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From Blackface to Black Twitter: Reflections on Black Humor, Race, Politics, and Gender

2021; Penn State University Press; Volume: 7; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/studamerhumor.7.2.405

2333-9934

Brittney Michelle Edmonds,

Race, History, and American Society

In recent years, a growing body of scholarship in Black humor studies has examined the cultural specificity and political resonance of Black humor with ever greater nuance. Studies dedicated to discrete historical periods, specific forms of media, single figures, and general surveys have greatly added to our growing knowledge of Black humor as a cultural resource and political instrument. Jannette L. Dates and Mia Moody Ramirez join this body of scholarship with their recent volume, From Blackface to Black Twitter: Reflections on Black Humor, Race, Politics, and Gender. Providing an extensive historical overview of key developments, influential figures, and the methods of performance that comprise the Black comic tradition, Dates and Ramirez explore how Black performers, Black comedians, and everyday Black communicators use humor to respond to and transform the social realities around them. Drawing on the combined tools of critical media studies and critical race theory, the authors examine how Black comedy communicates through and across hegemonic discourses and unequal social relations riven by power.Organized into five parts and ten chapters, the volume also contains three appendices dedicated to noteworthy African American men in comedy, noteworthy African American women in comedy, and a list of images that make up the book cover's collage. Part 1, “The Roots of Black Humor,” opens with an overview of the study's methods and central concerns as well as an account of the extant theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of Black humor. The second chapter, entitled “Pre-Slavery Through the 19th Century,” is especially notable for its elaboration of African American humor's historical and formal evolution. The chapter provides short primers on whiteness, hegemony, and humor before launching into a consideration of the enduring, outsize impact of blackface minstrelsy on the development and reception of Black humor.While Dates and Ramirez recognize the centrality of African folkways to the early development of African American humor—with African folklore influencing many of African American humor's defining storytelling strategies, its stock characters, and its tropes—the authors nevertheless emphasize the formative role that blackface minstrelsy played in the development of African American humor and comedic performance. The authors describe American minstrelsy as an imitation of an imitation: white people, on seeing enslaved Black people imitate their social rituals and mores by “putting on airs,” decided to do imitations of their own. White entertainers blackened their faces in exaggerated portrayals of Black people and in doing so, birthed one of the most controversial forms of mass entertainment in United States cultural history. Blackface minstrelsy established Black people as caricatures and comic fools in the popular imaginary and buttressed existing cultural discourse about Black people as inferior, pathological, and intellectually deficient. The chapter proceeds by cataloguing characters that still shape Black performance in the contemporary moment, offering short primers on Yankee Doodle, Rastus, coons, Uncle Toms, mammy figures, jezebels, and Sapphires—all figures who first gained audiences in minstrel shows.This second chapter serves as a foundation for the rest of the volume, establishing African American humor as a tradition divided, one where Black people, who are commonly the butt of mainstream jokes, nevertheless fashion their own public and private forms of humor that testify to Black humanity and communicate Black perspectives. In the third chapter, which is devoted to the twentieth century, Dates and Ramirez track Black humor's incompatibility with racial politics of integration and respectability, citing humor's tendency to “reveal stress fault lines” that conflict with the political and cultural desires to present Black people as cultivated—the opposite of the caricatures and buffoons that accounted for most Black characters in mainstream American entertainment during the period (52).As the civil rights movement transformed the country's racial politics, Black people began to emerge in mass entertainment as more fully developed characters. This extended the bounds of propriety for Black comedy and also facilitated the crossover stardom of many popular Black stand-up comedians. Many performers who generally confined themselves to the “Chitlin Circuit”—an informal collection of Black clubs and bars where Black performers entertained predominantly Black audiences—successfully engaged major venues, major networks, and major stages around the country. Dates and Ramirez credit Moms Mabley, Dick Gregory, Redd Foxx, Flip Wilson, Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor, Paul Mooney, Whoopi Goldberg, and others with creating opportunities for Black comedians and for public Black humor. At the turn of the twenty-first century, Black comedian superstardom made it possible for Black entertainers and performers to star in their own television shows and to host comedy specials devoted to Black talent. The authors spotlight Eddie Murphy, Whoopi Goldberg, Chris Rock, Def Comedy Jam, In Living Color and the Wayans family, Ice Cube, and the Friday movie franchise as important elements in the fundamental reshaping of Black comedy in mass culture.The following two chapters catalog the popular Kings of Comedy and Queens of Comedy stand-up tours alongside common representations of Black men and women in mass media and in comedy. The chapters are organized by gender and are largely figure focused, providing short descriptions of each of the comedians who participated in the tours. In both chapters, Dates and Ramirez emphasize how Black comedians use humor to “advance the race” and to bear witness to everyday life, to not only push back against stereotypes but also to express the realities of Black life.In part 3, “Black Comedy, Social Identity, and User-Generated Content,” the role of Black variety shows and sitcoms, the widespread use of the internet including social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Vine, and meme-generated culture provide an opportunity to consider how Black comedy practices create further nuances across axes of race, gender, sexuality, age, and class. The penultimate section of the book focuses on Black comedy and politics, with an entire chapter devoted to Barack Obama and his use of humor during his historic campaign and during his tenure in office as president of the United States. The final chapter of the volume addresses the future of Black comedy. Dates and Ramirez predict that Black comedy will continue to serve as an important cultural form of expression and as a singular political instrument, one capable of transforming unpopular or difficult ideas into more socially palpable or entertaining forms.Scholars of Black humor, experts and novices alike, will benefit from the clear organization and the breadth of this transhistorical study of Black humor in mass culture. A limitation of the study is that the authors do not substantially engage with either literary or visual arts, areas in which there was intense blossoming of comic output in the decades surrounding the turn of the twenty-first century. Even so, this volume serves as an insightful generalized introduction or reference work for those interested in the academic study of Black humor.