Academy Meetings Black Humor: Reflections on an American Tradition Gerald Early, Glenda Carpio, and Werner Sollors These presentations were given at the 1949th Stated Meeting, held in collaboration with the Chicago Humanities Festival on November 14, 2009, at Northwestern University School of Law. © Charles Johnson A Brief History of African American Humor Gerald Early Gerald Early is Director of the Center for the Humanities and Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters at Washington University in St. Louis. He has been a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1997. The assistant director at the humanities center I supervise is a Chinese woman who used to be a practicing archaeologist. She grew up in Beijing during the Cultural Rev- olution, lived in Tibet for ½ve years, and did not come to the United States until the 1980s. Despite being an American citizen, she still deeply identi½es with China. Once she wanted to prove a point to me about the cultural nature of humor, so she translated for me a popular urban Chinese joke. She thought it was hilarious. Not only did I not get it; it seemed incomprehensible to me. It was not only not funny; it was nonsensical. That was the point she was trying to prove: In our global world, humor is something that does not translate well. “Every group has its humor,” she said, “and understanding that humor determines whether you are an insider or an outsider. In America, there are a lot of different groups with insider humor. Can you understand how another group laughs at itself? And why?” I thought her observation was incisive. In the United States, with its many different groups, humor is the insider’s marker. Humor is an important creative act that binds a group together, gives it an identity, and de½nes its view of itself and the world outside itself. In the United States, a country that seems at times confused or unsure about assimilation versus pluralism, group humor is complex in its function and meaning. To understand how a group constructs itself through humor is not easy. A group’s humor might contain elements of self-hatred as well as elements of self-protection. How can an outsider understand all or any of this if people in the group do not themselves fully understand the complexity of their humor and, as might be the case with many in the group, do not like the humor of their group? Much commentary has been written about racial humor in the United States. And why not? It is a rich subject with a history dating back to the days of nineteenth-century minstrelsy, which gave us a complex intergroup humor of white performers pretending to be comically stereotyped versions of blacks. When, after the Civil War, this form of entertainment ½nally permitted black performers, they, too, had to act in the traditions of the art, playing comically stereotyped blacks. Black comic performers like George Walker and Bert Williams, who became an enormously successful team in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, performed what would be called “coon” roles. James Weldon and Rosamund Johnson, Will 1 Bulletin of the American Academy, Summer 2010 Academy Meetings Marion Cook, Bob Cole, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Ernest Hogan, and other black songwriters of the turn of the century wrote “coon songs” in the tradition of the popular music of the day–songs like “All Coons Look Alike to Me” (1899) and shows like A Trip to Coontown (1898). Perhaps this sort of work caused these blacks some special sort of angst–doubtless, it gave them a particular sense of irony–but it may not have been nearly as distressing as many of us today are apt to think that it was. Black audiences and black people in general have always found the popular stereotypes of themselves to be quite funny, in a certain context. Williams and Walker and early black musical stage composers were popular with both black and white audiences. retrograde, as a horrible stereotype of the Old Negro, so to speak. But Lincoln Perry, who created the character of Stepin Fetchit, for years developed and honed his act by performing in front of black audiences who rolled in the aisles laughing. They loved him when he was performing in all-black venues. He performed the same act in Hollywood ½lms and became one of the most criticized men in the national black community. Why? All Lincoln Perry was trying to do was take an ethnic character he had created and make it cross over to wider audiences as an American type, not unlike the Yankee Peddler or the American backwoodsman. However, Perry was too successful and became tied as an actor to his character in much the same way that Paul Reubens became tied to his 1980s character Pee-wee Herman. His character ceased to be an artistic creation and was interpreted instead as a pathologized projection. Why couldn’t Stepin Fetchit be seen as an American type like the neurotic Jew or the singing cowboy or the Irish Catholic priest? Lincoln Perry had great success getting whites, as well as blacks, to laugh genuinely at his creation. The problem was that blacks thought whites were laughing for different reasons. Fetchit, like minstrelsy, politicized laughter. He posed a dif½cult question with his characterization: What exactly made him funny to his audiences? The problem in America with group humor is not that outsiders won’t get the joke you make about your own group but that they will get the joke at your expense. Does humor not cross boundaries well, or are all groups made uneasy when the taboos they wish to explore or explode in their in-group humor is exposed to others? The popular, long-running radio comedy Amos and Andy caused both a similar and a somewhat different set of dilemmas. Premiering in 1928, the show was created by two white actors, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, who portrayed African American migrants who leave the South for Chicago, from where the program was broadcast. The show was very popular with black listeners. Indeed, when the actors made personal appearances, blacks would turn out along with the show’s legions of white fans. The actors appeared in black- The problem in America with group humor is not that outsiders won’t get the joke you make about your own group but that they will get the joke at your expense. face in publicity photos and also in a 1930 movie called Check and Double Check, where they looked very odd in scenes with actual black actors. They often appeared in character at personal appearances without any problems. People accepted them as Amos and Andy. In 1931, Robert Vann, publisher of the African American newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier, began a campaign to have Amos and Andy removed from the air because he felt its characterizations of low-class blacks were repellent and insulting. Here, again, the racial politics of comedy were implicated: if blacks and whites both laughed at a stereotyped black character, they could not be laughing for the same reason; and whites, almost certainly, could be laughing only because this sort of comedy reinforced their sense of superiority. In addition, whites played these roles, which only emphasized the denigrating minstrel roots of Amos and Andy. The campaign was not successful, but it did divide the black community about the show, only not enough