Turkish German Muslims and Comedy Entertainment: Settling into Cultural Mainstream Culture in the 21st Century (2025)

Book review: Turkish German Muslims and comedy entertainment settling into mainstream culture in the 21st century

2023

Weaponized humor : the cultural politics of Turkish-German ethno-comedy

2015

Wherever there is migration, cultural diversity will inevitably cause social friction and create tensions. At the same time, it will also enrich the host nation and produce unprecedented hybrid generations. Artists of such a bi-cultural background constitute key figures in abating said tensions. Advancing cultural integration instead of assimilation, they exploit their position of cultural ambivalence to present counter-narratives to official truths and so renegotiate majority/minority relationships in their country of residence. To take some of the sting out of these actions and simultaneously reach the broadest possible public, some of these hybrid artists avail themselves of the ancient doctrine of prodesse et delectare, cloaking their critical social commentary in comedy. Because they focus on clichés of their ancestral as well as native countries, their ethnic humor is mostly self-deprecating and creates a fool’s license to speak with characteristic candor on sensitive topics. The artist of a hybrid background thus occupies a social position similar to the medieval jester and likewise takes advantage of it to subvert existent power structures. The respective comedy routines focus on intercultural variety, perceptions of difference, and the deconstruction of stereotypes. These performances by hybrid artists constitute the distinct genre of ethno-comedy. My overall goal is to demonstrate qualities of humor that exceed mere amusement. Using two very different but complementary Turkish-German artists as representative examples, I build on Freud and Relief Theory to elucidate how ethno-comedic humor can work like a weapon in fighting prejudice and racism. Referencing Bakhtin, I show the way it continues and updates the medieval fool’s tradition. Finally, against the backdrop of Bhabha’s postcolonial studies as well as Adorno and Horkheimer’s “Culture Industry” I challenge the assumption that aesthetics are inherently separate from politics and outline the genre’s cultural political potential.

Serdar Somuncu: Turkish German Comedy as Transnational Intervention

TRANSIT, 2011

is a comedic form that centers on the ethnicity of the performer, where ethnicity and cultural difference provide the substance of the performance. The ethno-cultural identities performed are at once a construct for the stage and a staging of ethnic stereotypes as constructions through exaggeration and parody. This style of performance seeks to ridicule ethno-cultural clichés by enacting them. Ethno-cultural comedy does not actively dismantle cultural and ethnic stereotypes, but instead uses magnification to fix the audience's gaze on their absurdity. Kaya Yanar has made a career out of manipulating ethnic stereotypes of Indians, Italians, Arabs, and Turks, transformed into a set of stock characters whose foibles he repetitively rehearsed on his comedy show. Because of his own heritage-Yanar is of Arab and Turkish descent-he implicitly lends a veneer of authenticity and acceptability to his performances that counterbalances the giddy exaggeration of the ethno-cultural caricatures he plays for laughs. In her study Ethnic Drag, Katrin Sieg has examined the relationship between mimesis and masquerade, disputing the assumption that mimesis is affirmative while masquerade is subversive (Sieg 11). Yanar's performances straddle the divide between mimesis and masquerade and constitute, I would argue, neither affirmation nor subversion, exemplifying Kader Konuk's assertion-as presented in her analysis of staged speech-that mimicry in itself is not subversive, but has subversive potential if it refuses the validity or authority of that which it is imitating (Konuk 68). While Yanar's ostensible aim is to render ethnic stereotypes harmless, his comedy does little to stimulate reflection or encourage dialogue. 2 1 Kaya Yanar's Was guckst du? program on the German channel SAT.1 attracted some three million viewers (see Andrea Kaiser, "Noch 'n Türkenwitz," Zeit Online 8/2001) and garnered Yanar both the German television prize and German comedy prize. 2 In his study of ethnic humor, Leon Rappoport has come out as an advocate for its potential to undercut rather than encourage prejudice. He argues that stand-up comedians have succeeded in weakening the negative effects of ethnic stereotypes by rendering them ridiculous, and also makes the obvious if not trivial point that the purveyors of ethnic In contrast, the Turkish German actor, author, cabaret artist, and comedian Serdar Somuncu utilizes his acting skills and critical insights to create programs designed to subvert the image of the Turkish German performer as a "professional ethnic," and combat the reductiveness inherent in the term "ethno-cultural comedy." Ruth Mandel uses the term "professional ethnic" in her book Cosmopolitan Anxieties to describe Turkish-heritage members of a cultural elite in Germany forced to "reinvent themselves as ethnic elites" in order to gain recognition from the German culture industry (Mandel 186). These "professional ethnics" are "complicit in ethnic stereotyping, a kind of mimetic staging in order to target specific audiences and cater to explicit tastes" (Mandel 86). In my use of the term, Kaya Yanar can be seen as someone who has styled himself as a "professional ethnic" insofar as he has capitalized on his heritage to justify and disarm his stereotyped representations of a variety of ethnic groups. In that sense, he represents

Good intentions bad joke. 2006 Humour and citizenship in the multicultural society

