Why Does Elon Gold Use Mock Language

Elon Gold Elon Gold is a white, American comedian, he has a comedy special called, Chosen & Taken, in which, he, like many other comedians has a few jokes that he tells in his act, of which are solely based on different accents and or dialects of English as well as a few other languages. Mock language is best described by the definition of mock “to laugh at or make fun of (someone or something) especially by copying an action or a way of behaving or speaking”(Mock). Mock language is the combination of mocking someone specifically in the act of using their language or dialect as an example. Throughout this paper I will be analyzing how comedians (examples by Elon Gold) use Mock Languages in acts and why we find this funny, and not as offensive

Firstly he plays on the use of sociolinguistic capital. He states that due to the British accent that we unknowingly give people with this accent more intellectual capital than we would to others, for example before this skit he talked about New Yorkers dialect and how this made everything they said more ridiculous. Without knowing these people we assign them different intelligent levels, different amounts of capital that we do not know if they have or not, and most everyone does this. Although it happens almost unknowingly we judge these people, and most of this has to do with what we absorb through media and family as children. As Lippi-Green states on page 104 of her novel English with an Accent “Children are not passive vessels who sit in front of the television and let stories float by them. What they take in is processed and added to the store of data on how things –and people- are categorized”. Here she goes into discussion about Disney’s use of foreign accents, mainly for use in voices of bad guys in their animated films. Arguably the British accent has also gained sociolinguistic capital from many years of being the stereotypical “Sly, cunning, and brilliant” James

While conversing with his audience about these touchy subjects he uses many different tactics to spin the viewpoint of these beliefs from a negative connotation into a more or somewhat more positive angle. If he cannot do this he changes the view from the touchy subject to something that is very ludicrous, or just plainly not related unless he tied it into the subject at hand; as he did in his use of mock Japanese, comparing it to a blender. Overall Elon and many other comedians use different types or styles of mock language/ dialects. Mainly to reach into the part of our brain which houses stereotypes and beliefs put into us throughout years of media and other