Joke booth: Turner Brown

Marie Gillespie Marie says

When you first hear this joke it's the pun on turn around/Turner Brown that makes you laugh. But on closer inspection, it tackles the taboo of male rape. Depending on how it is told it can be read as a homophobic joke which expresses a fear of the black male as threatening. The joke raises a set of taboos only to close them down through a punch line pun. They are mock fears and mock shocks.

Despite this, representations of black men in western culture have historically been associated with a threatening, hyper- sexuality, that play on both degradation and desire. There is a lengthy cultural history to representations of uncontrolled black sexuality often linked to uncontrolled aggression.

For example, D.W. Griffths' Birth of a Nation (1915), regarded by many as the foundational film of Classic Hollywood Cinema, contains portrayals of hyper-aggressive, hyper-sexualised black men, including a black man raping a white woman. It even portrays the Ku Klux Klan in an uncritical light.

More recent images of black male sexuality, such as in Robbert Mapplethorpe's photographs of black male nudes, have been criticised for fetishising the black body and turning racialised images of black men into 'art' for voyeurs. So for some people, such jokes are seen to fall squarely within a system of racialised representation. Not just a bit of fun!