Towards a Multicultural Community. The Accommodation of Ethnic and Religious Minorities in the 'Migrant Comedy' Genre

Ekphrasis, 2020

The article deals with the phenomenon of migrant comedy films, framing the genre as part of the larger body of diasporic cinema. The author's definition of migrant comedy conceives it as a very specific genre typically set in immigrant milieus, whose main themes revolve around successful social and moral accommodation of diasporic characters to the shared (in most cases western, liberal) practices and values of the receiving majority. Migrant comedies exploit dichotomous divisions and stereotypes based on pronounced cultural differences to characterize their protagonists as members of specific ethnicities. In the article, migrant comedy genre's reliance on stereotypes is discussed in greater detail as is its multicultural ideology. In the second part of the article, the proposed genre framework is used to interrogate two films: All Three of Us (Nous trois ou rien, dir. by kheiron, 2015) and A Spicy Kraut (Einmal Hans mit scharfer Soße, dir. by Buket Alakuş, 2013).

'Islam Light’: Girly Muslim Power and Moderate Islamic Men in German Sitcoms

Framing Islam: Faith, Fascination, and Fear in Twenty-First-Century Culture, 2017

Here I discuss the genre of the Muslim sitcom and analyze two characters in ethnic sitcoms that have been explicitly marked as Muslim in German television sitcoms: Yağmur in "Alle lieben Jimmy", and Fatma in "Türkisch für Anfänger". I interpret these teenage girls as representatives of 'Islam light' – an 'ideal form of Islam,' according to Hamed Abdel-Samad – and examine to what extent these symbolic Muslim counter-figures reflect current debates on Islam’s contested place in German society.

Challenging Islamophobia with Humor -The Example of the Datteltäter on Youtube 1

A new generation of Muslim youth in the West is using humor to cope with rising Islamophobia, racist immigration rhetoric, and sexism. A representative of this new generation is the YouTube channel Datteltäter. Drawing on social theories of humor and dissent, this study analyzes Datteltäter's content, arguing that their humor is a practice of dissent and attempts to subvert dominant discourse. Since humor is not a practice of opposition per se, its character at this point depends on its context, the distribution of sensibilities, its relationship to policing regimes, and the techniques it uses. This study, using the online ethnography method, described and analyzed Datteltäter's representative videos, which were selected through purposive sampling. The study concluded that its humor exposes the Islamophobic and racist discourses and practices that permeate everyday life in German society and distribute the sensible in order to police bodies by disrupting their hierarchy of emotions and ideas. The study also found that the new generation of Muslims has strong insights due to their in-betweenness and has developed a similar oppositional attitude towards their communities. In doing so, they create a space of shared experiences and hybrid subjectivities that are open to others.

Living Islam in a German Family and Germanness in a Muslim family

Türkisch für Anfänger, a German sitcom directed by Bora Dagtekin, son to a Turkish father and a German mother, draws on the quotidian of a German-Turkish – Deutsch-Türken– family tossed together by fate in the city of Berlin in the years following 9/11. For the sake of brevity, focus is mainly placed on the first season whose twelve episodes shed light on some of the major issues Muslims, German Muslims, and Turks together with Germans, are faced with when fate brings them together in so cosmopolitan a city as Berlin. With this in the background, it goes without saying that much of the scriptwriter’s personal life is brought to bear on his creation of an ethno-comedy intriguing enough to follow and retrace. This study aims at explicating the ways in which friction leads to the perception and the construction of Muslim Other within the gates as riddled with stereotypes. By deconstructing the stereotypical, the researchers seek to demonstrate how humour can be used to dispel and subve...

American Muslims stand up and speak out: trajectories of humor in Muslim American stand-up comedy

Muslim American stand-up comedy is a unique response to post-9/11 negative social discrimination where socially critical comedians debate the stereotypes and realities of Muslim American life. Thus they continue an American minority tradition of engaging with American social life through public humor. The analysis draws from functionalist theories of the sociology of humor in order to discern the intended social messages of jokes that are meant to entertain and also educate. It shows how Muslim American comedy intends to influence opinions held not only about Muslims but also amongst Muslims. The paper suggests how competing forces related to being Muslim and American undercut the critical public humor of comedians who use these performances to argue what American Muslims should be saying and doing in order to advance their cause for social justice.

(Re-)presenting Islam: A comparative study of groups of comedians in the United States of America and France

2013

Over the last few years, humour has provided many Muslims with a means of seeking to establish a positive sense of self-identity, as well as a means of challenging misconceptions and fears of Islam in a wide variety of countries on both sides of the Atlantic. This article brings together two interviews with performers who use comedy to engage with perceptions of Islam and (re-)present Muslims in a generally non-threatening and everyday context. It compares and contrasts atrio of American stand-up comedians who tour under the name ‘Allah Made Me Funny’ and the two French performers who created ‘À part ça tout va bien’/‘Apart from that everything’s fine’, a humorous web series in France. The interviews provide an insight into processes of identity negotiation and (re)presentation by performers based in countries with very differing approaches to multiculturalism and diversity.