Sociolinguistic Artifacts

The SNL skit "This is How I Talk" plays off of linguistic and societal norms attributed to different groups of people (in this case black and white people) to create a humorous situation. The situation is funny because Louis C.K. who is an extremely white individual and a speaker of Standard English, pretends to be a native speaker of African-American Vernacular English to avoid letting his new boss know that he was making fun of her. This is unusual because AAVE is strongly associated with race, so to see a white man using this speech type is so out of the ordinary as to be humorous. Later on in the clip, Brenda switches to SE in order to find out for sure if Louis C.K.'s character is only pretending to speak AAVE natively. While she is speaking, she says that "this is my real voice. See, I went to a good college..." indicating the common conception that AAVE is not an "academic" form of speech and reinforcing the social hierarchy that is related to American dialects.