Towards a multicultural community. The accommodation of ethnic and religious minorities in the 'Migrant Comedy' Genre

Abstract

The article deals with the phenomenon of migrant comedy films, framing the genre as part of the larger body of diasporic cinema. The author's definition of migrant comedy conceives it as a very specific genre typically set in immigrant milieus, whose main themes revolve around successful social and moral accommodation of diasporic characters to the shared (in most cases western, liberal) practices and values of the receiving majority. Migrant comedies exploit dichotomous divisions and stereotypes based on pronounced cultural differences to characterize their protagonists as members of specific ethnicities. In the article, migrant comedy genre's reliance on stereotypes is discussed in greater detail as is its multicultural ideology. In the second part of the article, the proposed genre framework is used to interrogate two films: All Three of Us (Nous trois ou rien, dir. by Kheiron, 2015) and A Spicy Kraut (Einmal Hans mit scharfer Soße, dir. by Buket Alakus, 2013).