Black Like Me: The End of Reciprocity? (original) (raw)

I propose then a theater in which violent physical images crush and hypnotize the sensibility of the spectator seized by the theater as by a whirlwind of high forces. A theater which, abandoning psychology, recounts the extraordinary, stages natural conflicts, natural and subtle forces, and presents itself first of all as an exceptional power of redirection.-Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double Cris Mayo wrote her essay sometime before November 2007. Between the first time I read her essay in January 2008 and the time I wrote this response, I was pushed in a very different direction from her stated "general concern": to analyze black humor's strategies of playing with the audience, disrupting passive spectatorship, and insisting on nonreciprocity, features that may be useful to intervening in stalled discussions. I begin by tracing a general history of humor's relationship to power.… The signifying pedagogy derived from black humor traditions, through its pleasures and complexities, ultimately offers a way to move from spectator to participant, to a more knowing, critical partner in examining knowledge and forms of engagement. Everyone wants to be in on the joke, even if it means being part of the reason for the laughter and as such being part of the problem.