Humor (re)positioning ethnolinguistic ideologies: “You tink is funny?”

Humor (re)positioning ethnolinguistic ideologies: “You tinkis funny?”

E M A N U E L D A S I L VA

CREFO, OISE-University of Toronto 252 Bloor St. W., Toronto, ON, M5S 1V6Canada

[email protected] of Jyväskylä, Department of Languages, P.O. Box 35, FI-40014

University of Jyväskylä, [email protected]

A B S T R A C T

This article examines how essentializing ideologies of language and identityin Toronto’s Portuguese ethnic market, constructed as monolingual andmonocultural within the larger mainstream market of English-speakingCanada, provide the background for humorous sociolinguistic performancesthat playfully acknowledge, reproduce, and challenge ethnolinguistic stratifi-cation. After more than sixty years, the dominant spaces of the local Portu-guese market continue to exclude most Portuguese-Canadian youth byrarely legitimizing the use of English, bilingual code-switching, or‘broken’ or ‘Azorean’ Portuguese. By choosing YouTube as a space inwhich to engage audiences in ideologies of language and identity throughperformances of sociolinguistic caricatures, three young Portuguese-Canadianamateur comedians negotiate sociolinguistic boundaries with an ambivalentagency. The mocking performances are legitimized by the performers’in-group status and reveal, among other things, how a stigmatized varietyof Azorean Portuguese and certain ethnolinguistic stereotypes can be reap-propriated and reinforced relative to sociolinguistic hierarchies. (Languageideologies, ethnic humor, performativity, heteroglossia)*

I N T R O D U C T I O N : P E R F O R M A N C E F R O M AS O C I O L I N G U I S T I C P E R S P E C T I V E

The YouTube video featured a small, elderly woman sitting in a kitchen, dressed inblack, with a hint of some facial hair, wrinkled pale skin, and matted grey hair. Herdark, deep-set eyes shone through her large-rimmed glasses as she fielded a barrageof questions from a young, muscular white man with tanned skin, a tattoo above hisright wrist, piercings in his lip, nose, and ears, wearing an oversized graphic t-shirt,baggy jeans, and a baseball cap. The question, in Portuguese, was always the same:“Avó, o que é isto?” In the montage of edited scenes, the youngman repeatedly asks

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“What’s this, grandma?” as he thrusts unrelated objects in front of her (a blueslipper, a bag of sugar, a silver teapot, a Portuguese folklore doll) in order to geta rise out of her while filming her reaction. The grandmother’s responses, in amarked variety of European Portuguese that many would label as ‘Azorean’,ranged from playful to stern and elicited laughter from the grandson. While screen-ing the video, I watched for a reaction from the balding man, forty years my senior,who sat quietly beside me at the dinner table. He rolled his tired brown eyes, raisedhis bushy eyebrows, and shrugged his shoulders while shaking his cracked, cal-loused palms at me. “You tink is funny?” he asked in a thick Portuguese accent.Most of the video’s online viewers thought so, although a small minority foundit abusive. I smirked, averted my gaze and mumbled, “I don’t know Dad, I thinkit’s interesting”. Raised in a proudly Portuguese home, my parents taught me thatbeing and speaking Portuguese were worthy of respect, not mockery. In whatfollows, I explore how in-group stereotyping and mocking of language and identitycan complicate sociolinguistic hierarchies and ethnic solidarity.

This article examines the emergence of youth-led ethnic humor among Portu-guese-Canadians in Toronto as heteroglossic performance that positions and reposi-tions dominant sociolinguistic ideologies of Portuguese and English. Thesedominant ideologies value monolingualism, standard language varieties, and theinfluence of national socioeconomic and political elites, while devaluing vernacularand mixed varieties, and the social positions of marginalized speakers. Analyzinglanguage use through the concepts of performance and performativity allows schol-ars to question the creative, complex, and changing ways in which individuals andcommunities identify and position themselves relative to sociolinguistic hierarchies(Bauman&Briggs 1990; Palmer & Jankowiak 1996; Jaffe 2009; Ahearn 2012). Lin-guistic performances can be critically understood as forms of social action (Austin1962) and, through the notion of performativity (Butler 1999), as processes of‘doing’ rather than static forms of ‘being’. Critical views of language see it not asstatic or uniform either, but as continuously (re)produced and changing through in-dividuals’ actions, verbal and nonverbal (Gumperz 1982; Heller 1999). Performativ-ity, therefore, depends on how people display, frame, and evaluate discourse.Performances and their framings can socially and politically situate actions, actors,and audiences (Goffman 1974; Bourdieu 1991). In analyzing language or ‘verbalart’ as performance, Bauman (1975) highlights the importance of an audience inshaping and evaluating an individual’s display of communicative competence.

Performance puts the act of speaking on display—objectifies it, lifts it to a degree from its interac-tional setting and opens it to scrutiny by an audience. Performance heightens awareness of the actof speaking and licenses the audience to evaluate the skill and effectiveness of the performer’s ac-complishment. (Bauman & Briggs 1990:73)

Performers can mobilize symbolic resources from their sociolinguistic repertoires toproduce multiple and competing utterances in a single interaction, marking multipleaffiliations, and social personae. A critical analysis of these multiple voices, whichBakhtin (1981) defines as the verbal-ideological perspectives expressed within an

188 Language in Society 44:2 (2015)

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utterance, can reveal ‘stance-taking’ practices (Jaffe 2009): how speakers positionthemselves within fluid but socially constrained trajectories. That is, certain perfor-mances are evaluated more favorably than others by audiences in situated contextswhere specific resources (symbolic or material) are at stake (e.g. vying for accep-tance into a social group, or interviewing for a job). Speakers strategically navigatebetween structured social spaces where some processes tend toward uniformity andothers toward differentiation of various kinds (such as spatial, economic, religious,linguistic, or social). For Bakhtin (1981), there is a productive tension between thecentripetal forces of uniformity and standardization, and the centrifugal forces of di-versity and difference (Bell 2007). The key notion of heteroglossia refers to the in-herent diversity present in language resulting from this centripetal/centrifugaltension. Heteroglossia is a dialogic mixture of world views, languages, and utteranc-es, reflected in individual sociolinguistic repertoires. At a macro/societal level, ananalysis of heteroglossia challenges the dominant view equating one language toone nation and one people as an homogenizing ideological construction tied tothe politico-economic development of the European nation-state (Blommaert1999; Pujolar 2001; Heller 2011). At a micro/interactional level, analyzing hetero-glossic performances of language and identity can illuminate the (not so) subtle pol-itics of dominant and marginalized sociolinguistic identities in different contexts.

The sociolinguistic context discussed in this article is that of Toronto’s Portu-guese-Canadian community, which I have discussed elsewhere (da Silva 2011,2012a) as a market in order to reveal the relations of power and the multiple posi-tionings of social actors who compete for unequally distributed symbolic and ma-terial resources (Giddens 1984; Bourdieu 1991; Heller 2002). This particularmarket is divided over constructions of ‘legitimate’ performances of Portugueselanguage and identity, or ‘portugueseness’ (Klimt 2002; da Silva 2011). Sociolin-guistic tensions arise from an ideological competition between Portuguese immi-grants from Mainland Portugal (Mainlanders) and the Autonomous Region ofthe Azores (Azoreans)—the respective center and periphery of linguistic, cultural,political, economic, and historical capital in Portugal.1 Geographically distant fromeach other in Europe, the two groups are part of the same market in Toronto. There,a minority of Mainlanders assumed positions of power and generally imposed theirlanguage varieties and cultural performances as representative of an idealized Por-tugal, and marginalized the Azorean majority for their nonstandard ways of speak-ing and being. Themonolingual andmonocultural norms of theMainland dominantdiscourse of portugueseness in Toronto also alienate most second-generation youth(primarily Azorean, but also Mainland descendants) who do not speak Portuguesefluently, who mix English and Portuguese, and who generally interact with peoplefrom more cultural backgrounds than do their (grand)parents.

