Weaver - The Rhetoric of Racist Humour

I would like to dedicate this book to Louise and to my parents, Alan and Hazel. It is only with their continued support that this book could have been completed.

I would like to thank Neil Jordan, the Commissioning Editor for Sociology at Ashgate, who originally approached me with the idea of presenting my work on humour as a book. The writing of this book has been a pleasure and Neils swift answering of all of the inevitable queries Ive had during the process contributed to it being a stress free activity. The ideas presented in these pages have been shaped and improved by a number of mentors over the past decade. Michael Pickering, Gregor McLennan, Thomas Osborne, Brett St. Louis and Stephen May all provided tremendous support at various stages and I thank them for that. I would also like to thank two undergraduate lecturers of mine who opened the doors to other worlds by first sparking my interest in social theory Jem Thomas and Sean Watson. Much of my thinking on humour happened as a postgraduate student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Bristol, and I thank Annie Berry, Matthew Cole, Ranji Devadason, Kate Lister, Mutsumi Matsumoto, Karen Morgan and Lin Yi for their helpful comments on various chapters, but more importantly for their friendship during and since our postgraduate studies. Thanks and acknowledgement are given to the relevant publishers for permission to draw on earlier articles that include versions of some of the material. Those articles are: The Other Laughs Back: Humour and Resistance in Anti-Racist Comedy, in Sociology, 44(1), 3148 (Sage Publications); Liquid Racism and the Danish Prophet Muhammad Cartoons, in Current Sociology, 58(5), 67592 (Sage Publications); The Reverse Discourse and Resistance of Asian Comedians in the West, in Comedy Studies, 1(2), 14957 (Intellect Publishing); Developing a Rhetorical Analysis of Racist Humour: Examining Anti-black Jokes on the Internet, in Social Semiotics, 20(5), 53755 (Taylor Francis Ltd, http://www. informaworld.com); Jokes, Rhetoric and Embodied Racism: A Rhetorical Discourse Analysis of the Logics of Racist Jokes on the Internet, in Ethnicities Online First, May 2011(Sage Publications); Liquid Racism and the Ambiguity of Ali G, in European Journal of Cultural Studies 14(3) 24964 (Sage Publications).

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