Eddie Murphy’s 1984 “Saturday Night Live” skit, White Like Me, was a breakthrough—white people made fun of for a mainstream, if not primetime, audience. In a riff on Black Like Me, an autobiography of a white man who travels through the South disguised as a black man in order to see racism firsthand, Murphy dons whiteface (and brilliantly stiffens his gait) in order to investigate a world previously unavailable to him, which turns out to be full of cocktail parties and complimentary newspapers. “Well, I learned that we still have a very long way to go in this country before all men are truly equal,” he says at the end, “but I’ll tell you something—I’ve got a lot of friends, and we’ve got a lot of makeup.”

Comedy about white people can obviously vary in tone. Paul Mooney’s 1993 album, Race, was unapologetically scathing. Between jokes built on a by now familiar template—basically, Can you believe white people do this one crazy thing?, over and over—the former “In Living Color” and “Sanford and Son” writer directly aired earnest and profound frustrations with white members of his audience. (One of Mooney’s “white people be likes” went as follows: “See, with race, white folks have been racist against everybody, and running shit, and as long as they’re in charge, it’s cool.”) The Wayans Brothers’ socialite crime caper, White Chicks, was hopelessly, contentedly silly and crass (“Once you go black, you’re going to need a wheelchair,”) making no attempt at the teachable moments usually worked in to justify such audacious send-ups of stereotypes. Franchesca Ramsey’s YouTube hit, “Shit White Girls Say to Black Girls”—simultaneously an extension and a spoof of the Shit ____ Say formulas that swept the Internet in 2012—fell somewhere in between: “Jews were slaves too. And you don’t hear us complaining about it all the time.”

But what most white-people jokes have in common is that they are not about white people per se. Instead, they are about inequalities between whites and other races. “What is the scariest thing about a white person in prison?” a comedian asks. “You know he did it.” Har har! Except you only got the punchline because you’re aware of the problem of prejudicial prosecutions. In sum: “LOL, RACISM.”

In rarer cases where white people are the actual target, the joke tends to zoom in on a certain sector of the population—hippies, rednecks, anyone who is both white and poor—and rests on observations about socioeconomic circumstances, not the disadvantages posed merely by having a certain color skin. So when a white person tells any white-people joke, the humor can go from subverting whites’ status to rubbing it in. The jokes themselves aren’t necessarily less funny; it’s just that the bitter pill goes down easier when not delivered by someone benefiting from the privilege they’re trying to lampoon.