Toronto’s Portuguese market also operates within a larger Anglophone-dominantCanadianmarket that is divided alongmany lines including class, ethnicity, race, lan-guage, and migration history. The result is a sociolinguistically stratified market withmultiple hierarchies. In this case, Portuguese is positioned as a subordinate language

Language in Society 44:2 (2015) 189

HUMOR (RE ) POS IT ION ING ETHNOL INGUIST IC IDEOLOG IES

since, among other things, its speakers have mainly occupied uncelebrated working-class jobs and have not assumed mainstream positions of power where speaking ‘un-accented’ standard English and aligning with a white, Anglo-Saxon and de-ethni-cized Canadian culture are markers of prestige and power.2

This article builds on a three-year ethnography of Toronto’s Portuguese commu-nity (2005–2008) examining front and back-stage performances (Goffman 1974) ofPortuguese language and identity with a focus on second-generation youth.3 In thefollowing section, I present the broader historical and discursive context for publicperformances of portugueseness. Performances such as Portugal Day celebrations,speeches by community leaders, and religious events produce the dominant dis-courses of portugueseness because they publicly shape the community and ‘tendto be among the most memorable, repeatable, reflexively accessible forms of dis-course’ (Bauman 2005:149). The third section of this article situates Portuguese-Canadian youth within these performances. Drawing from Chun’s (2004) analysisof a Korean-American comedian (Margaret Cho) and her use of in-group stereotyp-ical Asian speech, which complicates some analyses of racial crossing (Rampton1995), the fourth section examines three comedic performances by youth who‘put the act of speaking on display’ (Bauman & Briggs 1990:73) by stylizing Por-tuguese and Portuguese-influenced English in ways that challenge and reproducethe sociolinguistic order around them.

C O N T E X T U A L I Z I N G P E R F O R M A N C E S O FP O R T U G U E S E N E S S

Essentializing discourses of Canadian multiculturalism (Porter 1965; McAll 1992)and Portuguese nationalism (Feldman-Bianco 1992; Noivo 2002; Holton & Klimt2009) construct Toronto’s Portuguese community as a unified and homogenousmarket meant to fit discretely within Canada’s multicultural and Portugal’s diasporicmosaics. These discourses, however, gloss over internal divisions based on unequalcapital (be it linguistic, regional, cultural, economic, gendered, or generational).Deconstructing these differences within Portugal is key to revealing many of thehidden relations of ethnolinguistic power within a Canadian market that firstimported Portuguese workers in 1953 (Teixeira & da Rosa 2000).

Historical relations between Mainland Portugal and the Azores have been tensesince the fifteenth century because Azoreans have been physically isolated, politi-cally marginalized, socially underprivileged, and economically exploited by distantLisbon governments (Alves 2000; Goulart Costa 2008). This marginalizationhinges on the Azores’ remoteness, their historically rural and undereducated work-force, their sparse population (less than 250,000 inhabitants according to the 2011Census), and on claims for a distinct Azorean identity (Oliveira & Teixeira 2004).This marginalization also hinges on stigmatizing ideologies of language and classthat equate rurality and a phonetically marked variety of Portuguese (commonly re-ferred to as Açoriano4 or ‘Azorean Portuguese’) with being ‘backwards’ and


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‘inferior’ to the Mainland standard, thereby framing Azoreans as ‘slow’, ‘stupid’,and illegitimate speakers (Alves 2000; Oliveira & Teixeira 2004; da Silva 2011).The key phonetic features that mark Azorean Portuguese (and especially Micae-lense, the linguistic variety spoken on the largest island of São Miguel) are theclosed, front rounded vowel [y] (vs. the European Portuguese [u]), elongated diph-thongs, and a vocalic shift towards more central and back vowels. These markers,while stigmatizing, also mark an ‘authenticity’ that unites Azoreans and informstheir sense of ‘azoreanness’. In emigrant settings across time and space, these lin-guistic and regional differences remain salient.

Of the nearly 500,000 Portuguese-Canadians, approximately two-thirds are ofAzorean descent (da Silva 2012a). Despite this numeric advantage and a differentsocial environment, Azoreans are not largely found in positions of power within thePortuguese-Canadian market (i.e. Portuguese sociocultural associations, ethnicbusinesses, media outlets, language schools, and Portuguese diplomatic institu-tions). In Toronto, Azorean varieties of Portuguese, Azorean history, andAzorean descendants themselves are rarely empowered since the dominant dis-courses of portugueseness reify a Mainland Portuguese habitus whose influenceis reproduced across generations (Oliveira & Teixeira 2004; da Silva 2011).

A P U B L I C C A S T I N G - C A L L F O R Y O U N GP E R F O R M E R S

Within Toronto’s Mainland-dominated Portuguese market, most of the Canadian-born second and third generations struggle to navigate Portuguese discursive spacesbecause they have a limited understanding of standard Portuguese and of Portugal.These discursive spaces remain monolingually Portuguese, promote antiquated andfixed images of Portuguese history and culture by romanticizing rural, working-class, Catholic, folklorized, colonial, and paternalistic traditions, and try to instilla sense of saudade ‘nostalgia’ and a desire to return to a land and time someonein their family left behind (da Silva 2011; see also Koven & Simões Marques,this issue, for a similar discussion of dominant discourses of portugueseness inFrance). Publicly engaging with these discourses is particularly difficult foryouth of Azorean descent, most of whom lack the standard linguistic and culturalhabitus (Bourdieu 1977) and have internalized negative ideologies of ‘bad’(Azorean) Portuguese, but it is also challenging for youth of Mainland descentwhose legitimate sociolinguistic capital may still not suffice. Although bilingualEnglish-Portuguese code-switching (referred to as portinglês; see Lang 1887 andPap 1949) is commonly heard in backstage settings, the only form of publicly sanc-tioned bilingualism is that of parallel monolingualisms (Heller 1999). This can beseen as a self-preserving effort by the ethnic elite to ‘protect’ the Portuguese lan-guage and their positions of power from change, but also as a way to contest thelocal and global dominance of English.



As a result of these discursive tensions, many Portuguese-Canadian youth (andtheir families) choose not to publicly invest in performances of portugueseness thatrequire displays of considerable linguistic or cultural capital. Their absence andsilence jeopardize the future of the market, even though activities staged by thedominant Portuguese institutions continue to be legitimized as being ‘for thesake of’ the under-represented younger generations. Their absence and silencealso undermine the dominant discourses of portugueseness that expect Portu-guese-Canadians, young and old, to proudly identify as Portuguese, and to speakand promote Portuguese everywhere (at work, at school, at home, and at play).Koven (2013) calls this a discourse of obligation within a diasporic ‘moraleconomy’ (Lubkeman 2002). Nevertheless, most Portuguese-Canadian childrenin Toronto prefer speaking English, and many parents privately struggle with lin-guistic insecurities about the ‘quality’ of their Portuguese.

In general, my ethnography revealed a lack of public in-group contestation of thedominant discourses within Toronto’s Portuguese market. Against this backdrop,my fieldwork set out, in part, to look for spaces that were either more inclusiveof Portuguese-Canadian youth, or made by and for them, and that were thusmore receptive to different ways of being and speaking Portuguese. At the peripheryof the market, I found Portuguese-Canadian university student associations that metthese criteria, although they did not always challenge the dominant discourses ofportugueseness (da Silva 2012b). At the same time, in 2007, I saw the firstpublic performance of Portuguese-Canadian ethnic comedy on YouTube thatengaged with stereotypes of language and identity. Drawing from Jaspers’(2011) work on ambiguous sociolinguistic agency, and ethnic minority students‘doing ridiculous’ while speaking in Dutch-based foreigner talk in Flanders, thisarticle attends to contradictory and ridiculous Portuguese-Canadian performancesof language (Portuguese and English) that may inform descriptions of ‘living in he-gemony’. This hegemony can operate both in Toronto’s Portuguese market (whereAzorean Portuguese and Portuguese-English bilingualism are subordinate to theMainland standard), and in the Torontonian/Canadian market (where Portugueseis subordinate to English). The comedic performers presented below highlighthow subjects of this potential marginalization negotiate this hegemony.