to diminish greatly the number of blacks who listened to it. This division between the black elites, who hated the program, and everyday blacks, who were less inclined to take offense or to make being offended a big issue, reemerged during the years when Amos and Andy was broadcast as a television show in the early 1950s, when it featured black actors in all the roles. Although the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp) had not joined the Pittsburgh Courier in its protest against the radio program, it did actively lead the charge against the television program. The naacp was successful, and the show was cancelled after two years despite enjoying good ratings. Black audiences and black people in general have always found the popular stereotypes of themselves to be quite funny, in a certain context. Also to emerge in the post-bellum years would be the humorous but slyly subversive character of the old “uncle” storyteller; white southern journalist Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus is, of course, the most famous example, but black writer Charles Chesnutt’s Uncle Julius is also well-known in African American literary history. In as much as modern-day black stand-up comics are storytellers (and the best of them are, rather than simply rapid-½re one-line jokesters like Bob Hope or Henny Youngman), they, in some measure, hearken back to this tradition. With so much of the history of black humor rooted in slavery and minstrelsy, it is no wonder that blacks are ambivalent or deeply divided about what the group should think is funny. Take the great black comic actor Stepin Fetchit (1902–1985), who rose to great heights as a character actor in Hollywood in the late 1920s and 1930s. When Fetchit became popular with white audiences, black commentators, civil rights leaders, and black intellectuals began to condemn him as something abhorrent, as politically 2 Bulletin of the American Academy, Summer 2010 Black Humor: Reflections on an American Tradition By the early 1950s, black actors generally avoided comic roles. The major black actors who emerged in this period–Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, James Edwards, Ruby Dee, and Dorothy Dandridge–did not do comedy, possibly because Hollywood was afraid to cast them in such roles but probably because the actors felt comedy carried the taint of minstrelsy. These black actors felt themselves to be the children of Paul Robeson, and they were highly sensitive to the idea of playing demeaning roles. And nothing demeaned a serious black actor quite like comedy, especially when it meant being funny for a white audience. Many people, especially those who have never watched the 1939 epic Gone with the Wind, are convinced that Hattie McDaniel’s Oscar-winning role of Mammy, the stereotypical overweight, nurturing, bossy slave woman, was a comic role, not the dramatic role it actually was. Louise Beavers’s Mammy-like performance in the 1934 version of Imitation of Life was also largely a dramatic, not comic, role. These were the two most substantial roles for black actors appearing in Hollywood ½lms before World War II, and while both ½lms attracted black audiences–“Imitation of Life” more so than Gone with the Wind, which was not critically well received in black newspapers–the ½lms were meant for whites. Thus, black audiences felt uncomfortable with the black roles, sensing that they were more comic than they actually were. Lena Horne, endorsed by Walter White of the naacp as the antidote to black servile comic actors, starred in Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather, musical motion pictures that were produced in 1943, had primarily black casts, and were made to appeal to African Americans. One of Horne’s roles was clearly comic–the sexy black temptress, another stereotype that would ensnare Dorothy Dandridge in the 1950s. Black audiences on the whole felt more comfortable with the humorous stereotypes in ½lms made explicitly for them. (After World War II, Ethel Waters would replace Hattie McDaniel playing “Mammy” roles, and singer/dancer Pearl Bailey would become a new comic voice as the sassy, outspoken black woman, a sort of black Eve Arden.) The political issues involved in the depiction of blacks in ½lm for both black and white audiences and for black actors was so complicated, so fraught with hazard, that the line between what was comic and what was dramatic was blurred. Early in his career, Ali became a juvenile comic, reciting humorous verse as a way of bringing attention to his boxing matches. He even recorded an album of such poetry for Columia Records in 1963, with liner notes by poet Marianne Moore. When he joined the Nation of Islam (noi), shortly More than a little controversy arose among before his 1964 title bout with champion blacks when Poitier and Dandridge agreed Sonny Liston, his comic antics took on a to play the leads in Otto Preminger’s 1959 much more political edge. For a time, Ali’s ½lm version of Porgy and Bess, roles that nei- comedy bothered many sportswriters and ther Poitier nor Dandridge wanted to do boxing fans because it made it seem as if he because they felt the characters were racial did not take his sport seriously. Blacks were stereotypes. The fact that Porgy and Bess is also bothered in the early days of Ali’s career not a comedy but an important opera (the because they felt his comedy was demeanonly performable opera featuring blacks in ing and made Ali look silly in comparison all major roles) was probably the only reason to the great race hero Joe Louis, who never these black actors agreed to play in it at all. joked and rarely smiled publicly. Later, his comedy tended to denigrate the politics (as Ali chose to de½ne them) of his black opponents. Ali’s comedy also bothered the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, who hated sports, especially boxing, though when Elijah Muhammad censored Ali, it was not for his comedy. (Members of the noi almost never smiled publicly and were known, in fact, for being grim and puritanical. They could express humor at times, however, in the sermons they delivered to the faithful in their mosques, usually at the expense of In light of all of this, Bill Cosby emerged in whites or establishment blacks who were the 1960s an extraordinarily important ½g- considered Uncle Toms. It must be noted as well that Ali’s comedy was unusual for a ure in American entertainment. When he was given a lead role in the television series high-performance athlete–although the I Spy, he became the ½rst African American subject of race, sports, and comedy is histo star in a dramatic series. However, Cosby torically and culturally complex and worhad come to the attention of the public as a thy of considerable explication in another context–and certainly for a boxer.) In 1969, stand-up comic. From 1962 to 1965 he rose rapidly, playing all the noted comedy clubs while in the midst of his three-and-a-halfand releasing a hit comedy album, Bill Cosby year exile from boxing because of his oppoIs a Very Funny Fellow . . . Right, in 1964. Cosby sition to the draft, Ali was suspended from was one of three important black stand-up the noi and shunned by its members for one year for expressing in an interview a comics to appear in the 1960s who were very different from the type of black comics