Furiously Funny: Comic Rage from Ralph Ellison to Chris Rock
2019; Penn State University Press; Volume: 5; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/studamerhumor.5.2.0406
ISSN2333-9934
Autores ResumoTerrence T. Tucker's Furiously Funny: Comic Rage from Ralph Ellison to Chris Rock (2018) joins a third generation of scholarship and anthologies preserving and defining African American humor, comedy, and satire. No doubt, scholars will still recall the initial naming and delineation of African American humor studies in Langston Hughes's The Book of Negro Humor (1966). Then, in just over a decade, the topic became a significant area of African American folklore—though not yet literary—studies, with William Schechter's The History of Negro Humor (1970), Henry Spalding's Encyclopedia of Black Folklore and Humor (1972), the prominent and often-cited chapter “Black Laughter” in Lawrence Levine's Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (1977), Redd Foxx's Encyclopedia of Black Humor (1977), and finally Daryl Dance's Shuckin’ and Jivin’: Folklore from Contemporary Black Americans (1978).This new monograph builds on, and departs from, the critical scaffolding developed in Darryl Dickson Carr's African American Satire: The Sacredly Profane Novel (2001), which expertly maps the black tradition of satire in literature. In his book, Tucker seeks to distinguish a strain of African American humor he names “comic rage” from this tradition. Tucker also locates his study in conversation with Bambi Haggins's Laughing Mad: The Black Comic Persona in Post-Soul America (2007) and Glenda Carpio's Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery (2008). But the study that Furiously Funny most echoes is Mel Watkins's massive anatomy On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying, and Signifying—The Underground Tradition of African-American Humor That Transformed American Culture, from Slavery to Richard Pryor (1994). That trailblazing work brilliantly crosses genres and modes, offering an accessible insider's view into what Watkins called the “underground” sensibility of black humor issuing from vernacular sources. And for Tucker, what distinguishes comic rage from satire and other humorous modes is its crossing and recrossing of media and venues—from the novel to stand-up comedy and back—as well as its unapologetic privileging of lower-brow, unassimilated black humor speaking for those who do not move in genteel, elite, or even middle-class circles. Hence, Tucker draws the sensibilities of Ralph Ellison, Richard Pryor, Ishmael Reed, Whoopi Goldberg, Chris Rock, and many others, into a shared post–World War II lineage that blends militancy with humor for an increasingly mixed audience.Furiously Funny traces an African American coupling of comic art and rage, whereby humor becomes the chosen vehicle by which militant resistance is shared, that includes even such contemporary “post-soul” interrogations of white and black conventional portraits of race in American life as The Colored Museum (1986) by George C. Wolfe and The White Boy Shuffle (1996) by Paul Beatty. The introduction begins with the signal moment of Richard Pryor's walk offstage during his 1967 Las Vegas show, when he symbolically rejected the middle-class values of his palatable stand-up comedy modeled on Bill Cosby and turned to the brand of humor he is known for today—a raw, acerbic wit graphically featuring the body, life in the ghetto, and the irrationality of racism. For Tucker, Pryor's unmasked humor aptly represents the paradigmatic “volatile mixture of humor and ideology, of rage and history, and of politics and pathos” (2). And while some readers might note that the general story of black humor's shift toward aggressiveness and militancy already has been told in Africana studies, Tucker's work expressly zooms in on the cultural formation that returns to the oral tradition to uncouple rage and violence (that destructive pairing featured so well in Richard Wright's Native Son) and to fuse poignant racial rage with radical comic political statement and commitment. In fact, Tucker sees comic rage as reaching ideologically beyond satire's call for reform to propose “a re- visioning of society at large by questioning the truth and legitimacy of the very values the satirist bemoans are being ignored” (7). Comic rage, then, seeks to call out corruption and hypocrisy in both black and white ideological quarters even as it privileges an “underground” racial stance; as Tucker puts it, “The center of comic rage includes a full-throated embrace of African American folk life and the cultural traditions that have emerged in defiance of white supremacist hegemony's attempt to devalue, exploit, or distort those traditions” (7).Given his emphasis, one of the more provocative aspects of Furiously Funny is that Tucker claims his study is not interested in humor or satire per se but rather in the conceptual turn that comic rage represents in the face of increasing political and moral contradictions bred by racialized American life. Tucker asserts that “comic rage centralizes African American experience and, fueled by militant rage, uses a comic lens to examine the complexities and inconsistencies in the American national narrative” (2). The work argues, then, that comic rage serves as a cognitive tool lubricating and liberating contradictory ideological patterns, and therefore that it deserves a more central place within humor studies, especially in African American literary movements in which humor has historically been marginalized (19). For Tucker, the “furiously funny” discourse—from Ellison to Redd Foxx to Whoopi Goldberg and Chris Rock—is broader and more trenchant than what we might read as only joking in its return to the oral tradition and use of humor to explore and convey resistant political ideology and undermine racist logics shared by both comic artist and audience. Comic rage is analogous to the jazz and blues impulses that have merged in what looks like mere “entertainment.” “The key to comic rage, as I see it,” Tucker explains, is not simply the presence of rage or of humor. Being funny or angry is not enough. Comic rage is about the fusion of the two, when the voices of the disparate responses combine to exist at the same moment and in the same place beyond comedy's general purpose, which, in white America, has been entertainment” (23).Of course, Ellison's Invisible Man holds a pivotal place in the cultural trajectory outlined in Furiously Funny, and Tucker nicely offers a “(re)viewing” of the novel that begins by pointing out its close association with Native Son and then foregrounds its contrasting “separation of rage from violence” (27), maintaining that Native Son “stands as an example of the consumptive nature of rage when not allowed a constructive outlet” (32). Hence, Tucker notes that “[Whoopi] Goldberg with her frequent transformations in her comedy sketches, her genre bending, her continual visibility, has remained able to inject her expressions of rage into the mainstream popular culture” (237). And Chris Rock, not surprisingly, marks the culmination of the tradition Furiously Funny seeks to describe: Rock not only takes on issues specific to post-civil-rights America through comic reversals or frank confrontation, he places those issues within a historical context that highlights the continued impact of white supremacist hegemony in American culture. Unlike Murphy and Chappelle, Rock's rage is ever present, whether aimed at blacks, whites, the government, or celebrities. As in the best of hip-hop, underneath Rock's energetic, blunt tone is a finely tuned critique of America that centralizes working-class African American experience. (243)The insights of Furiously Funny will certainly facilitate further research in the fascinating field of African American humor, which must—because humor is always multimodal—embrace interdisciplinarity and thus relationships among vernacular (e.g., stand-up) and highbrow (literary) cultures. Students and scholars have sought more astute and accurate accounts of this complex sociopolitical and aesthetic phenomenon at least since Hughes aptly claimed in 1966 that black people have perfected “laughing at what you haven't got, when you ought to have it.” The contributions of Furiously Funny for those of us who teach courses in African American humor and comedy are likewise numerous, but I name two: it facilitates the disentangling of various strains in the black comic tradition, which allows us to demonstrate the subtle and symbiotic relationship between protest and art in figures from, say, Ellison to Beatty, and it soundly traces an aesthetic or sensibility across media (i.e., between stand-up comedy, film, and literature, though not so readily in television due to its vulnerability to censorship). And yet I wished for more close reading of texts and performances to undergird and then develop general claims about the dynamics and perspectives particular to comic rage. The study would be more directly teachable if it offered clearer distinctions among the different levels of argument. Finally, readers will welcome the mention of Moms Mabley and Goldberg, but it is unfortunate that the study does not explore the role of gender in the expression and reception of comic rage.
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