The Mexican sports car controversy: An appraisal analysis of BBC's Top Gear and the reproduction of nationalism and racism through humor

1.We apply Critical Discourse Analysis to a controversial television episode of Top Gear.2.The analysis delineates the interplay between humor, nationalism, and racism in mass media.3.Ideologies of race and nation are reproduced when race and nation are presupposed in discourse.4.We draw a conceptual bridge between racialized humor and nationalized humor with this study.

One case of derogatory speech that originated from an episode of the BBC television show, Top Gear, is examined as a prototypical example of the interplay among national stereotypes, humor, and mass media. The authors use Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to examine the global controversy that erupted in response to the single episode in which the show's hosts invoked demeaning stereotypes of Mexico. Martin and White's appraisal framework was applied to a series of texts taken from this global discourse in order to identify the textual means by which humor—in the episode itself as well as the emotionally-charged discourse that emanates from it—serves to reinforce nationalist ideology as the prevailing commonsense. Drawing on multiple fields, this CDA exploration draws a conceptual bridge to the established work on racialized humor in that both benefit from controversial episodes that are played out in mass media because people take the central ideological premise as a given in order to participate in the discourse, thus perpetuating the ideology's central positioning as an unchallenged commonsense. It is worthwhile to study the relationship between nationalized humor and the mass media because it serves as a valuable complement to the existing literature on racialized humor, and it also contributes to broader questions about the role of mass media in reinforcing ideologies.