F I N D I N G R O O M T O P L A Y

Humor has long been a productive space to explore hybrid performances and com-peting ideologies of language and identity through the playful public licensing ofsocial critique and stereotypical discourses (Woolard 1987; Jaffe 2000; Chun2004). As Bauman & Briggs (1990:63) argue, ‘play frames not only alter the per-formative force of utterances but provide settings in which speech and society canbe questioned and transformed’. In this section, I present comedic performances ofmocking or stylized Portuguese and English that raise questions about ideologies oflanguage, legitimacy, authenticity, solidarity, and community membership.


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The sample presented below includes performances by YouTube humorist JeffPopsick, by a mainstream TV-based humorist (Diane Salema), and by a group ofPortuguese-Canadian YouTube humorists (the Modern Fawkers). The dearth ofpublicly accessible Portuguese ethnic comedy in Canada up to 2012, and itsgeneral absence before 2007, raises the question of why it did not emergesooner. With officially sanctioned Portuguese migration dating back to 1953,there was a sizeable number of youth born and raised in Canadian cities whocould have produced Portuguese-Canadian comedy as part of the ‘MTV Genera-tion’ or ‘Generation X’—born between the early 1960s and 1980s (Craig &Bennett 1997).5 Contrast this, for example, with Indo-Canadian comedianRussell Peters whose brand of observational humor highlights racial, ethnic,class, and cultural stereotypes and who rose to global fame in the late 1990s. Con-trast it as well with the work of Italian-Canadian comedians in the early 2000s in-cluding Debra DiGiovanni, the ‘DooWops’, and comedy tours like the ‘Italian BadBoyz of Comedy’. The public development of Portuguese-Canadian comedy hasbeen delayed for several reasons: the community’s strict investment in celebratingand preserving a monolingual and monocultural Portuguese market, the conserva-tive power of the local and diasporic Portuguese elite, the marginalization of itsyouth as well as many of its Azorean members, the community’s working-classhabitus, and its relative absence from Canadian mainstream attention.

The following analysis explores the ways in which heteroglossic performancesboth reproduce and deconstruct discriminatory discourses about the Portuguese,sometimes viewed in the mainstream as ‘uneducated’, ‘unintegrated’, ‘dirty’manual laborers who speak ‘bad English’ (Nunes 1998), or in in-group debatesabout who and what counts as ‘good Portuguese’. Relevant here is Reyes’(2004) study on how social actors (in her case Asian American teenagers) can re-appropriate stereotypes of their ethnic grouping as a way to position themselvesand others in socially meaningful ways and to potentially redefine stereotypes.These stereotypes can circulate in mainstream society (‘widespread typifications’)or locally on a more narrow scale (‘local typifications’), and they have differentimpacts on positioning the self and other by complicating hegemony and solidarity.My analysis examines the ambiguous agency of the performers, the legitimacy thatthey may or may not be granted, and the positioning of characters and commentersacross different boundaries. These performances render public the ‘inner sphere’ oftalk (Urciuoli 1996), and blur the boundaries between Portuguese and English,between standard (Mainland) and Azorean Portuguese, and between standardand ‘broken’ English.

Mocking a Portuguese grandmother? What is this?

The first Portuguese-Canadian to publicly mock portugueseness on YouTube wasJeff Popsick, the young man presented at the beginning of the article.6 The imme-diate target of his humor is his grandmother, someone representing Portuguese



authority and tradition, who speaks nonstandard (Azorean) Portuguese and virtuallyno English. By exposing her and himself to potential ridicule from Portuguese-Canadian, Portuguese, and non-Portuguese audiences, Jeff complicates notionsof in-group solidarity and challenges dominant Portuguese discourses of respectingone’s elders and respecting one’s ‘heritage’ language.

From 2007 to 2011, this teenager of Azorean descent posted dozens of videoclips of pranks on his Avó ‘grandmother’, from the abusive to the absurd andamusing. Most of the videos, organized as episodes in a ‘Portuguese grandmother’series, involve Jeff saying a few words in Portuguese and doing ridiculous things toher (e.g. startling her both at day and night by asking for bananas, and covering herbedroom floor with papo secos ‘Portuguese bread rolls’, to elicit and record her re-actions in (Azorean) Portuguese. The following excerpt is from Episode 17,O que éisto? ‘What is this?’, where, according to Jeff’s online synopsis, ‘we find grandmain aQ&A session for Jeff while he asks her questions about the things around her, ofcourse knowing what they are, Jeff just desides [sic] to keep grandma company. lolenjoy!’.7 Interestingly, the video’s metatext is almost entirely in English (except forthe Portuguese title), while the linguistic interactions in the video are almost entirelyin Portuguese. The lack of subtitles, which makes it difficult for a non-Portuguesespeaker to follow, suggests that Jeff positions his audience as ‘in-group’ members.Audience reactions are discussed after presenting the video. They reveal multiplepositionings and understandings of language and identity.

(1) Portuguese grandmother and Jeff Popsick: O que é isto? ‘What is this?’8

[At the 1:06 mark we are in the grandmother’s cramped little kitchen with Jeffthrusting random objects in front of her, starting with a bag of sugar.]

1 Jeff: Avó o que é isto?[iʃ]

Grandmother, what is this?

2 Grandmother: Não No3 Jeff: O que é isto, avó?

[iʃ vɔ]What’s this Grandma?

4 Grandmother: Eh homem, isto é o açucar para a[oʊm] [ɶsjykɑ pra]

gente botar no chá. Bota isso ali![ʒjɜ̃t butɑ ʃja is]

[raising her hands] Hey man,that’s sugar for us to put inour tea. Put that over there!

[The scene fades out and back in with the grandmother eating something when Jeffthrusts a silver teapot in front of her.]




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6 Grandmother: eh quer- [unintelligible] [laughs and makes a sign ofa cross across her forehead, chest andshoulders]

7 [Jeff laughs along with another woman present off-camera]8 Grandmother: É para tu mijares aí!

[pa ty][laughs] [unintelligible] It’s for you topiss in!

9 [The other woman laughs out loud]

[The scene fades out and back in with the grandmother in the kitchen sitting withother people. Jeff enters holding a doll dressed in a Portuguese folklore costume andshakes it in front of his grandmother’s face. The video switches to slow motion andthe voices are exaggeratedly slow.]



11 Grandmother: Eh homem! Mas porquê foste...?[oʊm] [fəʃt]

Hey man! But why did yougo…?

Isto não é para tu brincares!OK?

[pra ty]

This is not for you to play with!OK?

12 Jeff: Eu quero brincar com isso[ɜ kɜ bɾiŋkɑ is]

[she takes the doll away fromJeff]I wanna play with that

[the film returns to normal speed]13 Grandmother: Não brincas com isto não! No, you’re not playing with

this!

The grandmother’s increasingly frustrated reactions reveal how Jeff’s annoyingquestions make visible the existence of certain boundaries. With the bag of sugar,the grandmother’s reaction is straightforward, although she first tries to avoidgetting involved in the game. Her pronunciation of the word chá ‘tea’ as [ʃja]instead of [ʃa] is a marker of Azorean Portuguese, particularly that of the islandof Terceira. When faced with the teapot, her explanation of ‘what it is’ is verywry (‘for you to piss in!’) and elicits a roar of laughter as she too is in on thegame. When faced with the doll, however, the grandmother’s lightheartednessfades and she is infuriated. This is not just any doll. It is HER doll and not a toy.Dressed in a traditional Portuguese folklore costume it embodies Portugueseculture, which presumably makes it worthy of respect. Strikingly, her respect forthe traditional doll contrasts with Jeff’s disrespect for his grandmother who alsoembodies traditional portugueseness. Indeed, Jeff’s performance evokes the‘doing ridiculous’ of Jaspers’ (2006, 2011) ethnic minority students in Flanders.The fact that the staged caricature of Jeff’s grandmother creates a space for



comments on issues that are otherwise publicly taboo can be seen as an act ofresistance to the social order in the local Portuguese (and Canadian) market,where he likely would not be given the right to speak because he looks and actslike a ‘thug’.

