African American Humor

Abstract

The sophistication of the African American humor tradition testifies to its centrality in African American culture. Since its initial emergence in the contexts of enslavement, where humorous expression, especially humor at the expense of whites, carried great consequence, African Americans have turned to humor as an instrument of social, political, and moral sensemaking. African Americans use humor to make collective claim on the social world around them, to foster bonds of social and political solidarity, to make judgments about the material conditions of their lives, to express and encode feelings of contempt, aggression, and dissatisfaction, and to approach and mollify the emotionally challenging conditions of their everyday lives. Despite the culturally dominant tendency to depict African Americans as unlettered and foolish, African Americans developed a distinct strain of humor over and against traditions that targeted them as the butt of all jokes. This resulted in at least two dominant strains of African American humor: one reserved for private in-group expression, and one, a more public form, that engaged with and often departed from dominant distortions of Black personality. Despite such popular distortions, African American humor flourished and developed into a sophisticated modality for navigating the contradictions catalyzed by Black life in the United States. In the nineteenth century, African Americans flexed their comedic muscles in folktales, songs, stories, speeches, sermons, lies, and more. They satirized dominant misunderstandings of Black culture and combated the pervasive stereotyped image of African Americans that was popularized by the United States’ first, national mass cultural form, Blackface minstrelsy. But even private forms of Black humor had to contend with the image of African Americans as happy-go-lucky simpletons. By the latter half of the nineteenth century, African American performers donned the minstrel mask themselves, creating a complicated legacy—and an enduring strain of vicious irony—for the reception and development of African American humor in public. Across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, African American humorists flourished across expressive cultures, creating novels, films, plays, music, and visual artworks that represented the complexity of African American life. African Americans used humor to communicate the truth of African American life in public, transforming the racial mask into a comic mask that used racist assumptions to their own advantageous ends. Toward the close of the twentieth century, African American humor offered a crucial site from which to articulate an autonomous African American identity and helped spur innovation across Black expressive cultures.