Analysis of a Racist Joke

Over the weekend, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe made disparaging remarks about Puerto Rico during a Trump rally in Madison Square Garden in New York City. He made a joke, and Puerto Rico was the butt of the joke.

He said: “Like I don’t know if you guys know this. But there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah. I think it’s called Puerto Rico?”

I’m a professor of Spanish, and on Monday, one of my students brought up the subject in my medicine and literature class. I was born in Puerto Rico so when the subject came up during the class, I felt that I had the responsibility to address it. I’ve always felt that part of my job as a teacher is to challenge stereotypical views about the island of my birth and its people.

I told my students that jokes were like dreams. They are mechanisms that allow us to turn what we don’t want to face directly into something unfamiliar, but also into something that allows us to experience an emotion, a feeling, a wish, that we cannot experience directly.

I told them that the thing about jokes is that they don’t allow you to think about their mechanism. How is it that they “land” (or not, as the case may be)? Jokes, like dreams, are about obscuring the way they work, so that we don’t have to face what drives them.

I was quoting Sigmund Freud.

I challenged my students to think about the form rather than the content of Hinchcliffe’s clearly racist joke, in order to think past the butt of the joke, and to consider what might be behind it.

They came up with some interesting possibilities. One of them said that the joke really was about the loss of control of migration. Another one said that the joke was about the fear of the power the island of Puerto Rico.

It was a paradoxical exercise for me. On the one hand, I managed to redirect the racist energy of the joke, calling attention to the joker rather than the butt. My students successfully inverted the dynamic of the joke. Like good analysts, they revealed the unspoken fears and anxieties of the comedian. Bringing him down a notch.

On the other, hard as I tried not to take the joke personally, and to turn it into a symptom of a racist pathology, it also made me feel bad to repeat it, and to see myself through the eyes of the comedian, as the butt of his ill-conceived joke.

After further reflection, perhaps by writing this essay, I’m doing more than recycling the comedian’s pathological garbage. Perhaps I’m also turning our racist stereotypes into food for thought.