willingness to return to boxing to make monwho had existed before. The other two were ey. Muhammad thought Ali was groveling, degrading himself and the organization. Dick Gregory and boxer Muhammad Ali. All three were “clean” comics in the sense Gregory, who made the civil rights movethat they did not aim their material at an ment and race part of his routine of acerbic, adult audience by using obscene language wry observations on American cultural and or discussing sex. Each was the result of the political hypocrisy, belonged to a school of civil rights movement. liberal, Cold War political comics of the day that included Mort Sahl, Tom Lehrer, and The political issues involved in the depiction of blacks in ½lm . . . was so complicated, so fraught with hazard, that the line between what was comic and what was dramatic was blurred. Bulletin of the American Academy, Summer 2010 3 Academy Meetings Vaughn Meader. Ali combined elements of Jerry Lewis with the comic bragging of Depression Era–baseball pitcher Dizzy Dean Gregory, and Ali racialized their types of comedy in a new way, making their white audiences aware that they were speaking as black men. Of course, Williams and Walker, Stepin Fetchit, and Amos and Andy were also making their audiences aware that they were “black men,” but Ali and Gregory were self-aware and were not making humor that could in any way make whites laugh at the spectacle of their own degradation, their “naturally comic” position in life, or their naturally fun-loving, carefree disposition. I might add here that singer/actor/songwriter Oscar Brown, Jr., also popular at this time, was like Gregory in that he occasionally did humorous political songs with a withering satirical edge; for example, “Forty Acres and a Mule,” about reparations for slavery, appears on his 1964 album, Mr. Oscar Brown, Jr. Goes to Washington. some of Mabley’s and Markham’s recordings for Chess Records were given radio airplay, by and large these were adult comics whose routines were far too raunchy for children. Cosby’s comedy, which he mostly performed for integrated or largely white audiences, was not closely related to what these black comics performed for black audiences. The form of black comedy seen on the Chitlin’ Circuit would be exposed to wider audiences in the 1970s through the crossover success of Redd Foxx, and many of his comic peers would wind up appearing on his hit television show, Sanford and Son, where they performed cleaned-up, watered down versions of their acts. Neither blacks nor whites seemed troubled by this, and the show was popular with both groups, although some more-militant black intelDuring the age of integration, from the lectuals condemned the show as minstrelsy. 1950s to the mid-1960s, black performers and black audiences were freed from cerDuring and after the civil rights years, Marxtain types of con½nement that dictated how ist and nationalist blacks regularly conthey were expected to relate to the larger demned most black comedy as a form of white world around them. Black performminstrelsy, in effect saying that blacks could ers did not necessarily have to do racenever escape these stereotypes and that based acts or make use of comic racial making whites laugh was politically disemstereotypes. Black audiences, during this powering and socially degrading. Most time, felt more comfortable with this form blacks, especially among the black elite, of group humor being performed for white likely would have been unhappy had the audiences. In fact, black audiences were Redd Foxx–Chitlin’ Circuit–style of black sometimes visibly proud of this. humor been widely exposed to whites in the 1950s, when it was seen (again, espeIn the 1970s, Richard Pryor arrived as the cially by black elites) as low-class entermajor black comic of the day. Indeed, Pryor tainment. became one of the seminal stand-up comics of post–World War II America. Although Bill Cosby was, in effect, a middlebrow coPryor started out in the 1960s very much in median. His routines about growing up in the vein of Bill Cosby, doing mainstream, Cosby never made a point of reminding his a normal American family and being an television-safe comedy, he had shifted by audiences that he was black. He avoided be- American dad made not only Cosby but also the early 1970s, when he began to use obing political–to the point of not even casu- a fantasy image of the black family mainscenity in his work. This was around the ally mentioning political ½gures of the time stream in the days of both Daniel Patrick time that George Carlin, a white stand-up Moynihan’s report on black family pathol–and this probably had a great deal to do comic who became a major ½gure as well, with his enormous success. Nipsey Russell ogy (The Negro Family: The Case for National changed his act from mainstream to more and Flip Wilson, both successful crossover Action) and such television comedies about edgy by incorporating profane language. white families as The Dick Van Dyke Show, black comics of the day, generally avoided The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Leave It to For both comics, profane language was politics as well. Beaver, The Donna Reed Show, Make Room for used not so much to deliver raunchy jokes In this respect, Cosby was not a bridge ½gure Daddy/The Danny Thomas Show, and Father but to be political, antibourgeois, and antiwhen it came to bringing a version of black Knows Best. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, establishment. They were largely building stand-up comedy off the “Chitlin’ Circuit,” however, many African Americans, in their their 1970s routines around the sensibility the circuit of black theaters and urban ven- militancy and their quest for cultural auof comic Lenny Bruce, unquestionably the ues where a constellation of black comics– thenticity, were more apt to feel that Chitlin’ most influential and most controversial of including Moms Mabley, Pigmeat Markham, Circuit humor was an honest and compelall postwar stand-up comics. Pryor, in effect, Redd Foxx, and Skillet and Leroy–normally ling expression of blackness and would became the anti–Bill Cosby. And although performed for black audiences. Although aggressively identify with it. Pryor was enormously popular, he faced a The backlash against Richard Pryor was part of a larger dissatisfaction among many blacks with the new, gritty, ghetto image of blacks that was portrayed in popular culture, especially in blaxploitation ½lms such as “Shaft,” “Superfly,” and “Black Caesar.” Bill Cosby’s routines about growing up in a normal American family and being an American dad made not only Cosby but also a fantasy image of the black family mainstream. 