The Commodification of Chinese Stereotypes in Humour of Stand up Comedy Indonesia

Abstract

Various researchers and experts have found that even from the colonial era, the Netherlands have displayed negative Chinese stereotypes through various literary works which show that the Chinese are greedy, like to cheat and steal. At that time, there were also around 57% of Chinese immigrants who worked as a merchant in Indonesia, hence they played a major role in the development of the Indonesian economy. Since then, stereotyping of Chinese ethnicity has been a social reality in Indonesian society, where stereotype means an assessment of someone who is only based on the perception of the group in which the person can be categorized. Nevertheless, Stand Up Comedy Indonesia commodified the stereotype in a form of humour. Using critical discourse analysis Teun A Van Dijk, this article will unveil every text that contains Chinese stereotype and has been commodified in Stand Up Comedy Indonesia. This research found that the humour of Stand Up Comedy Indonesia which has the purpose of "Let's Make Laugh" is now no longer purely just to entertain the public, but there is a new focus on how to change the use value of humour into exchange value, in other words there is a commodification of Chinese stereotypical humour.