Multicultural British Screen Comedy

Multicultural British Screen Comedy: Race, Racism and Antiracism is a forensic and essential examination of British comedy. Behind every joke, every sitcom, every commissioning decision lies a framework of racial attitudes and beliefs - and this book expertly exposes them. Like a magician’s handbook, it reveals not just how jokes work, but what they reveal about who we are as a society.

For anyone seeking to understand racism and the workings of the media, this should be required reading. But it is more than critique - it also offers hope, showing how truly great anti-racist comedy can challenge assumptions, reshape narratives, and become a powerful agent for change.

— Marcus Ryder, CEO of the Film and TV Charity and co-founder of the Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity

This book traces the shifting politics of race in contemporary Britain through analysis of screen comedy that has worked to parrot, cloak or confront racist discourse. Moving from 1950s minstrelsy through to contemporary streaming-era content, Ilott demonstrates how race is made and unmade through screen comedy’s engagements with the tacit (and often racist) premises of British multicultural discourse. Chapters on the romcom, sitcom and police comedy read selected films and TV shows as counter-narratives on British multiculturalism, intervening in popular discourse that constructs interracial romance as spelling hope for the future, the Black neighbour as inherently threatening, or racially minoritised communities as disproportionately criminal. Drawing on decolonial, critical race and cultural studies perspectives, the study reimagines humour theory as a vehicle for interpreting the affective, political and epistemological significance of comedy to shape processes of racialisation and national identity construction.

Sarah Ilott is a Senior Lecturer in English and Film at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. She co-leads the Centre for Migration and Postcolonial Studies at MMU and the comedy and gender research network Mixed Bill.