Abstract

The matter under consideration in this article is the ethnic joke as a primary element of the German TV comedy “Was guckst du?”. The starting point is a short overview of the ethnic joke and the extralingual phenomena that are associated with such jokes, and – above all – pointing at the function of stereotypes as causes for jokes about individual nations. Texts of jokes concerning individual nations were used to illustrate the reviewed problems. The main part of the article is the analysis of the lingual and extralingual aspects in selected texts of scenes from the program “Was guckst du?”.