In Played Out: The Race Man in Twenty-First-Century Satire, Brandon J. Manning argues that Black male satire often pokes and prods the expanses of Blackness to question how race, gender, and class function (9). However, Manning maintains that “as Black men argue for a more nuanced understanding of identity and self-expression against the backdrop of American racial politics, they often do so at the expense of Black women in their work” (17). This is the central question of Played Out: How does Black satire move beyond centering Black men as “race men”? In this excellent survey of Black male satire in the twenty-first-century, Manning details various challenges to the “race man” (“a singular leader for Black social, cultural, and political engagements around the central issue of race and racism”) (2). He argues that modern satirists work to “undermine the myth of the race man by underscoring the significance of self-reflexivity and interiority in Black masculine performance and representation” (5). Satire permits Black male satirists to center vulnerability as a model for Black masculinity.In chapter 1, “Of Our Satirical Strivings,” Manning utilizes Paul Beatty’s The Sellout (2016) to discuss nihilism as a satiric mode out of gendered notions of success. Manning argues that “masculinist assumptions” (32) inform the very idea of the American dream and determine access to it. According to Manning, “for Black men the constitutive power of hope is inured through their proximity to male privilege and a broader embrace of American patriarchy” (32). In The Sellout, however, Beatty represents classic scenes of racial uplift in ironic ways that question the notion that the race man is “the ideal leader” and that nonviolent protest is “the sole means of implementing social justice work” (43). Nihilism, in Beatty’s sense, encourages readers to “embrace vulnerability,” asking them to consider abandoning “value systems that make sense of the world around us” (41). The Sellout encourages readers “to think imaginatively about new, more inclusive modes of Black political life that do[es] not link Black humanity to race work” (58).Chapter 2, “Neoliberalism and the Funny Race Man,” focuses on Dave Chappelle’s Chappelle’s Show (2003–6). According to Manning, Chappelle’s satiric persona in this show embraces emotional vulnerability by relying on “Black masculine awkwardness” rather than “Black masculine cool” (62). Chappelle’s claim that the show was a “tour through a young Black man’s subconscious” demonstrates his role as a “post-soul satirist” concerned with fostering a “discursive space” in which to “subvert, challenge, and laugh about representations of Black Americans” (80, 64). Despite the fact that sketches Chappelle performed on the show were for an audience, he professed “apathy about his reception” (67), and Manning argues that in so doing “he unapologetically prioritize[d] his Black interiority and comedic sensibilities” and performed “ambivalence toward his audience and their laughter” (67). Chappelle became increasingly concerned that his satirical intent was lost or misunderstood. Manning suggests that Chappelle may have “imagined an audience poised to participate in a cathartic response, but he later adopted a dominant gaze when producing and viewing the sketch” (79). Manning ends the chapter by briefly taking up recent controversies regarding Chappelle’s transphobic and homophobic comments, comments that Manning argues Chappelle has made because he possesses “a Generation X sensibility that is probably better defined by its ambivalence and popular culture than by its sociopolitical movements” (83). This seems like a missed opportunity to engage in how gender—and the retreat from vulnerability around gender—has shaped Chappelle’s more recent work. Nevertheless, this chapter provides useful context and framing for thinking about the legacy of one of the more important Black male satirists of the twenty-first century.In the third chapter, “Integrationist Intimacies,” Manning uses Percival Everett’s satirical novel I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), as well as the films of Sidney Poitier, “to center the relationship between sexual violation and Black boyhood” (88), demonstrating that vulnerability is “both a site of trauma and self-reflection for Black men” (87). The sexualization of Sidney Poitier in his films reveals how white liberalism fantasizes about “the intimacy of integration and fetishizes Black boys and men’s bodies as would-be race men” in ways that “force sexual encounters that recreate racist power dynamics” (93–94). In I Am Not Sidney Poitier, however, a white female teacher’s sexual violence toward the main character Not Sidney “comes to define the subsequent moments of sexuality in the novel” and to mark the difference “between the civil rights movement and post–civil rights moment” (105). Not Sidney recognizes himself as a victim and refuses to “let his body be the fodder of White liberal desire” (107). Thus, consent becomes not only consent over the physical body but also “metaphorical consent for how White liberalism and respectability politics takes up his body to create its own meaning and narratives” (111).In the final chapter, “The President and His Translator,” Manning investigates “how emotionality—specifically anger—gets incorporated into the neoliberal project of postracialism” via President Barack Obama, the first Black president, and Keegan-Michael Key’s Luther, Obama’s anger translator from the sketch comedy show Key and Peele (2012–15) (113). Obama’s awareness of how his Blackness—and anger—was constantly being judged led him to choose “to personify Black masculine coolness or anguish and grief: performances that were palatable and legible by dominant culture” (124). The character of Luther, however, “embodied White America’s assumptions about Black rage” (136). The duality of his character and by proxy Obama’s relationship to anger was made particularly manifest during his performance at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner in 2015. While Luther performed “Black rage within a White imaginary,” Black viewers were able to appreciate “his ability to tell White people to their face how they have wronged the first Black president and how race and whiteness informs that wrongdoing” (138). The satire of Obama’s anger translator derives not only from the recognition of the validity of Black masculine anger but also from an understanding of how this anger must often be represented at a distance in the (white) public square.In the book’s conclusion, “Beyond the Funny Race Man,” Manning points to other work that contributes to the decentering of Black men in satire, including 2 Dope Queens (2015–18), Insecure (2016–21), Black Lady Sketch Show (2019–), and Jerrod Carmichael’s Home Videos (2018) and Sermons on the Mount (2019). Played Out attempts to think through “what a glacial fall from grace looks like” for the race man and to show the “power of wit and humor to “begin the work of decentering Black men from the bedlam of racial uplift narratives and respectability politics” (141). Played Out provides both an excellent contextualization of vulnerability in Black male satire and a pathway for expanding the important work of Black satire.