Introduction: Black Laughs Matter

Abstract

This special issue of Studies in American Humor focuses on African American humor in different media, paying particular attention to literary satire and performance modes of sketch and stand-up comedy. In conceiving this issue, the editors originally wanted to draw contributions that addressed “Black humor,” albeit not the black humor found in mid-twentieth-century works, such as Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) or Kurt Vonnegut’s many novels. While these works tend to focus on the sheer absurdity of living in the post–World War II nuclear age, their authors are white, and they do not often address race. The Black humor—capitalized—analyzed in this issue concerns itself directly with the absurdity of living in a nation riddled with hypocrisy and contradictions about race, and it makes no apologies for targeting this speciousness.This issue responds directly to the moment in which we currently live. The widespread horror over George Zimmerman’s murder of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012 in Sanford, Florida, directly inspired the #Blacklivesmatter hashtag on the Twitter platform and subsequently the Black Lives Matter movement. Black Lives Matter activists have protested and kept pressure on authorities that all too frequently acquit citizens and police responsible for killing unarmed Black civilians. While legally sanctioned and extralegal murder of African Americans extends well beyond the nation’s founding and had its most obviously horrific expression in the thousands of people lynched in the century following the Civil War, the long string of killings in the last ten years has had an impact that has not been seen before. Many of these killings were caught on camera and circulated on social media, going viral.Yet none of these incidents sparked as much widespread outrage as George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on May 25, 2020. The video of his killing not only went viral but also had a particular, virtually unprecedented effect. Condemnation came from most parts of the political spectrum, from the most radical on the left to all but the most intractable on the right. People who had been unmoved by footage or the stories of Tanisha Anderson, Michael Brown, Philando Castile, Stephon Clark, Michelle Cusseaux, Janisha Fonville, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Andre Hill, Botham Jean, Atatiana Jefferson, Trayvon Martin, Gabriella Nevarez, Tamir Rice, Aura Rosser, Alton Sterling, Breonna Taylor, Daunte Wright, and many more found themselves pained by the video showing Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes until he died. Protests formed not only in Minneapolis but around the world, and Floyd’s face became an internationally recognized symbol. Black Lives Matter—admired by many yet controversial too—was embraced by millions more who realized at least part of what the movement signified. Thousands of corporations purported to back Black Lives Matter and turned their social media accounts black for a while to register their support, along with issuing statements of solidarity, albeit with all too few changes in their actions. As Vonnegut might say, and so it goes.The reasons for these shifts, great and small, in attitudes toward African Americans, toward antiracist movements, and toward social justice are not entirely clear, as the killings of other African Americans were at least as brutal as Floyd’s. Was it due to the focused attention of a nation locked down by the global pandemic? Was it a nation weary of an administration that used race-baiting as none had before? Was it the heightened emotions of an election year? Perhaps it was all of these things and more—or none of them. It is equally true that at least a portion of the public that shifted its views after Floyd’s murder shifted them back in the months and years that followed. The reasons for that shift may be more difficult to understand. In any event, speculation on these complex events is beyond the purview of both this essay and the articles in this issue.This issue’s title, “Black Laughs Matter,” obviously plays on Black Lives Matter. This particular pun does not have the same false ring of so many riffs used tastelessly in advertising, in seminar titles, and the like. No, Studies in American Humor posits that Black laughs matter because humor by African Americans, especially as it concerns the abuse and destruction of Black lives from the time of chattel slavery until the present, remains a crucial component of American culture. So does humor about the joys within Black lives despite systemic racism. Black humor matters because it has allowed African Americans’ psychological survival in the face of racism’s sheer absurdity and intractability. As such recent scholars as Lisa Guerrero, Danielle Fuentes Morgan, and Brandon Manning have argued, Black humor allows African Americans to laugh “to keep from dying.”1 While laughter of the