Surahmat, I Dewa Putu Wijana, Sulistyowati
Ethnic minorities in Indonesia have long experienced marginalization through state policies, everyday practices, and public discourses that reproduce unequal power relations. One of the discursive tools that sustains such marginalization is humor, which reinforces and normalizes negative stereotypes about minority groups. Beneath its entertaining surface, ethnic humor conveys stigmas that operate through three underlying dimensions: experiential, relational, and expressive. Speakers and media producers construct these jokes through textual structures that depict minorities as abnormal, unintelligent, or uncivilized. The persistent reproduction of such humor perpetuates ethnic prejudices that have been deeply embedded in Indonesian society since the Dutch colonial period. By normalizing exclusionary views under the guise of amusement, ethnic humor sustains discriminatory attitudes that hinder the development of an anti-discriminatory society. This paper argues that ethnic humor in Indonesia functions as a discursive mechanism that perpetuates the marginalization of minority ethnic groups by encoding ideological meanings that normalize ethnic hierarchy. © 2025 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Faculty of Language and Arts, Universitas Negeri Semarang, Semarang, Indonesia; Faculty of Cultural Sciences, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta, Indonesia
