UC Santa Barbara

This thesis analyzes the generic features and social significance of Vine racial comedy, a genre of sociopolitical humor on the video-sharing social media platform Vine. Comedy is the most popular category of videos on the platform, and for the majority of Vine’s existence since its launch in 2013, comedy has been dominated by King Bach (pronounced “batch”). Andrew Bachelor, the actor and producer behind the King Bach persona, is a 28-year-old Black comedian with more than 16 million Vine followers (as of October 2016), making him the most followed comedy Viner and the most followed Viner overall. King Bach has created a dominant form of Vine racial comedy, a unique style of audio-visual comedy that incorporates features of both face-to-face and online discourse genres and adapts them to the affordances of the Vine platform.

Multimodal discourse analysis on a data set of 30 vines in which King Bach performs racial comedy demonstrates that King Bach’s Vine racial comedy draws on the traditions of Black stand-up and sketch comedy and the online discourse genres of reaction GIFs and hashtag activism. Black comedians have used comedy to celebrate Black culture as well as bring attention to the negative racial ideologies and racial inequality that permeate the lived experiences of Black Americans. As a genre of online discourse, Vine racial comedy is also heavily influenced by the visual/textual medium of reaction GIFs, in which a moving image is used to represent the poster’s embodied reaction to an event or situation. By utilizing the affordances of Vine to highlight social inequality, Vine racial comedy is also generically similar to hashtag activism, which emerged when social media users began using Twitter for grassroots social activism.

Vine’s affordance of a six-second length limit has resulted in semiotically dense videos that rely on both audio and visual semiotic features to convey their message efficiently. Like in other subgenres of racial comedy, racial, cultural, and linguistic stereotypes are often employed for this purpose. In Vine racial comedy, King Bach constructs stereotype-based characters through the stylistic use of language, particularly African American Language. Visually, characters’ identities and social roles are constructed by embodied behavior — facial expressions, gesture, and other forms of body movement — and highly indexical attire (e.g., pastel polo shirt to index preppiness).

The affordance of a title/caption for each vine allows King Bach to direct the audience’s interpretation his comedy, which is particularly important for comedy like his that addresses complex and contentious racial ideologies, stereotypes, and forms of discrimination in the U.S. In the two examples analyzed in this study, audiences are confronted with racial profiling, police officers’ targeting of Black men, the idea of “playing the race card,” “white fragility” in racially motivated interaction, stereotypes of Black speakers, and derogatory representations of African American Language.

As a genre, King Bach’s innovative racial comedy uses performance and technology to challenge colorblind ideology, which asserts that acknowledging race only increases racial discord, and discourses of a racial digital divide that warn of Black Americans being left behind in a rapidly advancing technological society. With multiracial casts, his vines demonstrate that addressing race can actually bring people of different ethnoracial backgrounds together and that race is not solely the concern of people of color. By centering race in his comedy and using social media as the medium of expression, King Bach shows that, rather than being oppositional, race and technology can be complimentary, and Black people are taking advantage of the affordances of social media to address racial issues in their own lives