kind Morgan, Guerrero, and Manning describe does not allow for dissolution of cares or worries, it does enable the release of tension and offer hints for ways to speak the unspeakable—rage at the brutality, inequities, deprivation, endless slights, and outright invisibility that comes with living and being Black in the United States. It’s a form of cathartic laughter, a catharsis that staves off cathexis.The fact that we have several recent scholars of African American humor to mention also helps explain this issue’s provenance. Until the 1990s, studies of African American humor had been sporadic and brief in form. Some of African American literature’s most prominent intellectuals and authors, such as James Baldwin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, George Schuyler, Wallace Thurman, and Richard Wright, among others, had written pieces—published and unpublished—detailing the history of humor in Black communities. But serious book-length studies on the subject could not be found.In the last quarter century, this has changed, thanks largely to the rise of African American studies programs and departments that have fostered scholars’ desire to recover cultural and literary artifacts that academic scholars had ignored, forgotten, or considered almost unworthy of study. Thus we have Mel Watkins’s On the Real Side (1994; rev. 1999); my African American Satire: The Sacredly Profane Novel (2001) and Spoofing the Modern: Satire in the Harlem Renaissance (2015); Mark Anthony Neal’s Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002); Bambi Haggins’s Laughing Mad: The Black Comic Persona in Post-Soul America (2007); Glenda Carpio’s Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery (2008); Terrence Tucker’s Furiously Funny: Comic Rage from Ralph Ellison to Chris Rock (2018); Lisa Guerrero’s Crazy Funny: Popular Black Satire and The Method of Madness (2019); Danielle Fuentes Morgan’s Laughing to Keep from Dying: African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century (2020), and most recently, Brandon Manning’s Played Out: The Race Man in 21st Century Satire (2022). In addition, there have been edited volumes such as Derek C. Maus and James Donaghue’s Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity after Civil Rights (2014), which collects work by Manning, Morgan, Tucker, as well as Bertram D. Ashe—convener of a symposium on contemporary African American satire at the College of the Holy Cross in 2001—Michael B. Gillespie, Gillian Johns, Derek Conrad Murray, Linda Ferguson Selzer, Christian Schmidt, Keenan Norris, Jennifer Larson, and several others, and Hokum: An Anthology of African American Humor (2006), edited and introduced by the novelist Paul Beatty, often identified as a satirist or humorist.These recent studies have in common a focus on African American humor since the major victories of the modern civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. To be more specific, they consider works of the “Post-Soul” era, after the end of de jure segregation altered the struggle for racial justice, if not the tenor of American race relations. The generation born during and immediately after the modern civil rights movement experienced relatively little or no overt, legalized segregation and had greater opportunities for social, cultural, and economic advancement. At the same time, the face and form of racism changed, becoming more subtle. The ironies built into this transformation inform the work of authors and artists reckoning with white supremacy’s malleability, with extralegal racial violence—lynchings—being replaced by police violence, the war on drugs, and the explosive growth of the carceral state. In the new millennium in particular, the insanity and horror of these new forms of systemic racism are often the subject of Black artistic expressions. It is therefore no accident that madness and laughter are often connected in the titles and contents of works by Guerrero, Morgan, Carpio, Tucker, Haggins, and Manning and in the various essays in Post-Soul Satire. In summary, this is the moment for Studies in American Humor to devote its attention to Black humor in all of its forms.The essays included here range across a wide variety of topics, from stand-up and television sketch comedy to literary irony and satire. And while not every essay makes direct reference to recent political and cultural events, they all reflect a desire to think in new and creative ways about what humor by African Americans means right now. At a time when it has finally become unacceptable to utter the N-word, the most detestable racial slur, the issue considers how Black comedians are dealing not only with using that word itself but also with the other difficult issues found in standup routines. For example, what does the term “postracial” mean in a context in which it is clear that Americans have not forgotten race in any way whatsoever? How have different forms of humor made their way into iconic works of