4 Bulletin of the American Academy, Summer 2010 Black Humor: Reflections on an American Tradition backlash from some blacks who were especially disturbed by his excessive use of the word nigger. W. E. B. Du Bois, in a 1942 article about black humor and black audiences, wrote,“The use of the word ‘nigger,’ which no white man must use, is coupled with innuendo and suggestion which brings irresistible gales of laughter.” So, Pryor was following a tradition in black humor and, in becoming the anti–Bill Cosby, was in many respects reinventing an older blackcomic practice for contemporary audiences, both black and white. Indeed, the fact that Pryor attracted a large white audience in addition to appealing to blacks may have had something to do with the press criticizing his use of the word nigger. The backlash against Pryor was part of a larger dissatisfaction among many blacks with the new, gritty, ghetto image of blacks that was portrayed in popular culture, especially in blaxploitation ½lms such as Shaft (1971), Superfly (1972), Black Caesar (1973), and other such ½lms that were popular in the early and mid-1970s. But it should not be assumed that this response was largely from the educated black middle class. Some were opposed to it, of course, but many in this group were among Pryor’s biggest fans. Working-class, black church folk, black Muslims, older blacks of various stripes, and blacks in the “uplift trade,” as it might be called, were among those who strongly opposed blaxploitation cinema as romanticizing black pathology and being a poor influence on black adolescents. This debate would return with a vengeance with the emergence of rap, particularly gangsta rap, in the 1980s and 1990s. As nearly all blaxploitation ½lms were ultraviolent and action-oriented, comedy became, ironically, an antidote. Bill Cosby appeared in a series of clean comic ½lms directed by Sidney Poitier–Uptown Saturday Night (1974), Let’s Do It Again (1975), and A Piece of the Action (1977)–that were meant to combat blaxploitation cinema. Who would have thought that a family-oriented message of racial uplift would now be found in black comedy and that someone like Sidney Poitier–the ultra-serious, digni½ed black actor of the 1950s and 1960s–would direct comic black ½lms? But Bill Cosby’s clean comedy of the 1960s made it possible for blacks to do comedy and still maintain their sense of racial pride–not to be the objects of laughter at their own expense. Indeed, these ½lms enabled blacks to reconstruct their humor of the era of Walker and Williams without the tint of degradation. As Du Bois noted in his observations on black humor: “[Black comic actors] imitate the striver, the nouveau riche, the partially educated man of large words and the entirely untrained,” which is precisely what these ½lms did. In fact, these comedies even made fun of blaxploitation ½lms themselves. As it turned out, the pressure on Pryor was suf½cient to make him abandon the use of the word nigger for a time; in some ways, this in-group protest slowly became the undoing of his act. Regardless of whether this response was a misdirected act of group self-censorship, it should hardly seem surprising, coming from a persecuted minority that can never quite be sure how it can or should protect itself, especially from its own impulse to ½nd sources of its degradation funny. By the late 1970s blacks were divided over the image of blacks in popular culture and in comedy in ways that were similar to the divide blacks felt about Stepin Fetchit, comic actress Hattie McDaniel, and Amos and Andy. This divide continues to persist. The more things change, as the old saying goes, the more they remain the same. But as any good historian will note, this was not quite the same at all. No conflict is ever repeated the same way, if only because the actors always change and so does the audience. Black Women, Black Humor Glenda Carpio Glenda Carpio is Professor of African and African American Studies and of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University. any critics have noted that men have had much more freedom in doing physical comedy because they have had an easier time displaying their bodies than have women. One can easily see how race would further complicate this dynamic. Traditionally, women across divisions of race have been relegated to restrained wit–sly humor but not the raucous, screaming, demonstrative kind. Erika Kreger reminds us that in the United States not until the late-nineteenth century did critics come to see wit and humor as incompatible with femininity. Indeed, she argues, in “the mid 1800s, women humorists were often popular and acclaimed.” Yet the humor they practiced was neither necessarily politically radical nor performed; it was largely textual. Performing on stage was not an option for women, especially women of color, unless they joined vaudeville shows, where their place was decidedly ambivalent. The woman entertainer was usually included to “make the place ½t for decent women, yet everyone ‘knew’ that she was not decent herself.” Women could also join the minstrel troops of the late 1860s, but there they were usually featured as giddy sex objects and burlesqued in much the same ways as plantation stereotypes of African Americans.1 1 Erika M. Kreger, “The Nineteenth Century M © 2010 by Gerald Early Female Humorist as ‘Iconoclast in the Temple’: Gail Hamilton and the Myth of Reviewer’s Disapproval of Women’s Comic-Ironic Writings,” Studies in American Humor 3 (11) (2004): 5–38. Bulletin of the American Academy, Summer 2010 5 Academy Meetings Against this background we have some signi½cant pioneers. Among white American women we have Lucille Ball and Lily Tomlin, to name two giants, and among African American women we have the early blues singers Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and later Nina Simone, who sang of wanting “a little sugar in my bowl . . . a little hot dog between my rolls.” Later ½gures such as Whoopi Goldberg and Anna Deavere Smith have experimented with comedy and performance art. The so-called Queens of Comedy, including Adele Givens, Mo’nique, Cheryl Underwood, Laura Hayes, and Sommore are comediennes whose work was ½rst showcased on hbo’s Def Comedy Jam in 2001. Their work plays off the persistent stereotypes of black women as domineerthe slatternly Jezebel. We also need to look at the present-day work of Wanda Sykes, a comedienne who has been able to ½nd a middle ground in creating an embodied form of comedy, one that does not erase her sexuality, as with the grandmotherly Moms Mabley, or depend upon it, as with Josephine Baker and the Queens of Comedy. For centuries, African Americans have faced racism, in its various manifestations and guises, through a rich tradition of humor.2 And for centuries, people who oppressed them found that humor puzzling–how could a people so oppressed ½nd any reason to laugh? Minstrelsy went a long way in “explaining” the puzzle: black people laughed because they were simpletons. Yet black American humor began as a wrested freedom, the freedom to laugh at that which was unjust and cruel in order to create distance from what would otherwise obliterate a sense of self and community. Until well into the twentieth century, however, that humor had to be cloaked in secrecy lest it be read as transgressive and punished by violence. Hence the popular slave aphorism, “Got one mind for white folk to see / ’Nother for what I know is me.” Despite the life-threatening injunctions against black laughter, African American humor flourished at ½rst under the mask of allegory and increasingly in more direct forms. It developed a Janus-face identity. On one side was a fairly nonthreatening form that catered to whites’ beliefs in the inferiority of blacks while usually masking aggression. On the other side was a more assertive and acerbic humor that often targeted racial injustice but was generally reserved for in-group interactions. Performing on stage was not an