This video also provides a curious counterpoint to the dominant sociolinguisticdiscourse that promotes speaking nothing but Portuguese at home. In a narrowview, a young person like Jeff could potentially merit ethnolinguistic praise forspeaking Portuguese at home—despite his mocking use of it in a game that dem-onstrates little standard language competence. His irreverent mocking of portu-gueseness and of his grandmother challenges idealized ways of being andspeaking Portuguese. This video and the online responses also illustrate thatthere are many varieties of Portuguese that are judged differently. Simply speakingPortuguese at home does not guarantee the value of one’s Portuguese linguisticcapital in other spaces. For example, if Jeff is only exposed to a nonlegitimized, ver-nacular variety of Portuguese at home (influenced by Azorean Portuguese andEnglish), then he runs the risk of being ridiculed if/when he speaks it elsewherein the Portuguese market (e.g. in Portuguese-language schools and in interactionswith ethnic leaders, media, and businesses).

The heteroglossia of Jeff’s video is intensified by the online comments (seeKoven & Simões Marques, this issue, for more analysis of YouTube commentary).As of November 28, 2013, the video had drawn 144,988 views, been ‘liked’ 255times, and ‘disliked’ fourteen times. Of the 198 written comments, twenty-eightwere negative (e.g. “this is absurd”, “this guy’s an animal”, “Poor grandmaraising such a stupid kid!”), seven were both positive and negative (e.g. “yourvideos are hilarious, but give your grandmother a break!”), 129 were more orless positive, twenty-two were informative rather than appreciative, and twelvewere reactions to other viewers’ comments. Thus, despite the absurdity of Jeff’sactions, the documented response of viewers is overwhelmingly positive. As forthe languages used, 113 comments were in Portuguese, seventy-seven inEnglish, and eight in both English and Portuguese. Language use and usernamessuggest that the actively engaged audience consists mostly of Portuguese descen-dants (in the North-American diaspora and in Portugal) who are able to understandJeff and his Avó. A brief description and categorization of the comments reveals thatnearly half of them explicitly refer to the language use in the video, likely in reactionto the ‘initial novelty’ (Jones&Schieffelin 2009) of hearing a Portuguese-Canadiangrandmother from the Azores on YouTube. About half of the positive comments(55) reproduced direct quotes from Jeff and his grandmother, including unparsed,morphologically nonsensical, but phonetically simplified revoicings that reflecttheir nonstandard ways of speaking (e.g. “épatumijaresaí!!” and “Óvóquéich?”).As these last reductionary examples illustrate, revoicing or representing speech isnot a neutral act (Bakhtin 1981), but rather an evaluative one involving ideologiesof what one considers good or bad language, that can ridicule or support the originalspeaker—as we also see in the second excerpt.


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There are also twenty-five negative comments about the grandmother’s AzoreanPortuguese pronunciation and azoreanness in general as insulting idealized portu-gueseness. They are almost all written in Portuguese (translated here for the reader’sconvenience) and perhaps written by Mainlanders whose symbolic capital feelsthreatened (e.g. “This is Portuguese?! What?! I can’t understand a fucking thingthis old woman is saying!!!” to which someone responds “It’s the Azoreanaccent!” and “The Azores are like Brazil and Africa. After so many years of colo-nization they never learned our [Mainland Portuguese] language!”). Still, therewere five positive comments about the ‘Azorean accent’, including one that decon-structs the sociolinguistic context of Mainland Portugal: “What a stupid discussion.Even in [Mainland] Portugal people have different accents. Lisbon has an accent,Porto another, Coimbra another, ... Azores another. What’s the problem? lol?”.9

Finally, the second largest group of comments (forty-five) contains positive dec-larations of belonging and familiarity with Portugal and portugueseness (“LMFAOdude I’m Portuguese and this shit is the best!!!” “OMFG i love your avo! haha.where is she from? she sounds like people from Pico”).10 Commenters oftenpraise the grandmother for reminding them of their own family (“She’s the best!Just like my vavo!”). These declarations serve multiple functions. They can alignthe commenters with discourses of diasporic Portuguese nationalism and with animagined transnational family. These declarations may also entitle the commentersto either celebrate or mock the grandmother, much like Jeff’s ambivalent agency,because, as Chun (2004) argues with Margaret Cho’s Asian comedy, claimingan ‘authentic’ ethnic identity positions him and many commenters as insidersand unlikely to indulge in discriminatory mockery.

The following heteroglossic comedic performance broadens the scope of the au-dience from ‘in-group’ to ‘outsiders’ in the Canadian mainstream. It highlights Por-tuguese performances of nonstandard English.

Mocking Portuguese in the mainstream

From2006 to 2008, Diane Salema, a young Portuguese-Canadianwoman ofAzoreandescent, was a host onMTVCanada. Among the most popular short video segmentson the network was a comedic interview series called ‘Diane’s Dad on…’. In eachepisode, Diane received advice on a specific topic from her elderly father whospoke in what mtvlive.ca labeled ‘broken English’ with a thick Portuguese accent.Topics included ‘Diane’s Dad on…’ the government, Christmas, fashion, computers,doctors, and girlfriends, among others. The most popular of the videos uploaded toYouTube in 2009 was ‘Diane’s Dad on…Octopus’, which I present below.

By bringing the ‘inner sphere’ of talk in a Portuguese household to the ‘outer andpublic sphere’ of the Canadianmainstream, the boundaries between Portuguese andEnglish are explicitly structured and ordered. In this outer sphere, ‘broken English’and the use of Portuguese are much less tolerated and are seen as disorderly ordeficient (Urciuoli 1996). In fact, Mr. Salema’s English is so heavily accented or



‘broken’ that it is subtitled byMTVCanada, framing him as an illegitimate speaker of(standard) English, and staging the interaction as a ‘real’ interview (Park 2009). Ex-posing Mr. Salema’s language skills and his mannerisms to public judgment may re-produce negative stereotypes about Portuguese immigrants, but it can also provide aspace for Portuguese-Canadian youth to reinforce or critique the stereotypes in a lan-guage (English) and a space (social media) they dominate well. The following videoreveals a hierarchy of socially stratified languages and identities with complex andcontradictory alignments between the performers and the audience. In it, Diane andher father discuss a Portuguese tradition of eating octopus at Christmas. The sourceof humor comes primarily from Mr. Salema’s difficulty in correctly pronouncingoctopus, because the ‘oct’ cluster is not very common in Portuguese.

(2) Diane’s dad on… octopus11

[The scene opens with Diane and a man we assume is her father (Mr. Salema)sitting on a living room sofa, in front of a polished wood coffee table decoratedwith crocheted linen, a glass bowl, and an African safari statuette, surrounded byfamily photos. Diane places a red hat with white trim on her father’s head asdrum-beats are heard.]

1 Father: Euh! Santa Claus!2 Diane: [laughs] Yeah!

[There is loud music playing electronic beats and letters spelling ‘Diane’s Dad on…’appear on the screen as the camera zooms in onMr. Salema’s wrinkled face and gap-toothed grin. The music changes to that of a slow-paced acoustic guitar.]

3 Diane: [wearing the Santa Claus hat] Would you like to have octopus onChristmas?

4 Father: Why not? [raised eyebrows]Subtitle: Why not?

5 Diane: Why not? [smiles]6 Father: Yeah.

Subtitle: Yeah.7 Diane: I’d eat it.8 Father: Oh yeah, I like (them). I love dat stuff. Ah! Diane. What (.) Türkey,

türkey, türkey, to me fed up. If you eat, if you eat sa[me] na right timeokay. If you eat leftover for next day, you no taste anyting güd.—Nah fo’get it

Subtitle: Oh yeah I like, I love that stuff. Naaaaaaaya. Diane. Turkey, turkey,turkey, to me fart up. If you eat, if you saaaaa the right time okay. If youeat leftover for next day, you naught say anything good. Forget it.