African American literature, including works that are often read as straight, social document fiction?Our opening piece, “Chitlins and Dry Bones: A Conversation about the N-Word in Stand-Up Comedy,” constitutes a small portion of an extended discussion between scholar-comedian Andrew Ali Aghapour and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professors Samuel Gates (dramatic art) and Michelle Robinson (English) about the history of the use of the word “nigger” on the comedy stage and in broader society especially now. The word is, as the authors make clear, a painful, poisonous one, and who is allowed to use it and the circumstances in which their uses of it may be acceptable remain difficult ethical questions. Put simply, Black comedians still use it, as do many hip-hop artists. Within African American culture, the word has multiple meanings that the authors explore. This is no mere dialogue about whether the term is acceptable but instead about the different contexts and reasons it has been used or avoided, the power it has in each case, and why it continues to matter. After providing a brief but thorough history of how the N-word has been used in entertainment from the heyday of Blackface minstrelsy through to the political poetry of the Black Arts Movement, the authors focus on the special place stand-up comedians have in popular culture. They are “are unique social figures, insubordinates in a position to subvert audiences’ expectations,” even as they provide astute observations of current events. To prepare for their conversation, the authors watched clips by a number of Black comedians, including Richard Pryor, Dave Chappelle, Wanda Sykes, Chris Rock, and Sam Jay, along with non-Black comedians who have used the word on stage.Pryor, who gained his greatest fame in the 1970s, was an ingenious and heavily influential comic. From the early to late 1970s, Pryor openly deployed the word “nigger” as part of his routines, albeit in either a Black-centered context or with irony. He later eschewed the term, accepting it as a form of self-hatred, a disavowal he shared with his audiences. Yet Black comedians who followed Pryor, such as Eddie Murphy and Chris Rock, picked up the term, oftentimes in an attempt to imitate Pryor’s earlier routines, although they did not necessarily match his level of skill or social commentary. In Rock’s “Niggers vs. Black People” routine, which helped propel him to national notoriety, the term takes on a different meaning. As Aghapour, Gates, and Robinson argue, Rock’s routine sets up a contrast between “niggers” who represent a number of negative images and stereotypes within the Black community and “Black people” who are respectable and honest. The routine not only plays obviously into respectability politics but arguably reinforces racist stereotypes and the dishonest arguments of many racists that they hate only certain African Americans—usually those resembling the types Rock mentions. In their conversation, the authors highlight the fact that routines like Rock’s require critical attention. Instead of engaging in the sympathetic social critique that one would expect from Pryor or Chappelle, they invite audiences “to find humor in Black people who hate Black people as much as a white racist does.”Aghapour, Gates, and Robinson go on to discuss how the N-word affords a certain “cultural capital” (15) to African Americans unavailable to non-Black speakers and audiences, though those speakers and audiences want to be able to say the word. Why they want the power to say the word speaks to white privilege, as Ta-Nehisi Coates observes, inasmuch as whites are taught implicitly and explicitly from an early age that everything in the nation belongs to them, including the privilege to say what they want, when they want, regardless of consequences or effects. For Black people to deny them use of the term defies white privilege’s (il)logic and unsettles their assumed social power.Grace Heneks’s “‘We cool?’ Satirizing Whiteness in Obama-Era Black Satire” focuses on the sketch comedy of Keegan Michael Key and Jordan Peele, whose often satirical material picks up where Dave Chappelle left off when he ended Chappelle’s Show in 2006. Like Chappelle, Key and Peele comment on intragroup dynamics and cultural moments within the African American community while confronting racist tropes in popular media. In often lavishly produced scenes, the duo lampoon President Barack Obama and his critics, condemn anti-Black police violence, and speculate about utopian worlds in which Black lives either truly matter or aren’t routinely circumscribed by racist systems and snuffed out.Heneks focuses in particular on one sketch, “Apologies,” examining how racial innocence has become a commodity in the post-civil rights, post-Obama era, in which whites who hold racist beliefs and behave in racist ways nevertheless fear and resent being called “racist.” Avoiding the label of “racist” requires intellectual and sometimes physical