option for women, especially women of color, unless they joined vaudeville shows, where . . . the woman entertainer was usually included to “make the place ½t for decent women, yet everyone ‘knew’ that she was not decent herself.” ing, often large, emasculating women who fail to conform to essentialized notions of womanhood. These comediennes consistently focus on the thematic issues of body image, male-female relationships, and racial and gender identities. But they also often reinforce stereotypes of black female sexuality by relying heavily on their own often overly sexualized personas. To explore the impact of these stereotypes on the development of black humor among black women, we need to look back on the work of Moms Mabley and Josephine Baker, two ½gures who embodied and manipulated two of the most persistent stereotypes of black femininity: the asexual Mammy and The so-called Queens of Comedy . . . play off the persistent stereotypes of black women as domineering, often large, emasculating women who fail to conform to essentialized notions of womanhood . . . But they also often reinforce stereotypes of black female sexuality by relying heavily on their own often overly sexualized personas. haps in the tragicomic notes of the blues or in the life-af½rming spirit of righteous insurgency–or both. Black laughter is, however, not only a coping mechanism, although most people think of it only in this fashion. Black humor is also a rich source of creative energy. Still, by most accounts, African American humor, like other humor that arises from oppression, has provided a balm, a release for anger and aggression, and a way of coping with the too-oftenpainful consequences of racism. In this way, black humor has been linked to one of the three major theories of humor: the relief theory made popular by Sigmund Freud, which posits that we laugh as a way to release pent-up aggression. Freud claimed that “tendentious jokes”–of which he identi½ed two main kinds, the obscene and For black Americans, humor has often the hostile–allow the joker and his audifunctioned as a way of af½rming their huence to release energy used for the purposes manity in the face of its violent denial. In of inhibition. Much, but certainly not all, order to confront the maddening illusions African American humor can be underof race and the insidiousness of racism, black folk have laughed long and hard, per- stood as a kind of relief-inducing humor. Indeed, under the violent restrictions of slavery and segregation, African Americans 2 An expanded form of the background present- developed the art of tendentious jokes so ed here can be found in Glenda R. Carpio, Laugh- well, in particular those that mask aggresing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery sion, that often they left whites “with the (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). baffled general feeling that [they had] been 6 Bulletin of the American Academy, Summer 2010 Black Humor: Reflections on an American Tradition lampooned [before their very eyes] without quite knowing how.”3 Among themselves, however, African Americans have expressed aggression toward their oppressors more openly. African American humor is also, although less commonly, linked to a second major theory of humor: the superiority theory, which posits that we laugh at other people’s misfortunes. The traditions of signifying, “playing the dozens,” and “boasting and toasting” belong to this kind of humor, although in the verbal battle of “capping” and “yo mamma” jokes verbal wit is savored over mean-spirited competition or putdowns. The signifying tradition is generally considered an example of mother wit and departs signi½cantly from the Freudian model of humor, which stresses sublimation, because it relishes exposure and does not depend on the joke form. Instead, this humor is mainly attitudinal and visual and depends on the verbal dexterity of the dozens, the toasts (long, metrically and rhythmically complex compositions), and the telling of “lies,” or stories. Signifying remained largely segregated until Richard Pryor broke out of his original image as a slim, mild-mannered comedian who, believe it or not, never cursed and usually told charming jokes patterned after Bill Cosby’s material. Pryor began performing revolutionary acts for mixed audiences in the late 1960s, and thus was largely responsible for desegregating African American humor. Black comedians before Pryor, notably Moms Mabley, Dick Gregory, Godfrey Cambridge, Flip Wilson, Red Foxx, and Bill Cosby, had introduced aspects of black humor to mixed audiences, but it was Pryor, after a remarkable self-transformation, who brought all aspects of black humor to the stage. In a sense, he “outed” black humor from the closely guarded circles within which black folk had kept it since slavery. theory of humor: the incongruity theory, which suggests we laugh when our expectations are disturbed. The humor of incongruity generally entails the playing of “what if” games that suspend normativity. These are games that momentarily recon½gure habits of mind and language and that can lead to what Ralph Ellison, after Kenneth Burke, called “perspective by incongruity.” At its best, the humor of incongruity allows us to see the world inverted, to consider transpositions of time and place, and, especially when the humor is hot enough to push our buttons, to question the habits of mind that we may fall into as we critique race. Lawrence Levine, “The appeal of Mabley’s humor was precisely its degree of folkishness. . . . Her antique clothing, her easy manner, her sense of kinship with her audiences –marked by her references to them as ‘children’–her lack of pretentiousness, the easy familiarity of her language, her movements, her dialogue, were at the core of her vast popularity.”4 Mabley challenged the notion of black women as domineering and emasculating while offering black Americans group recognition, a sense of af½liation, and comfort. But Mabley’s approach was not without risk. Her decision to adopt a grandmotherly persona reinforced a notion of black femininity patterned after the asexual mammy ½gure. For, although she was known for telling risqué, even bawdy jokes (usually about how much she liked younger men), she used the mantle of her grandmotherly ½gure and demeanor to hide any real possibility of marking her body as sexual. Her guise would ultimately betray any gesture toward a liberated sexuality. Josephine Baker, by contrast, combined sex appeal and comedy in her dance performances. She famously used a skirt of bananas to flesh out but also to mock the primitive persona she had established in her debut in Paris in 1925. A beautiful woman and gifted dancer, Baker exaggerated stereotypes of black female sexuality by performing numbers such as the Danse sauvage while minimally clad in a “primitive’ costume: bare-breasted but with feathers, wings, and other such signi½ers attached to her extremities. Often she would be chased and captured on stage by white hunters. Black American humor began as a wrested freedom, the freedom to laugh at that which was unjust and cruel in order to create distance from what would otherwise obliterate a sense of self and community. This is the kind of humor I deal with in my book, where I especially focus on how writers and artists from both the