Communicating with Laughter

Scene 1: A Southern plantation in the 1840s. A group of black slaves (then known as darkies) sits around a ramshackle log cabin. One strums a banjo--a cigar box and a stick strung with horsehair--as they sing:

Git out the way, ole Dan Tucker,

Too late to get your supper . . .

Combed his haid with a wagonwheel,

Died with a toothache in his heel.

Scene 2: Hollywood, 1935. A sleek phaeton town car whooshes onto the 20th Century-Fox lot. Emblazoned in neon lights along each side is the name "Stepin Fetchit." Under the klieg lights, Fetchit is anything but a phaeton owner. "Dey is ghostes roun' here!" he exclaims, wailing and rolling his eyes horribly. "I gots to get outer here."

Scene 3: The Bitter End Cafe in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, 1970. Jimmy Walker, 22, outlines the new black education: "Here's black history, here's where black people come from, black folks--and then they show us an Amos 'n' Andy rerun. Or chemistry class. That's where they show us how to make roach and ant killer."

Laughter, simmered in self-mockery, was the first black soul food. It fed the slave during his fierce day's travail in the shimmering Georgia cotton fields. It simultaneously comforted the second-class citizen and nurtured his sense of subservience during the agonizing disappointment of Reconstruction and through the long dark age of de jure segregation. Flight from reality, as illustrated in the nonsense lyric of Dan Tucker, formed the bedrock of the earliest Negro humor. Later, vaudeville, radio and the movies perpetuated the blackface minstrel stereotype of the happy-go-lucky devourer of watermelons.

Indeed, throughout the first half of this century, Negro performers generally reinforced the debased stereotype. Pigmeat Markham, the originator of "Here come de judge," was the vaudeville ideal of the irresponsible, chuckleheaded Negro. Mantan Moreland was so hopelessly inept that he practically had to be spoon-fed by his boss, Charlie Chan.

This sort of low caricature could hardly persist after the battle for civil rights was truly joined. In those tense days of the '50s and early '60s, laughter came to serve dual functions. By mocking the black's own intolerable position, it bolstered his emerging self-awareness as he marched on Selma and Washington. At the same time, it pricked the white's guilt feelings by chastening him for years of brutal apathy, then soothed his conscience with the balm of newfound empathy. Says Black Comic Stu Gilliam: "Until we marched in the streets, no one was interested in what the black man had to say. That's why we didn't have talking acts per se--only singing and dancing. Then black comedians became a link of communications. We had to be teachers and amateur psychologists."

The man who made the breakthrough was a sly satirist named Dick Gregory. At the Chicago Playboy Club in 1961 he brought the house down with his now famous line: "I waited around till the lunch counter finally integrated . . . and then they didn't have what I wanted." Gregory accomplished just what he intended: to evoke streams of conscience from whites while making them laugh. He also prodded black awareness, and other black comics picked up the double-edged blade of mockery. Godfrey Cambridge described the Negro white-collar worker going to the office with fried chicken in an attache case. George Kirby talks about the transplant of a black heart into a white man. "Not only did the white man live--he went to Harlem and won a tap-dancing contest. When he went home, he found three welfare checks waitin' for him and the finance company drivin' his Cadillac away." Moms Mabley waddles up to a mirror in a blonde wig and asks, "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all?" The voice in the mirror (Redd Foxx) answers: "Snow White. And don't you forget it!"

State of Mind. Three-button-suit-and-watermelon material now has mainly nostalgic value. Black laughter currently reflects a burgeoning self-confidence, an emerging sense of pride and power. It also reflects an understanding that, however unjustly, many whites are tired of being made to feel guilty. Says Peter Long, advertising director of Harlem's Apollo Theater: "Five or six years ago, people were embarrassed to be conservatives. Now there's no shame in it." Indeed, as Slappy White points out, "The swing is away from racial humor, because people won't laugh at talk about violent confrontation. They don't see anything funny about the Panthers." To be sure, some Gregorian humor is still extant, but on a less vitriolic--and much blacker--level. A current campus favorite: "This year's courses open to blacks are the black man's role in white culture, African history and Swahili. Next year's courses are the black man's role in white culture, African history and remedial Swahili."

The current trend in black humor is to dwell on the whole of black experience rather than on black-white confrontation. It is more soul than polemics, aimed increasingly at blacks but also at whites who at least partially apprehend the black condition. Richard Pryor, often called "the black Lenny Bruce," puts it simply: "Black is no longer a question of color, but a state of mind." The new rubric of mockery tends to exclude whites who want to laugh to expiate their racial sins.

That is why comedians like Redd Foxx, the scatalogical granddaddy of blue-black comics and the old pro most venerated by his descendants today, is enjoying nationwide success. In the late 1930s and '40s Foxx made his mark with 49 of the dirtiest--and funniest--party albums on record. Like so many oldtimers from the Chitlin' Circuit, he had to clean up his act for national television, but his cleaning job came out pure black. "I was in Watts when the riots started. Maybe you saw my cousin on TV with a couch on his head. 'Are you a looter?' asked a cop. 'No, baby,' he said, 'I'm a psychiatrist making a house call.' "

Foxx is not the pacesetter that Gregory was, though; black comics are now sufficiently self-assured to establish the tone and develop the material that suits them best. Bill Cosby--the richest and probably most successful of his colleagues--can hardly be labeled a black comic. That is like calling Jack Benny a Jewish comedian. In fact, some blacks tend to denigrate Cosby because they feel he speaks too much to white audiences and does not use blackness itself for material. Says Peter Long: "I don't think Cosby could go into a really tough black club and be a success."

Ethnic Grist. Still, Cosby's material has a blackness all its own. All ghetto humor is basically ethnic. U.S. minorities have traditionally preserved their identities by laughing at their origins. Cosby's North Philadelphia is as rich in ethnic grist as Manhattan's Lower East Side was for a generation of Jewish comedians. Consciously or not, there is a deeper facet of Negro heritage in Cosby: his penchant for outrageous hyperbole. When one of his TV pupils asks "Chet Kincaid" (Cosby) why he must take gym, he hears: " 'Cause you got to get in shape, man, in case the enemy comes and captures us and makes us march to Seattle."

If anyone epitomizes the new look in black humor, it is probably Flip Wilson; he seems to have solved the considerable problem of how to be black without being racial. Like Cosby, he tends to narrative rather than one-liners. His harridan housewife who swears to her hapless preacher husband, "The devil made me buy that dress!" may become one of the classic routines of American comedy. On a funkier level is Richard Pryor. Aside from his extensive repertory of anal and armpit gags, Pryor does such splendidly satirical routines as "It's a bat, it's a crow, it's a job for SUPER NIGGER!" A totally different sort of innovator is Irwin C. Watson, who takes a gently self-mocking, cerebral approach to blackness. "I wasn't too surprised to hear there was a group starting a back-to-Africa movement. They say that within the next ten years, all of the people of African descent will be goin' back to Africa. It warmed my heart. Every time I see one of them I wish him a pleasant voyage. See, 'cause I'm not goin'. I figure with all them goin' to Africa and all the white men goin' to the moon, they'll soon just be me, some Puerto Ricans and Chinese, fightin' to keep those Indians on the reservation."

Says Watson: "I want people to think. Humor without anger is nothing." But anger with humor can be devastating. As Godfrey Cambridge puts it: "I hope the backlash doesn't mean that some of my good white liberal friends are going to buy me back."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.