Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University Communication Theses Department of Communication 4-21-2009 Racial Satire and Chappelle's Show Katharine P. Zakos Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/communication_theses Part of the Communication Commons Recommended Citation Zakos, Katharine P., "Racial Satire and Chappelle's Show." Thesis, Georgia State University, 2009. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/communication_theses/50 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of Communication at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Communication Theses by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. RACIAL SATIRE AND CHAPPELLE’S SHOW by KATHARINE P. ZAKOS Under the Direction of Mary Stuckey ABSTRACT This thesis examines Chappelle's Show’s use of racial satire to challenge dominant stereotypes and the effectiveness of that satire as a tool to achieve perspective by incongruity. I use a variation of D’Acci’s circuit of media study model to examine the institutional challenges and limitations on the show due to the context in which it was created, produced, and distributed; to interrogate the strategies employed by the show’s writers/creators to overcome these challenges through the performance of race; and to analyze the audience’s understanding of the use of racial satire through a reception study of the show’s audience. I argue that using satire often has the unintended consequence of crossing the line between “sending up” a behavior and supporting it, essentially becoming that which it is trying to discount, though this is not to say that its intrinsic value is therefore completely negated.