Dame Edna and 'the help': Australian bilingual Latin American immigrants respond to that joke

Dame Edna Everage', a persona originally created by the Australian comedian BarryHumphries in 1955, is a character designed to simultaneously shock and amuse. Dame Ednavoices (and satirizes) the discourse of 'average', older, politically conservative Anglo-Australians who feel compelled to 'tell it like it is'" no matter how offensive their opinionsmight be. In the Anglosphere, Edna's humour is well understood and sustained internationalsuccess has followed Edna for more than 60 years in Britain, Canada, the US and Australia.However, Edna occasionally misfires. In 2003, for instance, Edna's satire outraged Latinosacross the USA, in fulfilment of Poe's Law (Aikin, 2009). Simply put, Latinos assumed thatEdna's comments satirising negative mainstream attitudes towards them were expressive ofEdna's authentic racism. This paper investigates the Edna joke in the overall context of failedhumour and then specifically for the offensiveness it generated amongst the Latino minority inthe United States. It then tests whether this reaction was the result of a discursive frame specificto the US context, by conducting an exploratory study amongst a small sample of highlyeducated Australian bilingual Latin American immigrants and their adult children, to seewhether they thought Edna's joke was funny. These Australian individuals of Latin Americanheritage responded via an online questionnaire, and an analysis of their responses is presentedhere. The study's main finding is that while these individuals generally demonstrated a highcomedic literacy across both English and Spanish, including a prior awareness of Edna's andAustralian humour, they overall rejected the intention and humour of Edna's joke. This paperasserts that, when it comes to humour, some transnational migrant speech community loyaltiestranscend other notions of identity and language competence.