9 Diane: —Mhm.10 Father: Ca-Cacopus. And

Subtitle: Caaa, Cacapose, I


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11 Diane: [muffled laugh]12 Father: Yesterday I told you motha’ say, when we gonna eat ocapus?

Subtitle: Yesterday I told your mother say, when are you going to eat cacapose?13 Diane: Eat what?14 Father: [shouting] When you gonna eat OCAPUS!?

Subtitle: When you gunna eat CACAPOSE!?15 Diane: [laughs looking away from her father and at the camera]16 Father: WAKAPUSS!

Subtitle: WHAKAPUSS!17 Diane: [laughs] I [laughs again, looks at her father] I want some ocapus

wakapuss.18 Father: Yeah?

Subtitle: Yeah.19 Diane: Yeah [looking at the camera] that stuff’s good.20 Father: Putta in wine. Garlay (garlic). Things like that. Next day/they gonna fry.

[He places his hand on his forehead, then lifts it up to the ceiling beforebringing it down to his lap]The moon come down.

Subtitle: Putta le wine. Garlay things like that, and next there going to fry.The moon come down.

21 Diane: The moon come down? [laughs looking at the camera]It’s that good, —huh?

22 Father: —Beautiful!Good? Tsshu!

Subtitle: Beautiful.GOOD! Tusshhhh.

[The electronic music swells as an ad for MTV Canada appears on screen.]

In a public rendering of the inner sphere of (staged) talk between two generationsof Portuguese-Canadians, Diane, like Jeff Popsick with his grandmother, can beseen as breaking in-group solidarity by purposefully exposing her father and his ac-cented English to social and linguistic evaluation, and by positioning herself favor-ably with the de-ethnicized, middle-class, Anglophone-dominant MTV audience.Her privileged position as a family and ethnic insider gives Diane enough legitima-cy to publicly present in-group interactions. Furthermore, her whiteness, canadian-ness, and exclusive use of standard English grant her privileged access to themainstream market. The unknown subtitle-writers use their power to add anotherevaluative layer to the interaction by decoding and policing Mr. Salema’sspeech. Although it is at times unintelligible (Wirtz 2007), Mr. Salema’s Englishis not only corrected but it is potentially ridiculed through the subtitles that occa-sionally deviate from the original speech and create an even more heteroglossic in-teraction—like the reported speech in Jeff’s viewers’ comments, as we have seen(see also Jaffe & Walton 2000; Androutsopoulos 2000; and Koven & SimõesMarques, this issue, for discussions on orthography and the representation of



nonstandard speech). Adding this textual layer creates different levels of under-standing: those, like me and Diane, who understand Portuguese-accented‘broken’ English, can claim an insider position and identify the subtitles’ devia-tions, unlike a non-Portuguese-speaking audience. Another textual layer heightensthe ridiculousness of the utterances through uncomfortable close-ups of Mr.Salema’s tanned face, bushy eyebrows, balding head, wrinkled skin, and gap-toothed grin, as he sits back in a worn blue-collared shirt and grey pants thatlikely index the uniforms of workers in the service industry.

Before Diane’s father trips up on the pronunciation of octopus, the subtitle-writers mock his accented English pronunciation in turn 8 as he explains that hegets “fed up”with there being too much turkey to eat at Christmas. By pronouncingit [fɑːd ʌp], with a shift characteristic of Azorean Portuguese towards the backvowel, he allows the subtitle-writers to enter “fart up”, a representation that getstaken up as humorous in the online comments. By contrast, no commenter scoffsat the subtitle-writers for misrepresenting “you no taste anything good”, in turn8, with an ungrammatical “you naught say anything good”. There should,however, be no contextual confusion since Diane’s father is evoking thecommon reality that leftovers taste less fresh the following day.

Turns 10 to 17 represent the climax of the mocking. Mr. Salema’s first attempt atpronouncing octopus yields a hesitant “cacopus”, as he inverts the first syllable,stutters, and drops the [t], creating a comical and widely recognized childishword for faeces ‘caca’. In turn 11, Diane muffles her laughter and does notcorrect her father. With no reason to suspect anything is wrong with the interaction,Mr. Salema continues his narrative and, in the following turn, produces “ocapus”, aword very similar to octopus. The scene would be different (and perhaps lack itsappeal), however, if Diane’s father were seen communicating plainly in English.This is likely why the subtitle-writers ignore the improved pronunciation and repro-duce the previous mispronunciation: “cacapose”. In on the joke herself, andknowing that this is the most mockable part of the scene, Diane asks her fatherto clarify what exactly he wants to eat (turn 13). Mr. Salema’s frustration in turn14 may be because he expects his daughter to understand him. He raises hisvoice and repeats his question more slowly, as if Diane had trouble hearing whathe said. Her laughter and orientation towards the camera leave Mr. Salema withan ambiguous response. He thus repeats himself a second time, even louder andmore emphatically, changing “ocapus” to “wakapuss” in turn 16, to provideanother plausible alternative, in case the miscommunication hinges on the wordfor octopus. Diane laughs again in turn 17 but goes on to jokingly align herselfwith her father saying that she too wants “ocapus wakapuss”. The fact that she re-produces both words suggests that Diane had no trouble hearing and decoding whather father said. Whether or not she actually enjoys eating octopus (“that stuff’sgood” in turn 19), it is arguably not a common part of mainstream Canadiancuisine and can, thus, represent a ‘funny’ food eaten by foreigners, like Diane’sfather who thinks it is literally out of this world.


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Unlike Jeff Popsick’s videos of his Portuguese grandmother, none of theYouTube comments online chastised Diane for exposing her Portuguese father topublic ridicule. As of November 28, 2013, the Octopus video had drawn 24,281views, been ‘liked’ fifty-four times, and ‘disliked’ only once. Of the twenty-onewritten comments, eighteen were more or less positive and three were unrelated tothe video. As for the languages used, all twenty-one comments were in English;none were in Portuguese. Thus, the commenting audiences for these two amateurcomedians were considerably different. Whereas Jeff’s was primarily of Portuguesedescent (and therefore legitimized to defend or ridicule their own Avó’s), Diane’saudience was more ethnolinguistically diverse ( judging from user profiles, names,and the exclusive use of English in the posts). The most common comments(twelve of the twenty-one) revoicedMr. Salema’s character, including the confusionover “fed up” (e.g. “Turkey, turkey, turkey to me fart up. That’s my favorite part,haha. ”), the syntactically simplified, nonstandard expression “the moon comedown” (e.g. “the moon come down.MYGOD I DIED”), but especially his differentformulations of octopus (e.g. “Cacapose... WHAKAPUSS. LMFAO”). In this non-serious frame, practices that invoke laughter, or a somewhat positive response, canstill reproduce negative ethnolinguistic stratification, as Hill (1998) has argued. Onthe one hand, Diane may be seen as a willing agent of a wealthy, Anglophone main-stream media corporation, which identifies authority, parental figures, immigrants,and nonnative English speakers, among others, as targets of linguistic and social rid-icule. On the other hand, a humorous framemay allow for an ideological critique or apersonal identification that might otherwise have been unavailable and that could de-centralize the stigmatizing sociolinguistic positioning.

Therewere, for instance, four comments that affirmed ethno-cultural solidarity (e.g. “hes exactly like my grandpa”) and that celebrated Portuguese ‘authenticity’,going so far as to imagine sharing a traditional Portuguese meal with Mr. Salema:“… I want to find him and drink wine and eat sardinhas assadas [‘grilled sardines’]with him.” In addition to the alignment work in the comments, Diane’s performanceillustrates some complex and contradictory alignments as she animates her father’swords (turns 5, 17, and 21), supports her father (turns 2, 7, 17, 19, and 21), plays therole of interpreter for a non-Portuguese audience (turns 13 and 21), and disalignswith her father by aligning with the MTV audience through her laughs, smilesand looks at the camera (turns 5, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, and 21).

Diane’s flexible alignment is due in part to her powerful capital of ‘goodEnglish’, which elevates her status in a mainstream Anglophone market (like Tor-onto’s media) and allows her to publicly mock and sympathize with her father,whose ‘bad English’ guarantees him a less powerful position. Diane’s humorderives from a caricature of Portuguese-Canadian elders who cannot speakEnglish without a ‘foreign accent’, much like the humor ofMargaret Cho’s voicingsof Mock Asian (Chun 2004).