gymnastics, as evidenced in both President Trump absurdly claiming that he is the “least racist” person on the planet and in white liberals constructing elaborate denials of unconscious bias. In Key and Peele’s sketch, the titular duo attempt to enjoy drinks at a bar while a parade of supposedly “progressive” whites try to gain Key and Peele’s approval or forgiveness for even the appearance of committing a racial faux pas. In other words, they engage in virtue signaling writ large in an effort to secure exoneration.The white characters satirized in Key and Peele’s sketch, Heneks argues, exemplify the “postracial” moment that was the Obama era, when the election of the first Black US president immediately triggered pronouncements that the United States was finally “postrace.” According to this logic, the inauguration of someone of African descent to the highest office in the land proves that racism in a country founded on it is now over, just as it was over after the passage of civil rights bills in the 1960s, after “Colored” signs from the Jim Crow era were removed, after school busing, and so on. All of these moments have in common a desire to deny that African Americans have any reason for complaint. The more that whites appear to embrace aspects of African American culture while removing the most visible symbols of racism, the easier it becomes for them to pretend that American society has evolved beyond racism. Despite the fact that police killings of unarmed Black women and men persist, that the war on drugs disproportionately targets Black and Latina/o people for arrests and incarceration, that poverty and hunger continue to haunt the nation, and that in many ways the nation remains nearly as segregated as before, the consolation of postracialism endures.Heneks shows that, for Key and Peele, the most honest white Americans are those who admit their racism rather than try to claim innocence or to assume an insincere posture of affinity or solidarity at the expense of African Americans’ time and energy. Heneks argues that the frequent demands that African Americans acknowledge whites’ desire to avoid being perceived as or called racist are examples of “New Racism,” which invokes old racist tropes while trying to make racism invisible or insisting that it pertains only to a narrowly defined set of overtly racist activities. White demands for absolution from racism are a burden on Black minds and lives and have the effect of once again placing African Americans in the role of involuntary servants.Heneks continues her examination of white privilege in an analysis of Black-ish. Produced by powerful writer/producer Shonda Rhimes, whose hit shows routinely put complex issues of race and gender before their TV audiences, Black-ish is not only based on creator Kenya Barris’s life, but also makes “Black identity crucial to the show and its satire.” Heneks notes that while Black identity and white privilege are routinely examined or criticized, the show avoids easy caricatures by not “villainiz[ing]” the white characters. Heneks shows how this approach plays out in the episodes “Lemons,” which depicts Black and white responses to Donald Trump’s election, and “Gap Year,” a direct analysis of the specific ways that white privilege works. Black-ish illustrates that Obama’s election did not erase white privilege or even make significant inroads into eliminating it. In fact, the pattern of racial progress followed by retrenchment that has defined American life since Reconstruction repeated itself in both the Obama and Trump eras. Like that fateful period following the US Civil War, every movement toward racial justice contains within it the inevitable backlash, as whites realize that an antiracist program means giving up some part of their unquestioned privilege. The assumption that whiteness is normal while Black identities and cultures are abnormal or pathological sits at white supremacy’s core. White privilege thrives on that norm never being upset.Benjamin Schwartz examines the so-called postracial world in his article “Circular Time and Postracial Capitalism in Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Friday Black,” a literary exploration of racial violence and its implications. Schwartz draws on Maria Bose’s concept of postracial capitalism, or the idea, once again, that racism can be “fixed” through an act, several pieces of legislation, or one horrific killing, to analyze the speculative satire in selections from Adjei-Brenyah’s debut short story collection. Postracial capitalism would have us believe that George Floyd’s murder was the über murder, the one so ghastly that overtly or covertly racist people would repent forever, fully engage and thoroughly shun their fellow racists, and pass or enforce all laws meant to bring about social justice. But if there were such a thing as the über murder or crime, then the beating of Rodney King in 1991 would have brought a guilty criminal verdict for the four Los Angeles Police