A Brazilian Stand-Up Tells a Racist Joke
...Some thoughts on humour and offence
A QUICK HEADS-UP: This week’s Brands & Humour looks at humour and offence. To write this without including potentially offensive material would be meaningless. So, just as a heads-up, there are examples in here.
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A few days ago, a Brazilian friend contacted me with a breaking news story. Last week a Brazilian comedian, Léo Lins, had been sentenced to eight years and three months for his jokes in a 2022 stand-up routine.
His jokes, according to The Telegraph, “made fun of Black people, indigenous people, fat people, gay people, Jews, evangelicals, disabled people and those with HIV.”1
Here’s an example:
"Black people keep complaining about the job market not giving them opportunities. But during slavery, they were born employed and also complained".
In Brazil, this is a hugely political issue: 55% of the nation identify as Black; it was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery, in 18882.
Sentencing Lins, Barbara de Lima Iseppi, the judge, said that “freedom of expression is not absolute nor unlimited”. In his defence Lins said, “We’re living through one of the biggest epidemics of our time: rational blindness. Judgments are now based entirely on emotion – no one listens anymore, they only want to impose their own truth”3. He remains free and says he will appeal.
Now!
Full transparency: I speak no Portuguese, and hadn’t encountered the work of Lins until last week. So my intention in this week’s B&H isn’t to say if his sentence — or its length — is just or unjust.
But it’s a launch-pad to talk about offence, and share a few thoughts on it.
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Why Offence Matters
Let’s take two examples, one from advertising, one from comedy.
This is a South African Nando’s ad from the 1990s:
And this is one of Sarah Silverman’s jokes:
“I was raped by a doctor, which is so bittersweet for a Jewish girl.”
Who might be offended by the examples above? Gay people, rape victims and Jewish people.
A default defence against such jokes is, of course, the “it’s just a joke” defence: “It’s not serious, get over it. I was only joking.”
But this isn’t a get-out-of-jail free card. A major authority in this area is an American professor of social psychology, Thomas Ford. He has argued that potentially offensive humour, even when used ironically, can “negatively influence someone’s behaviour, if they already have a leaning in that direction.”4
Moreover, the big danger here is that the “are they serious, or are they joking?” ploy can become a tool — in its very ambiguity lies its power.
For example, The Daily Stormer is an American neo-Nazi site that “argues for a second genocide of Jews”5. Their style sheet was published by the Huffington Post in 2017. It notes:
The undoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not.
Chilling, isn’t it?6
But on the other hand…
This might sound a little counter-intuitive, almost to the point of being ridiculous, but there is value in offence. Marcus Brigstocke, the British stand-up, noted that “Offence is important; that’s how you know you care about things. Imagine a life where you’re not offended. So dull.”
Digging a bit deeper, it’s worth considering the thoughts of another stand-up, Ricky Gervais (whatever you might think of his comedy). I reckon he has a fair point when he argues that, when people take offence, they all-too-often mix up the subject and the target of the joke.
For example, take the little conversation below between Jim Carrey and Margot Robbie. The target of the joke is Robbie; the subject is that pretty women get ahead in Hollywood (and, by extension, a critique of the sexist superficiality of Hollywood).
Is Robbie offended? Clearly not: she’s amused.
Also, in our age of social media, it pays to look at the media channels in which people express their offence: are people more offended now than they used to be? Or are there simply more ways to express their offence? Or both?
Once, not so long ago, people had to put pen to paper to complain about a bigoted or sexist joke. Now? You just go onto X and get into a firestorm that lasts a few hours before everyone loses interest and remembers to put the rubbish out.
This matters because, before, we had time to stop, pause and consider what we thought. Now? A post takes no time, we get a dopamine rush, it’s out there. And as it’s liked and reposted, we get even more dopamine rushes as we revel in self-righteousness.
And here’s an added plus: it’s anonymous. You can publish how offended you are and take precautions that it can’t be traced.
Perhaps these days we take offence too easily.
So what does this all mean?
What it means is that it is a very nuanced debate. Context matters hugely: what is being said, when it is being said (especially if it refers to an atrocity), by whom and to whom. Much also depends on the type, or types, of humour being used.
Some good news…
But there’s some good news and it’s this:
Stand-ups are in front of hundreds, maybe thousands, of people. They stand up there (hey, the clue’s in the name), sweaty-palmed, working the room, terrified they’re going to die on stage.
But brands don’t. They have time. They can research the audience, the subject, the brand, the type — or types — of humour they use. They can gauge for laughs, they can get a really good sense of what will work and what doesn’t. Without tooting my own trumpet, this is what I do for a job.
And this means?
In short (bolded for emphasis): brands are not stand-ups and nor sure they be.
For example, I don’t go to IKEA for laughs. I go to IKEA to buy furniture. But it’s ads like this that get me in there in the first place:
I say all this because too often people conflate humour in marketing with humour coming from a stand-up. Though there are huge similarities, to think the two are one and the same is, I think, a big mis-step.
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A big thanks to James Scavone for telling me about Léo Lins and indeed to you, for reading.
I’m at the Cannes Lions this week, so the next B&H will look at the funniest work to come out of the festival. As of the time of writing, I can’t predict what I’ll be reporting on but, all being well, I won’t be referring to neo-Nazi websites.
Paddy
‘Brazilian comedian jailed for eight years for offensive jokes,’ The Telegraph, 10th June 2025, here.
A big thanks to James Scavone for researching and providing these details.
Ibid.
Ince, Robin: I’m a Joke and So Are You, Atlantic Books, London, 2018, p. 222.
Quoted in Attardo, Salvatore: Humor 2.0, Anthem, London, 2024, p. 238.