The final example of heteroglossic comedic performance does not involve anolder Portuguese family member but is, rather, a youth-led parody of life for



many Portuguese-Canadians in Toronto. It engages with ethnic tropes and epithets,it presents Portuguese-accented English with Portuguese loanwords, and it revealstensions between different group positionings, including Italians and the main-stream Anglo-dominant group.

Modern ‘porkchop’ mockery

In the wake of South Korean musician Psy’s wildly popular ‘Gangnam Style’ videoin the summer of 2012, hundreds of parodies appeared on YouTube from around theworld, including one called ‘Porkchop Construction Style’ from Toronto. This par-ticular video, created by three young Portuguese-Canadian men of Azorean descentcollectively known as the ‘Modern Fawkers’, or just ‘the Fawkers’, garnered over215,000 views by the fall of that same year. These amateur comedians, whosename is likely a sanitized play on a similar sounding expletive (mother fuckers),have a YouTube channel with clips of pranks and random acts of absurdity (inline with MTV’s television series ‘Jackass’), not all of which have to do withbeing Portuguese. In ‘Porkchop Construction Style’, the performers appropriate aderogatory term for the Portuguese in Canada (‘Porkchop’12) and base theirfictional sketch on a common occupation for Portuguese-Canadian men: construc-tion. This illustrates how some ethnic epithets and stereotypes can be reappropriatedas a resource for accomplishing new social actions, much in the sameway as ‘nigger’and ‘chink’ have been reappropriated, in certain conditions, as solidarity terms byAfrican Americans (Kennedy 2002) and Asian Americans (Reyes 2004). By invok-ing a frame of sketch comedy, the Fawkers are sanctioned to break with social con-ventions of politeness and can parody different stereotypes of Toronto’s Portuguese-Canadian community (e.g. its working-class habitus, religiosity, and gender roles).Yet, as the viewers’ comments reveal, these stereotypes can be taken up unsympa-thetically by out-group members who want to reinforce the ideologies that can mar-ginalize the Portuguese in an English-dominated sociolinguistic hierarchy.

(3) Porkchop Construction Style13 (first verses, 0:00-1:30)[An alarm clock goes off at 4am and an electronic drumbeat grows louder as ashort, stout, white young man gets out of bed wearing sunglasses and startssinging/rapping.]

1 Porkchop construction style. Construction Style. Porkchop construction style.[Man gets out of bed and looks into the camera]

2 I wake up in da morning feeling like the P. Diddy,3 I pray to God that tüday the weader (weather) gonna be shitty.

[He clasps his hands together and shakes them]4 Maria make my lunch and I get ready to drive

[In the kitchen a woman wearing a blue robe and shawl on her head puts a bag ofpapo secos in a lunch cooler]


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5 I need to be at de jobsite by five.[He walks to a door wearing an orange reflective vest and holding a lunchbox]

6 I no wanna work, gotta pick-up José Manel.[He sits in a vehicle where a silver cross and a small green and white soccer jerseyhang from the rearview mirror. José Manel adjusts his hardhat as he sits in a garagefull of construction material.]

7 I no wanna work, dis guy he bring his own martel’ [‘hammer’][José Manel dances and smiles as he shows off his hammer]

8 I no wanna work, but I gotta make lots of papel [‘paper’ =money].[Sitting in a bulldozer with one hand on the steering wheel and the other rubbing a$50 bill]

9 I no wanna work, but I gotta work.[Nodding and singing into the camera]

10 I work hard at construction today. Hey! Today. Hey![Laying back suggestively on the bulldozer’s track roller swaying his arms, as twomen appear from behind the bulldozer and join in saying “Hey!”]

11 Lots of tax deductions to pay. Hey! To pay. Hey![Close-up of him on the bulldozer track roller rubbing his fingers together]

12 I no wanna work late today![Shaking his fist in the air]

13 Porkchop construction style! Construction style. Porkchop construction style.

[As the electronic music swells, there is a montage of clips with the three mendancing in different places including a coffee shop, a construction site, and atopvarious construction vehicles.]

Like Diane’s sociolinguistic position vis-à-vis her father, the Fawkers can cap-italize on their position as ‘good English’ speakers to satisfy the needs of Toronto’sEnglish-speaking market, to make their videos accessible to young Portuguese-Canadian and non-Portuguese audiences and, perhaps, to resist some stigmatization‘from above’ (i.e. the local Portuguese elite) when it comes to speaking ‘bad Por-tuguese’. Although the Fawkers do not all speak Portuguese fluently, the video’sprotagonist has enough sociolinguistic capital to produce stylized portugueseness.Of particular interest here are the features of stylized Portuguese-influencedEnglish: the alveolar flap ‘r’, [ɾ], in words such as construction, morning andMaria, the ‘th’-alveolarization where the voiced dental fricative in the andweather, /ð/, is pronounced [d], and the closed front-rounded vowel [y] insteadof [u] as in today [tydej]. This last phonological feature ‘keys’ (Goffman 1974) anonstandard speaker of Azorean descent as well as a nonstandard Englishspeaker, thereby blurring the boundaries between in-group and out-groupmocking. Another stylizing strategy is to use Portuguese loanwords for rhymeslike papel ‘paper/money’ and martel’ ‘hammer’ or martelo with a deleted un-stressed final vowel, and common Portuguese names like Maria and José Manel.



The reactions to the video on YouTube were overwhelmingly positive with dia-logic responses that illustrate different alignments along class and ethnolinguisticlines (both in-group and out-group). As of November 28, 2013, the video haddrawn 334,395 views, been ‘liked’ 1,420 times, and ‘disliked’ ninety-two times.Of the 323 written comments, 208 were more or less positive towards the video,twelve were negative, four were positive and negative, eight were informativerather than appreciative, and ninety-one were responses to other comments. Asfor the languages used, 304 comments were in English, ten in Portuguese, andeight in both English and Portuguese. More than half of the positive comments ex-pressed general and unspecified appreciation (“LOL”, “that was hilarious!”,“awesome!!”). More specifically, forty comments identified with being Portugueseand celebrated Portuguese-Canadian (‘Porkchop’) culture (e.g. “i love being Portu-guese”, “Hahaha love this I’m a porkchop… love being Portuguese333”), twentycomments applauded life as a construction worker (e.g. “Portuguese contruction[sic] workers make the world go round!”, “im a porkchop and costruction [sic]worker all true good vid”), and twenty-one comments reproduced a quote or ascene from the clip (e.g. “So true. I don’t want to work but i need lotsa papel”,“Ahhhyyyy. i don’t wanna work late. LOL IM Portuguese and i love this!”).These reactions reveal how potentially negative stereotypes of class can be reappro-priated and used to valorize individual and group experiences of marginalization.

