Race, Gender and Broadcast Comedy: The Case of the BBC's Kentucky Minstrels

Abstract

From 1933 to 1950 the BBC ran a variety series, The Kentucky Minstrels, which was built on the tradition of blackface minstrelsy. This hugely popular tradition of entertainment, which dates back to the 1830s in Britain and was later taken up by BBC television in the 1950s and 1960s in an equally long-running series, The Black and White Minstrel Show, has been largely ignored by social, theatrical and media historians alike. This article focuses in particular on the dimension of comedy in the show. The history of media comedy and the dynamics of particular comic forms have also been ignored within media studies, although recently some interesting work has begun to emerge. In making a modest contribution to that history, this article tackles the questions of racism and sexism in popular humour. The cultural transmission of prejudice in comic discourse and the analytical difficulties of dealing with offensive values within such discourse, have not, surprisingly, been subject to much critical scrutiny. This article tries, therefore, to make good this academic neglect and so contribute to the study of the development of popular cultural perspectives on questions of ethnicity and gender, and the cultural analysis of specifically comic forms of discourse.