ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the ways Saturday Night Live sketches function to produce meaning and represent “reality” about race and racism, especially as the sketches focus on Whiteness. SNL sketches are highlighted as teaching tools that demonstrate the dynamic potential for comedy to call attention to the intersectional nature of race, gender, sex, sexuality, class, culture, and other aspects of identity. This chapter discusses example sketches focused on race and racism and suggests SNL’s satire can be used as a teaching tool that emphasizes the fragility of hegemonic norms. Example sketches include a mock commercial, music video satire, and children’s television show. Guided discussions about these SNL sketches are encouraged to show how media often minimizes people at the margins. This chapter argues SNL’s treatment of race serves as a teaching tool for critical race media literacy because the comedy often requires its audiences to engage in critical interpretations in order to understand the satirical sketches’ rhetorical significance. Permitted via irony to speak about controversial topics, SNL employs a kind of comic irony that offers fertile teaching ground.