Despite the considerable sanctioning of the Fawkers’ playful or demeaningrepresentation of Toronto portugueseness, they are not without their detractorsfrom in-group and out-group viewers who see them as reinforcing ethnolinguistic dif-ferences. Among the negative comments, four were in-group views critical of poten-tial discrimination against Portuguese-Canadians (e.g. “Funny vid but really, we allknow that the Portuguese are hard workers compared to others so don’t give us a badname because there will be idiots out there that will actually believe the Porkchopsare like this.”). This particular commenter fears that non-Portuguese people willdistort the in-group play frame (see also Koven & Simões Marques, this issue)and take this video as an accurate portrayal of Portuguese-Canadians, whom herefers to as ‘Porkchops’ in a presumably nonderogatory manner, as being dim-witted construction-working men who speak English poorly, are obsessed withmoney, but would rather not work. Two other comments flagged negative depictionsof Portugal (e.g. “im am portuguese dont call any one portugal porkchop or we willbeat shit out of you”). The basic grammatical mistakes in this comment (verb conju-gation, lack of prepositions and articles) lead me to suspect that its author is not afluent speaker of English and may be from Portugal. The commenter takes offenceto the use of the epithet ‘Porkchop’, without specifying its in- or out-group use,and implies that using that term in Portugal would get the speaker in trouble.Lastly, the video garnered four negative in-group comments about the tensionsbetweenAzoreans andMainlanders, perhaps related to the vocalic features of stylizedPortuguese. One commenter wrote: “Don’t group me in with these retarded islandersplease. They’re 2 and a half days off from being Portuguese. ._. ”.14 Another


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responded, “Let me tell u guys the truth we islanders we make Portugal the best weare fun and not a bunch of fucking retards that think there are the best in the world…so don’t try to talk bad about the islanders we are Portugal liked ur not [like it ornot?]”. Behind this argument about Azoreans being ‘fun’ may be the idea that thesame distinctiveness and stigmatization of Azorean Portuguese makes it both mock-able (or perhaps ‘retarded’ to some) and, in other cases, ‘fun’ and ‘authentic’, asopposed to the ‘stuffyness’ of standard Mainland Portuguese. Another commenterresponded to this last reaction echoing notions of fun, distinctiveness, and samenesswhile creating a dialogically layered interaction: “c’mon man. I make fun of theisland accents all the time (specifically saomiguel) but its all for fun. In the endmain-landers and islanders are both Portuguese, just with a few differences in accent/slang,and lifestyle.…We’re all porkchop, stop the stupidity. Peace.”). The negative com-ments, then, reveal the boundaries of different group positionings: Azoreans andMainlanders, Portuguese and Portuguese-Canadians, Porkchops and non-Porkchops.

The video’s success, and its inclusion among the hundreds of parodies of thehugely popular ‘Gangnam Style’ video, positions it within a global frame ofsuch videos that make it likely to be viewed by awider audience beyond Portuguesedescendants. This exposure to out-group viewers also creates space for negative re-actions towards or from ‘rival’ groups who compete over symbolic resources withina given ecology. Portuguese-Canadians in Toronto have a (not so) friendly rivalrywith Italian-Canadians and the Portuguese have often assumed a subordinate posi-tion.15 For example, success in Canada’s construction industry and in internationalsoccer competitions are two flashpoints for this rivalry, where Italians hold the ad-vantage. This rivalry accounted for forty-two online comments, often betweenviewers, who attacked or defended the sudden online popularity of portugueseness.In this context, and in response to the video’s many positive comments praisingPortuguese identity and even construction life, one commenter ignited a verygraphic debate summarized by the following posts:

Lots of Portugese in construction today, maybe thats why there is glass falling from high rises down-town and uneven roads. I dont remember this happening when the Italians were running the show.Maybe we should have reconsidered handing the torch to the Portugese! What do you guys think?Who feels me here!!!!!!!!!!! P.S. When was Portugal’s last World Cup or Euro Cup victory?

Italians are the biggest queers in this world. Italy is shit. Portugal is the best!

And you are really irritating!! look at the maturity in you bud to sit here and bash Italians, why causeone portuguese song went viral, your getting all excited to be Portuguese haha. Like a Porkchopfinally did something. LOL.

screw you we portuguese are awesome

You eat shit for breakfast cuz its the scum from where your from.

(Modern Fawkers:) we do not encourage this pointless “comment war” thanks for taking time towatch and comment.



These negative reactions to the ‘Porkchop Construction Style’ video illustrate thedanger that ‘widespread typifications’ of stereotypes (Reyes 2004) performed byin-group humorists can be taken up unsympathetically by out-group members.Like the widespread typification of the Asian storeowner stereotype, the stereotypeof the Portuguese construction worker has widespread circulation in Toronto, inCanada, and elsewhere. The Fawkers narrowed the scope of the stereotype somewhatby situating their video in a Toronto suburb and by portraying local typifiers (a mallparking lot and store) that are unrecognizable to ‘nonlocals’ and that receive positivecomments from ‘locals’.While the Fawkers can be seen as trying to reappropriate thestereotype as an interactional resource, the rivalry between Italians and Portuguese inthe symbolic and material ecology of Toronto reveals how negative ideologies ofclass and language, among other social categories, can be taken up to maintain a hi-erarchy that privileges those with longer migration histories and more power. Whenthe Fawkers joined the polyphonic (Bakhtin 1981) debate of online comments, theyargued that parody and humor gave them license to enact a ‘play frame’without war-ranting a ‘serious frame’ from the online commenters (“if people dont know what aparody is they really shouldnt be watching them lol thanks for watching”). TheFawkers’ decision not to publicly engage in the debate to ‘defend’ Portuguese iden-tity (illustrated by their post on the Portuguese-Italian “comment war” above) sug-gests that they, like Jeff Popsick and Diane Salema, are more invested in ambiguousrather than resistant agency, both accepting and challenging sociolinguistic bound-aries (Jaspers 2011).

C O N C L U S I O N S

This article has shown how essentializing ideologies of language and identity in aminority ethnic market, like that of the Portuguese in Toronto, within a larger main-streammarket, like that of Anglophone Canada, can inspire humorous sociolinguis-tic performances that acknowledge, reproduce, and challenge ethnolinguisticstratification. Humor can allow people to publicly engage with tensions of unifor-mity and difference by rendering explicit the inherent diversity, or heteroglossia, ofsocial interaction. Different ways of speaking can signal different alignmentsbetween speakers and audiences in different contexts. Framing a performance ashumorous grants performers the potential to break with social conventions ofpoliteness and respect that would otherwise restrict uses of stigmatized linguisticvarieties and stereotypes. This play frame allows performers to (re)situate sociolin-guistic markers and to expose the nested hierarchies in which social actors operate;in this case, for example, Toronto’s Portuguese market (i.e. Mainland Portuguesevs. Azorean Portuguese vs. Portuguese-English bilingualism), and the de-ethnicized Canadian mainstream (which is dominated by English and whereintracommunity differences are often ignored).

Through their mockery, the performers seen above challenge the traditional con-ventions of exhibiting Portuguese ethnic and linguistic pride in Toronto. These


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traditional ways normally include publicly self-identifying as Portuguese, speakingPortuguese (well), promoting a particular version of Portuguese culture, utilizingPortuguese symbols, and participating in culturally sanctioned spaces (like culturalassociations, religious institutions, Portuguese political or business organizations).The Modern Fawkers illustrate how mocking Portuguese-accented English andaspects of Portuguese-Canadian life can still be proof of Portuguese pride, asmany of the YouTube commenters confirm. The Fawkers also reveal howmocking the widespread stereotype of the Portuguese construction worker presentsa humorous risk in out-group settings where it can be appropriated unsympatheti-cally. Diane Salema’s performance may attest to her ethnic pride by the fact thatshe took someone like her father—who would otherwise have existed in theshadows of the middle-class, Anglophone-dominant Canadian mainstream—andmade him publicly visible and audible. Finally, Jeff Popsick pokes fun at the mono-lingual rule of ‘speak Portuguese at home’ supported by the dominant discourse ofportugueseness, and he frames his practices of ‘doing ridiculous’ as a way ofkeeping his elderly grandmother company and sharing her ‘authenticity’ with theworld.

These examples of in-group stereotyping raise questions about the ideologiesof legitimate mockery and its motivation. Chun (2004:278) argues that in-groupethnic comedians who ‘mock their own’ ethnic groups (e.g. Asians doing‘Mock Asian’) are not being discriminatory because they are not in a positionor have any intent to oppress their own. The examples presented in thisarticle, however, reveal the young performers’ ambivalent sociolinguisticdominance. Moreover, depending on the specific market and the resources atstake, in-group members can stand to profit from their sociolinguistic perfor-mance. Diane Salema, for example, got paid by MTV Canada. Jeff Popsickand the Modern Fawkers benefit from the attention (and limited financialreturn) they receive from YouTube.

