Comedy in America
Ethnicity is a big deal in America. People with the same ethnicity seem to come together in the world when it comes to making fun of other ethnicities. George Gaetano of Hamline University may agree.
Last week East Carolina University held the Humor fest conference in Mendenhall from November 1-3. The Humor fest consisted of 14 panels. The panels each had different points. The panel held on Friday, November 2 at nine o’clock in the morning was called “Ethnic Comedy in America.” There were three speakers for each panel.
During the “Ethnic Comedy in America” George Gaetano talked about the topic “Kings and Queens of Comedy: Using the strategy of identification to elicit laughter.” Gaetano started off by saying “Why is humor funny?.” He had asked his students why they thought a stand-up comic was funny. Most of them, he said, responded with they just are. After he asked the same question a few times the students got frustrated.
However Gaetano was trying to get a connection between humor and people. He came with this conclusion of ethnicity. Gaetano used some examples of how people relate to other people with the same ethnicity.
Gaetano said that he was Italian-American and his family was able to relate to the HBO series The Sopranos, because his family talked and acted like the characters in The Sopranos, except probably without the Mob and violence. He also talked about how Italian-Americans identify with Pat Cooper like Mexican-Americans identify with Latin Kings of Comedy, which includes stand-up comic George Lopez and Cheech Marin of the Cheech&Chong movies.
Gaetano used the Latin Kings of Comedy for his main point of how people in every culture use humor to identify with the people in their culture. He said mainly Latinos attended the Latin Kings of Comedy, and African-Americans mainly attended Kings of Comedy. The Kings of Comedy consisted of Steve Harvey, Bernie Mac, Cedric, and D.L. Hughley.
The Latin Kings of Comedy is the original act. Gaetano noticed that George Lopez of the Latin Kings of Comedy did not call Latinos Latinos, but Mexican-Americans. Gaetano said the Latinos related to Lopez well especially when Lopez told a joke of how every Latino person has a family member in a wheel-chair. Gaetano said that the Latinos laughed.
Throughout Gaetano’s presentation he seemed to know his material very well. He even talked about how humor did not become popular until the 70s and 80s with comedians such as Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Cosby. The audience responded very well to his presentation, especially when he started to tell some of the jokes used in the Latin Kings of Comedy.
Gaetano’s presentation seemed to have had made impact on the audience with his examples of how people use humor to identify with each other. Maybe this is why people laugh, because we relate to whom ever we are laughing with, especially within out own ethnicity.
Filed under: HumorFest Reports