civil rights/ Black Power and post–civil rights/Post Soul generations stage “rituals of redress” with respect to American slavery. At the center of the project is a concern about the abiding impact of the racial and gender stereotypes produced by slavery and how artists and writers use humor to confront the legacy of these stereotypes. Baker sought to command some authority Although the history of early African Amer- in her self-production as the primitive sexican women comics has been largely ignored, ualized Other, combining a form of femiJackie “Moms” Mabley has received critical nine sexuality with a clownish disposition. As Susan Gubar puts it, “throughout her attention. Born in 1897 in North Carolina, Rarely is black humor connected to the Mabley became a dancer and singer by the career, Baker sauced her sexual numbers with comically exaggerated, antic gestures third (and for me the most interesting) time she was sixteen but quickly turned to comedy in traveling tent shows. Early in her career Mabley assumed the character of an 4 Mel Watkins, On the Real Side: A History of Afri3 John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town elderly earth mother. As Mel Watkins puts can American Humor from Slavery to Chris Rock (New York: Anchor, 1949), 309–310. First pub(Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2002); and it, “The guise provided the buffer or interlished in 1937 and quoted in Lawrence Levine, Lawrence Levine, “Black Laughter,” in Black “Black Laughter,” in Black Culture and Black Con- mediary necessary to quell resistance to a Culture and Black Consciousness (New York: sciousness (New York: Oxford University Press, woman doing a single comic routine.” For Oxford University Press, 1977). 1977), 313. Bulletin of the American Academy, Summer 2010 7 Academy Meetings [she was known, for example, to cross her eyes in burlesque fun] that distanced her from the sexual frenzy she was putting on display.”5 Baker also made a point of contrasting her on- and off-stage personas to emphasize the arti½ce of her act. Off stage she was a sophisticated and glamorous beauty and later in her career a devoted civil rights promoter. And long before Angelina Jolie, she adopted children from all over the world and raised them in her castle in France. lic threat.” As early as 1927, the bananas had “become ever harder and more threatening”–so much so that they looked more like spikes than bananas.7 What happens when the black female performer focuses on form as much if not more than on content? What happens when she skillfully manipulates triple jeopardy, strategically de-emphasizing one aspect (in this instance race) while highlighting another (gender)? Wanda Sykes adopts the laidback attitude of Moms Mabley without Yet Baker was so typecast by her early role denying her sexuality. She also uses her that she encountered a great deal of dif½culty body to address issues of gender without when she tried to develop her singing and exoticizing her own status as a black woman. acting in pursuit of a more sophisticated Her performance Tongue Untied (2003) is a persona in the 1930s. In particular, she be- measure of the progress, albeit slow, we have came almost synonymous with her skirt of made since Mabley and Baker. But this style bananas, which took on a life of its own. of manipulating race and gender is also particular to Sykes who, at least in stand-up (she is still relegated to the role of the maid in ½lms—see Monster in Law and even Chris Rock’s Down to Earth), shows a great deal of talent and promise for what may become the future of black women comedic performers in the public sphere. What happens when the black female performer focuses on form as much if not more than on content? What happens when she skillfully manipulates triple jeopardy, strategically de-emphasizing one aspect (in this instance race) while highlighting another (gender)? their cravings to see women’s bodies. “How do men ever get any work done?” Sykes asks facetiously, referring to the obsessive ways men can fetishize women’s bodies. At any given moment, the intense longing to see women, especially the most tabooed parts of their body, may take hold of a man, rendering him helpless. “Let’s go look at it!” one of them may say in the midst of work and take off to the strip club. Sykes’s participation in the whole enterprise softens this potentially chastising gesture, allowing her audience to laugh at the obsessions that besiege men without rendering them the butt of the joke. She then skillfully transitions into a satire of the obsessions that besiege women, turning the tables on members of her audience that might have felt privileged. Throughout the skit, she deemphasizes her racial identity, though she casually makes it part of the show through particular language choices and allusions. She also moves on the stage in a manner that marks her as a sexual being without making that sexuality the de½ning characteristic of her identity. The fact that Sykes recently came out as a lesbian also marks our reading of her performance, enriching our understanding of how she manipulates stereotypes of race and gender without making her own body bear the burden of that manipulation. The incongruity theory of humor . . . suggests we laugh when our expectations are disturbed. “Oh! How this idea has turned ridiculous!” Baker said of the costume. “How many drawings and caricatures it has inspired! Only the devil, apparently, could have invented something like that.”6 While the identity of the costume designer remains unknown, Baker’s appeal in her primitive guise is all too clear. Baker became the banana belt, thus inadvertently conflating two forms of colonialist consumption: that of a colonial product that, like sugar, tobacco, or coffee, has frequently been associated with pleasure; and that of black female bodies. During the 1930s, Baker made overt efforts to work against her typecasting, especially by adding androgynous twists to her act. She also rede½ned her famous skirt. She turned the bananas into “absurd signi½er[s] of black male phal- Tongue Untied begins with Sykes addressing politics–in particular, the absurdity of the web of lies spun by George W. Bush about weapons of mass destruction. By starting with politics, a realm long denied to women, Sykes distinguishes herself from performers like the Queens of Comedy and other female comedic talents across gender and race. After four segments in which she addresses political issues–a critique of the George W. Bush’s engineering of war and his manipulation of fears about weapons of mass destruction–Sykes turns to topics that are more traditional in the work of women comedians; namely, issues involving gender and sexuality. However, she approaches these topics in surprising ways. One skit focuses on Sykes visiting a strip club in Florida, where she plays the role of a highly ironic participant observer, a woman witnessing straight men as they satisfy 7 Michael Borshuck, “An Intelligence of the Body: 5 Susan Gubar, Racechanges: White Skins, Black Face in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 115. 