In addition to challenging the ideologies of the Portuguese market, theseyoung performers appear to be warding off potential stigmatization from theMainland Portuguese-Canadian elite (e.g. language teachers, media figures, com-munity and business leaders, and visiting Portuguese politicians who oftenlament Portuguese-Canadian youth’s limited Portuguese sociolinguistic capital)by fronting other people’s ‘incompetent’, ‘accented’, or ‘broken’ speech in Por-tuguese and English. In this way, the youth can deflect criticisms of their linguis-tic incompetence in Portuguese by identifying the limits of another person’sPortuguese linguistic capital, or by shifting the terrain of the linguistic marketso that their own English linguistic capital is more highly valued than that oftheir Portuguese elders who struggle to master the dominant language inToronto. Indeed, mocking their own family members (with ambiguous affection)may suggest a shift in the earlier structure of the ethnic market, where respect forelders once dominated. Furthermore, this ‘extreme in-group’ critique of inner-sphere family dynamics can be an attempt to avoid challenges that the critique



is coming from ‘outside’ (i.e. the Canadian mainstream) and thus constitutesdiscrimination.

Intracommunity critiques are taboowithin Toronto’s Portuguese market, but thisarticle has deconstructed some of the sociolinguistic tensions that are often ignoredby Portuguese nationalist discourses and by Toronto’s dominant English-speakingmainstream. Interestingly, the emerging Portuguese-Canadian ethnic comedymarket appears to be led by Azorean descendants, not Mainlander descendantswhose privileged sociolinguistic habitus could grant them easier access to the dom-inant spaces of Toronto’s Portuguese market. The ‘illegitimate’ variety of AzoreanPortuguese, and the use of Azorean phonetic features in stylized Portuguese andEnglish, so often ridiculed by those ofMainland Portuguese descent, are slowly be-coming a weapon of the weak(er) (Hill 1998) and are being made public in alterna-tive spaces (e.g. YouTube, Facebook) and at the margins of the dominant ethnicmarket. Perhaps humor can (re)situate some of the voices and the experiences ofa silenced Azorean majority.

The analysis of online comments suggests that young Portuguese-Canadian au-diences get special enjoyment from the stereotyped languages and identitiesbecause they see their otherwise marginalized peers in positions of power infront of a broad public audience. They may also build solidarity through thepublic sharing of common experiences like hearing linguistic repertoires similarto their own, or perhaps their family’s inherited delegitimized language, whetherit is Jeff Popsick’s limited Portuguese, Diane Salema speaking in English eventhough her father may prefer Portuguese, or the Modern Fawkers who speaklimited Portuguese but who can parody portinglês on the construction site. The gen-erally positive online reactions and the strong alignments toward ethnic solidaritycan potentially recontextualize the underlying ethnic stratification and make itmore bearable (Jaspers 2011), just as they can reappropriate the ethnic epithet‘Porkchop’. Yet, this reappropriation and recontextualization also depends onhow it gets taken up by others, and the online comments reveal a diversity of audi-ences with different stakes in positioning themselves vis-à-vis the performances.Those with enough English linguistic and material capital (be they non-Portugueseor Portuguese descendants) are able to position themselves more favorably than thestereotyped characters.

Finally, these heteroglossic performances and performers can also be under-stood within a larger context of change impacting the homogenizing ideologiesand structures of the traditional nation-state (Heller 2011). The examples presentedabove uncover spaces of ambiguous in-group contestation resisting the dominantdiscourses of portugueseness and of middle-class Anglo-dominance. They alsoreveal cracks within a minority ethnic market that is slowly seeing its resources re-distributed because of shifts in local and global economieswhether through pro-cesses of urban gentrification and its impact on the residential and institutional(re)structuring of Toronto’s Portuguese community, or through the recent post-national mobilization of the Azorean diaspora in the Americas. Still, no matter


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what the context of social change, people’s positions will still be partly defined byethnolinguistic ideologies. Humor is one way to render that positioning explicit.

N O T E S

*I am very grateful to the special issue editors, the journal editor, and the reviewers for their helpfulfeedback on the manuscript. Any shortcomings are my own.

1While the location of Mainland Portugal is widely known, the Portuguese Autonomous Region ofthe Azores is less well known. An archipelago of nine islands in the middle of the North Atlantic, theAzores were discovered and settled by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century and granted relative auton-omy in 1976 following Portugal’s decolonization period.

2Within the vertical mosaic of Canada’s labor market, the Portuguese and their descendants are over-represented in manual labor and service industries. They have some of the lowest levels of political ac-tivity, mainstream civic participation, and educational achievement in Canada, and especially in Torontowhere they rank lower than many racialized minorities (Nunes 1998; Ornstein 2000; Giles 2002).

3My methods included participant observation, fieldnotes, interviews, textual analysis, and audiorecordings (da Silva 2011).

4Throughout the article, words in Portuguese are followed by translation meanings (‘glosses’).5Although there may have been public Portuguese-Canadian humorists before the 2000s, I have not

yet found their work. My future research will also explore whether there was earlier comedy about Azor-eans in Canada or in Portugal, and comedy by Azoreans about Mainlanders.

6Popsick is afictional surname playing on theword for a very common type of Portuguese bread: paposeco (which literallymeans ‘dry throat’). The regular elision of unstressed vowels in vernacular EuropeanPortuguese ( pap’ sec’), and the closing and back-shifting of vowels in Azorean Portuguese ( pap’ topop), allowed Jeff to create an anglicized and parodic orthographic representation ( pop sick). Sickplays on a common North American English slang term for ‘cool’ and ‘deviant’.

7http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arw5_LdFDpQ; accessed November 28, 2013.8Nonstandard pronunciations appear in IPA. Meta-textual and nonverbal information appear in

square brackets. The viewers’ comments are faithfully transcribed including nonstandard conventions(acronyms, shorthand, emoticons, and phonetic representations of reported nonstandard speech) andspelling mistakes, which for brevity’s sake I do not always identify with the notation sic.

9The original comments, translated in this paragraph, appear below:

“Portugues iso?u k?... nao da pra entender merda nenhuma doke esa velha fala!!!”“é o sotaque açorianooo!”“Os Açores são como o Brasil e África. Depois de tantos anos de colonização nunca aprenderam afalar a nossa língua!”“Que discussao estupida. ... Tb em Portugal as pessoas tem sotaque diferente. Lisboa tem umsotaque, Porto tem outro, Coimbra outro ... Açores outro. Qual e a crise? lol?”

10The acronyms LMFAO and OMFG stand for ‘Laughing my fucking ass off’ and ‘Oh my fuckingGod’.

11http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iul4OCIbAzI; accessed November 28, 2013. In transcribingthis excerpt, I represent the pronunciation orthographically, rather than using IPA, in order to juxtaposeit with the subtitles, which are underlined. I also add some extra spacing to the subtitles in order to alignthem with Mr. Salema’s utterances.

12The origin of the term porkchop as a derogatory ethnic slur for the Portuguese in Toronto is unclear.Expressions like porkchop, pork and cheese, and porker play on aspects of theword ‘Portuguese’ and onnegative perceptions of Portuguese cuisine.When used by in-groupmembers, they may serve as signs ofstigmatized ethnic solidarity. When used by non-Portuguese people, however, they may be offensive.The ethnic rivalry between Italians and Portuguese in Toronto, for example, pits Wops against Chops.In the US, the related epithet may be Portagee/Portugee (Monteiro 1968).



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arw5_LdFDpQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iul4OCIbAzI

13http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3DFfkAu0tI; accessed November 28, 2013. In transcribingthis excerpt, I represent the pronunciation orthographically.

14This is an emoticon or a textual portrayal of two eyes looking left and an expressionless mouth. Iinterpret it as a dismissive eye-roll or a look of wariness.

15Although the two groups are similar in many respects (geography, religion, language, labor, diet,settlement areas), they are significantly different in other respects (population, migration history, socio-economic status, integration into Canadian positions of power, cultural resonance in the mainstream),with Italian-Canadians assuming more dominant positions. See da Silva (2011) for more on thisrivalry in Toronto.

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(Received 26 February 2014; revision received 13 August 2014;accepted 28 October 2014; final revision received 01 November 2014)


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Humor (re)positioning ethnolinguistic ideologies: “You tink is funny?”

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