Description
The abject and increasingly toxic politics of immigration in the UK is often framed in terms of an ethics of seriousness. From humanitarian and cosmopolitan frameworks that centre vulnerability, compassion and hospitality, to communitarian and nativist discourses that variously juxtapose tradition with the 'threat' of rapid change, perhaps posed by an unknown 'other', the ethics of immigration is no laughing matter. In this paper, I foreground the everyday ethics of immigration by considering the vernacular discussions of immigration that permeate comedy and memes about migration. On one hand, ironic and self-deprecating treatments of immigration in mainstream comedies like Goodness Gracious Me and Borderline centre the capacity of humour to negotiate ambiguities of identity and belonging. On the other hand, the exclusionary politics of the online right often circulates repeated gags, sarcastic memes about 'cultural enrichment', 'doctors and engineers', that serve to sensationalise immigration as a question to the inclusive narrative of the British state. Across cases the role of humour in imagining and contesting the everyday ethics of immigration blurs the divide between serious and funny with important implications for the literature.