6 Terri Francis, “Embodied Fictions, Melancholy Migrations: Josephine Baker’s Cinematic Celebrity,” Modern Fiction Studies 51 (4) (2005): 836. Disruptive Parody through Dance in the Early Performances of Josephine Baker,” In EmBODYing Liberation: The Black Body in American Dance, ed. Dorethea Fischer-Hornung and Alison D. Goeller (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction, 2002), 53. © 2010 by Glenda Carpio 8 Bulletin of the American Academy, Summer 2010 Black Humor: Reflections on an American Tradition Black Humor: Reflections on an American Tradition that governed the worlds of slavery and Jim Crow and how this very absurdity invited numerous African American jokes that were recorded long before existentialism. This gives the term black humor a speci½cally racial meaning and context in America. A black man is going to the voting booth to cast his vote. The sheriff tells him, “Boy, ½rst you’ve got to pass a reading test. Read out this here headline,” and he hands him . . . a Chinese newspaper. As if he were reading the headline, the black man slowly and deliberately enunciates, “Negroes won’t vote in Mississippi again this year.” The response is ingenious, in part because it acknowledges the continuation of the grievance of voter disenfranchisement. A conductor who tells a Negro passenger to go to the Jim Crow car gets this reply: “I done quite the race.” Here the humor points to the strange fact that unlike pretty much all other social categories, being a Negro is apparently not one that can be shed. Levine mentions the “story of a slave who was caught killing and eating one of his master’s pigs and who mockingly rationalized his act by arguing, “Yes, suh, Massa, you got less pig now but you sho’ got more nigger.”3 Here the principle of ownership is turned against itself by a witty slave. Levine also tells of the white deacon in Mississippi who walks into his church and ½nds a Negro standing there. “Boy,” he calls Werner Sollors out. “What you doin’ in here? Don’t you know this is a white church?” “Boss, I only Werner Sollors is the Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot just got sent here to mop up the floor,” the Professor of English Literature and Professor of black man informs him. “Well, that’s all African and African American Studies at Harvard right then,” the deacon responds. “But don’t University. He has been a Fellow of the American let me catch you prayin’.”4 The punch line Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2001. speaks volumes about Jim Crow religious hypocrisy. “ lack humor literature is similar to the The witty repartee seems to restore justice literature of existentialism in that it begins within the realm of humor for a second, with the same assumption–that the world fending off the possibility that outsiders is absurd.”1 This is how Alan R. Pratt de½nes will “get” black humor at the expense of the term in the introduction to his edited blacks (as Gerald Early put it) and giving collection, Black Humor: Critical Essays. He whites the uneasy feeling that somehow then illustrates his de½nition with a passage they have been lampooned by black laughfrom Jean-Paul Sartre. Postmodern authors, ter (as Glenda Carpio said). However, many most notably Thomas Pynchon, are among other jokes suggest the insurmountability the best practitioners of black humor literof the burden of race by taking for granted ature. Pratt also offers a number of alternathe absurdity of the world made by slavetive terms for black humor, among them holders and segregationists. apocalyptic comedy, dark comedy, pathological comedy, nihilistic humor, tragic farce, Glenda Carpio writes in Laughing Fit to Kill: and comedy of the absurd.2 Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery that “African American humor has been, for In his book Black Culture and Black Consciouscenturies, a humor of survival. It has been ness (1977) the late historian Lawrence Lea safety valve, a mode of minimizing pain vine highlights how absurd the rules were and defeat, as well as a medium capable of expressing grievance and grief in the most 1 I wish to acknowledge Leslie Berlowitz, who artful and incisive ways.”5 B The absurdity of the rules . . . that governed the worlds of slavery and Jim Crow . . . invited numerous African American jokes that were recorded long before existentialism. Looking through my library catalog, I found a book called Black Humor, which was humorously located on the Black Power shelf. Published in 1970, it was authored by Charles Johnson, who later became a National Book Award–winning novelist. (Anyone interested in black humor should be sure to read Johnson’s Oxherding Tale.) Black Humor, a short book of cartoons, contains inappropriate-seeming pages on slavery and its legacy. For example, the caption under a sketch showing ½gures in the hull of a slave ship reads, “Say, why don’t we have a singalong?” (Figure 1). A cartoon of a slave auction shows a man at a podium with a placard proclaiming, “We give trading stamps” (see page TK). Similarly, a twopanel cartoon shows a Klansman kneeling at his bedside (Figures 2–3). He prays, “Give me the strength to eliminate the inferior people ruining my nation.” The next panel shows God’s apparent answer, ironic and subversive: “Sho’ nuff, boss!” As Bill kindly invited me to participate on this panel, and Glenda Carpio, Gerald Early, and Jennifer Kurdyla, who made helpful comments. Charles Johnson was not only generous enough to grant permission to reproduce pages from his book Black Humor, but he also redrew ½ve images to go along with his text from 1970. These newly drawn images are published here for the ½rst time. 2 Alan R. Pratt, ed., Black Humor: Critical Essays 3 Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Con- sciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 309. 4 Ibid., 312. 5 Glenda R. Carpio, Laughing Fit to Kill: Black (New York: Garland, 1993), xvii. Humor in the Fictions of Slavery (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 230–231. Bulletin of the American Academy, Summer 2010 9 Academy Meetings Black Barber” when he penned the literally double-edged scene in which the slave rebel Babo holds the razor against Captain Delano’s neck: “The famous shaving scene at the center of Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno’ (1855) tried to live up to the grave humor that Dan Emmett and Eph Horn had been performing on the minstrel stage for a decade and a half. This same blackface-derived shaving scene would still be reincarnate in Charles Chesnutt’s ‘The Doll’ (1912).”7 Lhamon also ½nds that the opening words of Frederick Douglass’s ½rst autobiography (1845) copped Jim Crow’s come-on: Rice: “Come listen all you galls and boys / I’s jist from Tuckyhoe.” Douglass: “I was born in Tuckahoe.” 