, but the subject positions embodied by the audience and the immigrant alike. Joking, like all social meanings, is produced and interpreted in collective settings that cannot be politically neutral (Mintz Reference Mintz1985). When Leno’s huge audience laughed at so-called illegal immigrants it signified; that is, it constituted these people as criminals. With a shared laugh at the expense of a butt, we bond as an in-group – whether we number two or a multitude. No one of them, in this moment of signification, can ever be one of us. Raskin noted that Freud observed that people are incapable of pitying the butts of successful jokes, for we cannot get the release, that particularly primal pleasure of putting them below us, if we sympathize with them. The capability to impose social hierarchies and boundaries in the joke-telling setting parallels the social effects of Mock Spanish use (Hill Reference Hill1998). Leno’s nightly monologue is a ritualized discourse practice that does social work, reinforcing the lived boundaries that divide humanity in the United States.
I would like to stress that in contrast to Billig’s Klan webmasters who relish the most vicious racist jokes about African Americans, the host of the Tonight Show never delivers violent jokes.19 Leno implied that 12 million people could be deported, but his jokes are not extreme and crude, they are subtle and effective. Billig notes that when the Klan joke webmasters say, “We’re just joking,” they believe they have established a penalty-free space that grants them freedom from worry about the facts, freedom to state their prejudices, freedom to enact mock violence, and freedom to be brave without acting. The general public deems these sites to be reprehensible racist entertainment, and only a few thousand ever visit the notorious Klan websites.
Disturbing parallels should be noted. Leno’s audience grants him license to distort the facts on their behalf, to casually perpetuate stereotypes, and to cunningly evoke deep-seated prejudices. By their shared laughter they signify their chauvinism on a network television program that respected corporations sponsor. Most important, they can dismiss a people’s call for justice. The audience took no risk when they laughed with Jay at immigrants without facing them. By way of Leno’s clever confabulations, they mocked these vulnerable people without challenge. In ways similar to people gravitating to Klan websites, the people watching the Tonight Show could feel brave without facing their fears, without confronting the people they indifferently or heedlessly exploit. After a reassuring laugh, they could fall asleep sensing no obligation to reassess the assumptions by which they conduct their all-American lives.
Conclusion
Insofar as he perpetuates loathing and intolerance, Leno is a cheerful hatemonger. For all his carefully crafted affinity with the sleepy Everyman, however, I imagine that the jester harbors a strand of contempt for his audience’s moral lethargy. On the two nights following the Great May Day marches, at the end of his monologue Leno did not allow his audience to drift off to dreamland with a big easy laugh. On May Day, Leno raised his audience’s anxiety level by invoking overly fecund Mexican women who (falsely) threaten the United States with their immigrant progeny. Leno let his audience sleep on this image. On the following night, he finished with a sly comment that most Americans somehow can never learn the lyrics of their own national anthem. Leno only tangentially compares his audience’s character to that of the marchers who sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” in Spanish while marching through the streets of America. These vigorous men and women risked death crossing deserts, only to immediately mortgage their lives to better their children’s prospects. Now they demand that the nation realign its immigration policies to affirm its greatest values. The tone and structure of Leno’s last joke projected an audience with a conceit reminiscent of Kevin Federline. The final joke is on the all-Americans. Leno can give no lasting relief to his sleepy audience, a public too lazy to cut its own lawns or do its own nails, from those disciplined and increasingly politicized anthem singers.
