Talk:Ethnic joke

Western-centric and recentist
At the moment, this article is both Western-centric and recentist. I'd be interested to know: -- The Anome 10:40, 19 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Are ethnic jokes universal, or do some cultures not have them? If they don't, do they have something else instead?
 * What are the ethnic jokes told by non-Western cultures about Westerners, and about one another?
 * What were the equivalents in the ancient world, where most people rarely saw people from other places? Did they tell similar jokes about the people from the next village?
 * What about cultures with caste structures? Are such jokes told, or are they taboo? Are they told both "up" and "down" the caste hierarchy?
 * What about tribal cultures?
 * How about segmentary lineage cultures?
 * What are the relationships between ethnic jokes and jokes based on other distinctions such as sex, class and religion?
 * Are there reciprocal relationships in such stereotypes; for example, if group A tell jokes in which group B are misers, do B then tell jokes in which A are spendthrifts? Or is there no such relationship?
 * Are there any cycles in the "stupid people joke" graph, where two groups tell stupid people jokes about another, or longer cycles where (for example) group A tells stupid people jokes about B, who tell stupid people jokes about C, who tell stupid people jokes about A...?
 * Are appearance-based jokes such as blonde jokes becoming more common as a reaction to the recent taboo against racist jokes, as the joke forms are simply reused against new targets that avoid the stigma of racism?

While these are thoughtful questions, and it's common ideal to seek "universal" data, this remains an encyclopedia: inherently broad yet general reportage of the literature- ie, articles are based on published sources, not based on examples or interpretation of data. WP articles do not represent ultimate answers- only what is available in 3rd-party sources. And now the article is tagged as needing more expert input. Then given this is a topic with certain 'international' implications, we are English WP. Ergo, most writers will inherently have a western cultural orientation. Criticizing an article for that orientation does not seem fair at all in a field of research which has just seen its beginnings in the English language. Most of these requests are issues in, or criticisms of, existing academic theory- & better addressed at Humor. I suspect The Anome would enjoy a personal PhD program in the field. I encourage such Original Research, I think you are a natural candidate. Perhaps you can even improve funding for humor studies. But OR is for private publication, not a WP article.
 * &BTW "Recentist" is the despised WP neologism, if you can believe it, now re-created to re-define certain distortions of encyclopedic format. The traditional English usage is "an ahistorical view"; other alternatives might include "modern"; "dated"; "revisionist"; "selective" or even "anachronistic" depending on the evidence for the opinion. However the charge itself supposes that the basis of humor changes over time. And that's another broad issue for Humor . But the entire article would appear to easily withstand the "10-year Test". I dont believe this article fits any current criteria for "recentist"  Hilar leo  Hey, L.E.O. 15:30, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Ethnic jokes exist in the middle east (non western), for instance the jokes about people from Rasht, told in Iran. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 201.198.113.130 (talk) 21:53, 12 March 2010 (UTC)


 * The text is really west-centric, for example, the following paragraph was erased even when it had references and because it considered jokes addressed agains Americans in Latinoamerica:


 * But in other cases the ethnic jokes are addressed against those who are historically seen as the aggressors, like the multiple jokes published in Mexico about the Americans (also called gringos there).    Similar jokes have also been published in Barcelona. 


 * 206.167.243.6 (talk) 15:53, 31 July 2017 (UTC)
 * This piece was deleted because it was not referenced by scholarly sources, but by jokes themselves. In such form, it constitutes original research inadmissible in wikipedia. Staszek Lem (talk) 16:49, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

temporal issue
Professor Christie Davies, author of this theory, has posed the main arguments in his article Ethnic Jokes, Moral Values and Social Boundaries, published in 1982. His approach is based on Victor Raskin's (1985) Semantic Script Theory of Humor, or to be more precise, on the arguments connected with ethnic humor on binary oppositions.

So, uh, in the above sentence, how did Christie Davies base his approach in 1982 on something that happened in 1985?--2600:6C51:447F:D8D9:71C0:EACD:1843:F925 (talk) 01:23, 2 July 2020 (UTC)