Department officers responsible in 1992; the riots that ensued would not have happened. Trayvon Martin’s killer would be in prison, and “stand your ground” laws would have been repealed. George Floyd would not have been lampooned by those on the far right, nor would Candace Owens have made hay by condemning him or making him virtually responsible for his own murder. As with Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), discussed in Diego Milan’s contribution, Friday Black’s title, according to Schwartz, situates the text “within the canon of what André Breton calls ‘black’ or ‘gallows’ humor, as well as within a long-standing tradition of African American (‘Black’) humor” as defined by such authors and critics as Ralph Ellison, “who argues that Black American satirists have frequently amplified absurd or grotesque elements of American racism to critique the irrationality of the social, political, and economic arrangements that reproduce white supremacy.”Schwartz examines two stories, “The Finkelstein 5” and “Zimmerland,” each of which illustrates the story collection’s “forceful critique as it pertains to one specific form of postracial capitalist violence, namely, the surveillance, criminalization, and premature death of Black male bodies.” Both of the pieces Schwartz examines are good examples of speculative fiction, as they imagine scenarios in which a Blackness meter and an amusement park devoted to releasing white rage on Black bodies, respectively, are the norm. Adjei-Brenyah uses these devices to measure—literally, in the case of the Blackness meter—the extent to which Black lives are either ever under examination via Du Boisian double consciousness or in mortal danger. Survival in such a world requires that characters embrace what Danielle Fuentes Morgan calls “kaleidoscopic Blackness,” or Black identities that eschew stereotypes about being Black, as the characters in Black-ish do. The development of healthier Black identities, if not always Black survival, also calls for stepping outside of narratives about Black progress, which limited what was possible for African Americans to pursue after the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. When legally defined segregation and racist violence no longer explicitly define Black lives, the future depends on imagining new tactics and paths, akin to what the founders of #BlackLivesMatter did in the face of racial violence. As Schwartz concludes, “Black Americans have leveraged their imagination, as Adjei-Brenyah does here, to find the language to articulate the urgency of racial justice in brilliant and beautiful new ways,” albeit without buying into a “triumphalist” and teleological sense of racial progress. The idea that racial justice has a singularly defined end is itself toxic, as white supremacy requires that those living under oppression declare victory over racism so that white privilege will remain intact. Such a victory would indeed be a defeat, as white supremacy would no longer be challenged. Friday Black resists such an end, positing instead that the struggle for justice is ongoing and perhaps ever should be.The latter half of our issue focuses on several important works in African American literature that have gained critical esteem but have been studied less often than they deserve: Fran Ross’s Oreo (1974), Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), and Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral (1928). The reasons for the relative dearth of interest in and scholarship about each novel vary. According to our contributors, the common denominator is that each work has been misread, misunderstood, or mischaracterized; none of them found the desired audience because contemporaries failed to appreciate the humor and often the irony that marks them.Adriana Wisniewska’s “‘Half a wit is better than none’: Race, Humor, and the Grotesque in Fran Ross’s Oreo” centers, appropriately, on communication in Ross’s novel. As Wisniewska puts it, Oreo is “a novel deeply concerned with the languages, tools, and means of expression that we use to interact with one another and navigate the world around us. The novel abounds with wordplay, charts, graphs, and all kinds of verbal and visual inventiveness.” Like Tristram Shandy, published more than two centuries earlier, it represents one of the more curious and bewildering examples of a once-lost novel. Published in 1974, Oreo never found its audience at a time when the influences of the Black Arts Movement and concomitant Black Aesthetic were on the wane and Black cultural nationalism held sway. The half-Black, half-Jewish protagonist, Christine Schwartz, whose nickname is Oreo, is a metaphor for the difficulties of bridging two cultures.Her Black and Jewish families speak their respective communities’ vernaculars: African American Vernacular English and Yiddish. Like other vernaculars, these two languages allow those within the group to communicate in a way that shields them from often-oppressive