No Laughing Matter.

• Author: Lovato, Roberto
• Position: Television program review - Essay

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Late night funny man Conan O'Brien recently tickled his studio audience as he touched on immigration, a hot button topic heard with growing frequency on late night talk shows: "A man in Mexico weighing 1,200 pounds has lost almost half that weight and might enter the Guinness Book of World Records for most weight lost. The Mexican man lost the weight when the family inside him moved to America." Then at the Emmys on September 16, O'Brien, who won an award, provided a clip of his writing team depicted as Latino day-laborers.

During a "New Rules" segment of his show broadcast in late August, liberal late nighter Bill Maher went to the well of immigrant humor: "New Rule: No more produce-scented shampoo: avocado, cucumber, watermelon. Gee, your hair smells like a migrant worker."

Jay Leno, who has gone out of his way to tell people, "I'm not a conservative," has also joined in. During a show in mid-September, he joked, "Well, police across the country now say they're arresting more and more illegals who are prostitutes. But proponents say, 'No, no. They're just doing guys American hookers will not do.'"

And during a recent sketch making light of Latino criticisms of Ken Burns for his exclusion of the more than 500,000 Latino veterans in the filmmaker's epic War documentary, Jimmy Kimmel deployed images of sombrero-wearing Speedy Gonzalez--a cartoon long considered racist by Chicano activists--yelling "Arriba. Arriba." Kimmel's shtick includes placing parking lot attendant Guillermo in compromising positions as when the heavily accented Latino immigrant participates in spelling bee contests with young champions. In another humiliating sketch, Kimmel begs him, "Please do not resort to violence."

While the immigration debate in Congress ended months ago, the immigrant jokes haven't. This is not so much because the late night hosts are at the tail end of a political trend, but because they are, in fact, at the front end of a major cultural trend: the mainstreaming of anti-immigrant sentiment.

I mmigrant rights activists have concentrated much energy on challenging rightwing radio as well as blatantly racist, formerly fringe video games like "Border Patrol," in which players shoot immigrants for points. But little attention is paid to the more mainstream fare: Top-selling video games in which white good guys kill immigrant bad guys and black and Latino zombies; popular television shows like NBC's The Office , in which...