8 Lhamon goes on to speculate whether Douglass, like Thomas Rice, was thinking of that other Tuckahoe, the Virginia plantation that was the boyhood home of Thomas Jefferson, Mr. “Created Equal” himself.9 John Edgar Wideman, who wrote the essay on Charles W. Chesnutt for A New Literary History of America, comments that Chesnutt and Ralph Ellison are two authors who have noted with a distinct sense of humor that their “characters commit the unforgiving mistake of allowing themselves to fall asleep within someone else’s dream, the dream that blacks and whites coexist peacefully, voluntarily, in a just, mutually bene½cial arrangement. The wake-up call of riots, Ellison’s staged in Harlem and Chesnutt’s set in Wellington, North Carolina, expose the dream’s fragility.”10 One of the microstories Wideman contributed to Best African American Fiction 2010 explores similar themes: © Charles Johnson Figure 1 The speci½c black humor strain in A New Literary History of America appears in W. T. As “a mode of minimizing pain and defeat, “Rip” Lhamon’s essay “Rogue Blackness” (1830), which argues that Melville was reas well as a medium capable of expressing grievance and grief,” versions of black humor acting to the minstrel show number “The permeate American culture, as is visible in A New Literary History of America, a book I 6 Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, eds., A New had the pleasure to coedit with Greil Mar- Literary History of America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). Cosby has said, God clearly has a sense of humor. One of the cartoons has acquired a particular poignancy in the past year. A mother is shown talking to a friend. The woman’s young son is nearby, jumping on a (white) doll. The caption below the image reads, “He may never be president, but he’ll make a great militant” (Figure 4). cus.6 The book represents America in 219 chronologically arranged essays written by 201 authors, among them Glenda Carpio on Thomas Pynchon and Gerald Early on The Wizard of Oz, Tarzan, and integrating the military. Message A message in red letters on the back of a jogger’s T-shirt passed by too quickly for me to memorize exactly. Something about George Bush going too far in his search for terrorists and wmds. A 7 W. T. Lhamon, Jr., “Rogue Blackness,” in A New Literary History of America, ed. Marcus and Sollors, 204. 8 Ibid., 203. 9 Ibid. 10 John Edgar Wideman, “Charles W. Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition,” in A New Literary History of America, ed. Marcus and Sollors, 464. 10 Bulletin of the American Academy, Summer 2010 Black Humor: Reflections on an American Tradition punch line sniggering that Bush could have stayed home and found the terrorist he was looking for in the mirror. The message clever, I thought, and jacked the idea for my new line of black-lettered T-shirts: America went way too far looking for slaves. Plenty niggers in the mirror for sale.11 The “mirror” or “tarbaby” effect of white “hallucinatory” perception of blacks is also apparent in novelist Ishmael Reed’s essay in A New Literary History of America on Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, an essay that begins with the ironic comment that “structurally” the novel “is about as solid as a New Orleans levee” and ends with a passage rarely highlighted in discussions of Huck Finn: © Charles Johnson Figure 2 Huck cries, “I want my nigger,” like the children of the suburbs who are addicted to gangster rap, like the white Southern children after the Civil War who craved their coon songs from New York. Twain exposes this bizarre hunger, this exotic yearning of those who despise blacks yet wish to imitate them. Who wish to be called “honey” by them. Who wish to be “petted” by them. Who wish to burn them, cut out their very entrails, and take them home with them. If you can’t give us our nigger, they seem to say, we’ll make do with Elvis. . . . Twain knew. I want my nigger!12 George Schuyler must be the godfather of black humor. His thoroughly irreverent novel Black No More (1931) is unsurpassed for its raucous jokes about the joke that is race. Jeffrey Ferguson (who wrote the entry on Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt in A New Literary History of America) ½nds in his study of Schuyler that the wisdom “of black humor, . . . resided in its sharp recognition of the ludicrous and outlandish in American race relations.”13 © Charles Johnson 11 John Edgar Wideman, “Microstories,” in Best African American Fiction 2010, ed. Gerald Early and Nikki Giovanni (New York: Random House, 2009), 180–191. 12 Ishmael Reed, “Mark Twain’s Hairball,” in A Figure 3 New Literary History of America, ed. Marcus and Sollors, 380, 384. 13 Jeffrey Ferguson, The Sage of Sugar Hill: George S. Schuyler and the Harlem Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 32. See also Jeffrey Ferguson, “Sinclair Lewis,” in A New Literary History of America, ed. Marcus and Sollors, 580–584. Bulletin of the American Academy, Summer 2010 11 Academy Meetings © Charles Johnson Figure 4 This ludicrousness is present in many of the essays in A New Literary History of America, from Walter Mosley’s reflections on “hardboiled” prose to Monica Miller’s comments on Zora Neale Hurston’s rather different vein of humor.14 In 2001, conceptual artist Keith Townsend Obadike offered a version of the “I done quit the race” conundrum for the eBay era (Figure 5). Obadike put his blackness up for sale on the eBay auction site, a move that revisits the problem of voting and is also a self-reflexive comment on black humor itself. Sarcastically alluding to the legacy of slave auctions and to the racialism that makes “blackness” precisely a quality one can never shed, and following ordinary eBay conventions, Obadike gives potential buyers the following information: Mr. Obadike’s Blackness has been used primarily in the United States and its 14 Walter Mosley, “Poisonville,” in A New Literary History of America, ed. Marcus and Sollors, 598–602; and Monica Miller, “‘The Self-Respect of My People,’” in A New Literary History of America, ed. Marcus and Sollors, 852–856. functionality outside of the us cannot be guaranteed. Buyer will receive a certi½cate of authenticity. . . . Bene½ts: . . . 2. This Blackness may be used for writing critical essays or scholarship about other blacks. 3. This Blackness may be used for making jokes about black people and/or laughing at black humor comfortably. . . . 4. This Blackness may be used for accessing some af½rmative action bene½ts. (Limited time offer. May already be prohibited in some areas.) 5. This Blackness may be used for dating a black person without fear of public scrutiny. 6. This Blackness may be used for gaining access to exclusive, “high risk” neighborhoods. 7. This Blackness may be used for securing the right to use the terms ‘sista’, ‘brotha’, or ‘nigga’ in reference to black people. (Be sure to have certi½cate of authenticity on hand when using option.) . . . 9. This Blackness may be used to augment the blackness of those already black, especially for purposes of playing ‘blackerthan-thou’. . . . Warnings: 1. The Seller does not recommend that this Black- ness be used during legal proceedings of any sort. 2. The Seller does not recommend that this Blackness be used while seeking employment. . . . 5. The Seller does not recommend that this Blackness be used while making intellectual claims. 6. The Seller does not recommend that this Blackness be used while voting in the United States or Florida.15 The auction was held in August 2001 but was removed by eBay after only four days for inappropriateness. “Keith Obadike’s Blackness” had attracted twelve bidders and the highest bid was $152.50 when it was pulled. Perhaps it does take an existentialist’s black humor to make sense of race in America. © 2010 by Werner Sollors 15 Keith Townsend Obadike, “Keith Obadike’s Blackness” (2001), http://obadike.tripod.com/ ebay.html. 12 Bulletin of the American Academy, Summer 2010 Black Humor: Reflections on an American Tradition Figure 5 Bulletin of the American Academy, Summer 2010 13