outgroups. For Christine, these conflicting languages contribute to a near incommensurability evident in the United States. Ross employs these vernaculars and incorporates elements of speculative fiction and the travel narrative, all within an at times nearly incomprehensible plot centered on a powerful woman who is able to fend off sexual assaults during her quest to find her father. In the early 1970s, nothing quite like this novel existed in African American literature, save perhaps for Ishmael Reed’s satirical Mumbo Jumbo (1972) and Clarence Major’s more avant-garde work. African American women novelists were developing their own voices and finding space to publish in this era, but not with this same degree of narrative experimentation. Ross, it seemed, couldn’t communicate. By writing about different ethnic cultures and not only African Americans, Ross trod ground that Black authors seldom did, with the notable exception of Zora Neale Hurston in the 1930s and 1940s. Moreover, Oreo is, Wisniewska argues, a carnivalesque satire and parody of the myth of Theseus. Openly centering a novel on Greek myth was nearly unthinkable. Ross was therefore ahead of her time, paving the way for Percival Everett’s generic experiments.Wisniewska emphasizes that communication in Oreo happens not only in verbal utterances but also in a “fundamental incongruity between live bodies and mechanical rigidity.” Bodies express ideas and meaning, whether in Christine’s ability to merge with a device that acts as a barrier against sexual assault or when Oreo’s Black grandfather James Clark turns to stone on hearing that his daughter will marry a Jewish man, sitting in a straight-backed chair in a way that calls to mind one half of a swastika (minus head and feet) and thus depicts his paralyzing bigotry. Wisniewska argues that these depictions undermine overdetermined, common views of the Black body as a symbol, allowing it to be used in humorous ways that resist stereotypes and suggest the fact that ethnic or racial prejudice—as opposed to racism—is not confined to any particular group. More to the point, Ross uses James Clark’s comic transformation as a metaphor for rigidity in cultural and literary expression. Our laughter highlights the novel’s goal of upsetting expectations; even its connections to the ancient Greek myth of Theseus are tenuous at best. Ross’s “tongue-in-cheek approach to these classical forms and traditions has the effect,” Wisniewska argues, “of cutting the connective tissue between the myth, and her chapter titles, and the events of the novel, parodying the self-importance of literature that aspires to the status of ‘high’ art by appealing to an upper-middle-class white sensibility.”Moreover, Ross defies the prescriptive nature of any aesthetic, Black or otherwise, that circumscribes artistic expression, rejecting linear narrative structure, and challenging anything that stands in the way of the work’s ludic purpose. As in Black-ish, its creative heir, Oreo refuses to stick to expectations and looks complexities squarely in the face. “Rather than erase the complex relationship that exists between Blackness and whiteness,” Wisniewska writes, “Ross highlights it by inverting the cultural associations associated with Black and white.” Oreo herself is “both Black and Jewish” rather than “an invisible ‘multiracial’ identity” that effectively erases the cultures that it comprises, forming a nebulous middle ground that would move the novel away from comedy and steer it into tragedy, a trap Ross wishes to avoid.Diego Milan’s “Joking at the Limits of Protest in Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go” examines one of Himes’s most accomplished early works, one frequently cited as a landmark in both African American literature and in social protest literature. Yet, as Milan contends, the humorous crux of If He Hollers remains misread and misunderstood, if not altogether ignored, in critics’ focus on its defiant protest of anti-Black racism. While we cannot ignore Himes’s indictment of racism, If He Hollers is also a wryly, bitterly humorous novel, veering at times into satire. “While Himes’s novel engages in [social protest’s] objectives,” Milan asserts, “the centrality of jokes in it requires analysis that moves us beyond seeing humor as merely instrumental. Joking as a form of protest allows readers to imagine agential resistance” to racism. Moreover, the jokes at the novel’s heart, Milan argues, highlight the absurdity of living Black in a white supremacist world. In this novel and his other writings, Milan writes, “Himes articulates his affinity for the absurd as a function of the slant relationship between the surrealist gallows humor at the heart of André Breton’s notion of l’humour noir and the longer tradition of African American humor that reckons with the workings of whiteness.” Again, African Americans laugh to keep from dying. Or more precisely, this novel invokes laughter in its characters and readers to keep