Black Like Me: The End of Reciprocity? (original) (raw)
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Race and Power: Transgressing the Hegemony through Humor
This capstone explores prior research in the area of ethnic, self-deprecatory, and disparaging humor in stand-up comedy as either oppressive or transgressive. Much of the previous research done in this area has confirmed that ethnic and self-deprecatory humor in general tends to be oppressive. This research disagrees with that conclusion, and posits that stereotypes may be useful in disrupting the reifying process of the hegemony. This research further posits that it is necessary to understand the following themes in order to understand humor as transgressive: culture, power, society, language, the social construction of reality, race, humor, and the relationship between each of these. The analysis uses a variation of a priori coding to analyze the content, comprised of segments of comedy specials from these comedians:
A Good Story": On Black Abjection in Improv Comedy
2014
This paper discusses Black absence in Improv Comedy as a symptom for the racial exclusion inherent in Humanism. Critiquing Enlightenment thought as the epistemological basis for Improv's liberatory and democratic ideals , I engage in deconstructive play with one of the era's central literary motifs, the Doppelganger . I analyze Improv as a particular symptom of White aesthetic, cultural, and political hegemony.
Comedy and critical thought: Laughter as resistance
Contemporary Political Theory, 2018
Is humor critique? Many have long assumed it to be-including heads of state and government censors. A group of people sniggering together often seems threatening, signifying a kind of antisocial collectivity, a point of view not commonly available, a subverting of the normative stitching of politics. This suggestive conflation also underlies the power of the medieval jester, the coyote trickster, the Greek cynic, the literary satirist, and-in our own time-the late-night television comedian, all of whom possess a tremendous power: the ability to say the unsayable, to confront hypocrisy, to kick the pricks. But any clear-eyed rendition of humor must also take into account its profoundly reactive qualities. Those sniggers also serve to keep others in their place. The subjects of jokes are more often minorities than governments. The cutting edge of wit can exile and humiliate. Teenagers mobilize humor against the misfit, the nerd, the overweight, the already-outcast. This would seem an odd fit for critique: cruelty against the weak does not comport with the uncovering of the truth from the exigencies and productions of capitalist cultural consumerism. Comedy also operates under a second set of procedures which misfit critical thinking. Critique requires distance from its subject, whereas humor operates through immersion. Humor operates contextually and immanently. Explaining a joke kills the joke. And a third problematic: critique depends on a profound positivism, or at least a presumption of discoverable verities. Discovery (the procedures of seeing how things operate) and actuality (the structural truth of oppression in any given situation) underpin critical thought. What is behind the curtain is real; the curtain itself must be abolished. Comedic tropes, in contrast, revel in the play between reality, intentionality, and meaning: irony, sarcasm, exaggeration, slapstick. Critique operates structurally and narratively, while humor surprises and undercuts. This volume of thirteen essays, originating in a conference ranging across lines of political science, rhetoric, history, philosophy, and media, addresses this vital
Routledge Books, 2022
What performative strategies do stand-up comics engage in when inviting audiences to consider them as subjects whose race is coded differently when performing in different countries? How do these performative strategies assist comics in translating their comic material across borders, wherein exists the inevitable, fluctuating demarcations and delineations of racial construction? The stand-up comics I explore in this chapter: Tehran Von Ghasri, Trevor Noah, Gina Yashere, and Aamer Rahman, are all comics whose work constitutes critical race humor as a "form of public pedagogy…[providing] people with the skills and habits of thought necessary to think critically about and transform racial knowledge and reality" (Rossing 16). The defiance of "dominant practices and ideologies that promote the erasure of material realities of race," through comic performance, coupled with a transnational self-awareness on the part of the performer, is the current which flows underneath the work of the comics discussed here (Rossing 17). A transnational origin for these comics is not merely embodied as an intersection of their own identities, but additionally, a matter of how they adapt their performative strategies in response to their racial legibility when moving across national borders. To borrow from Mary Louise Pratt, I define this space as a comedy contact zone (1991); a place in which the colonizers and the colonized meet, and within which the performer, a "conquered subject [uses] the conqueror's language to construct a parodic, oppositional representation of the conqueror's own speech" (Pratt 35). What becomes evident from analysis of these comics' performances is the reliance on their ability to create multiple vocal qualities, manifesting a parody of whiteness for audiences and affecting the "conqueror's language." These comics, performing from the U.S., Kuwait, Israel, UK, to Germany, UAE, Australia, etc., utilize a global awareness of the ways in which color, ethnicity, class, and nationality integrate to produce various readings of their bodies; their performative strategies then capitalize on the voice as a key instrument, capable of challenging these raced views of their identity. Book: Punching Up in Stand-Up Comedy Speaking Truth to Power Edited By Rashi Bhargava, Richa Chilana Copyright 2023 Punching Up in Stand-Up Comedy explores the new forms, voices and venues of stand-up comedy in different parts of the world and its potential role as a counterhegemonic tool for satire, commentary and expression of identity especially for the disempowered or marginalised. The title brings together essays and perspectives on stand-up and satire from different cultural and political contexts across the world which raise pertinent issues regarding its role in contemporary times, especially with the increased presence of OTT platforms and internet penetration that allows for easy access to this art form. It examines the theoretical understanding of the different aspects of the humour, aesthetics and politics of stand-up comedy, as well as the exploration of race, gender, politics and conflicts, urban culture and LGBTQ+ identities in countries such as Indonesia, Finland, France, Iran, Italy, Morocco, India and the USA. It also asks the question whether, along with contesting and destabilising existing discursive frameworks and identities, a stand-up comic can open up a space for envisaging a new social, cultural and political order? This book will appeal to people interested in performance studies, media, popular culture, digital culture, sociology, digital sociology and anthropology, and English literature. Chapter 9 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons (CC-BY) 4.0 license. Funded by the University of Helsinki.
The Barriers to a Critical Comedy
The political valence of comedy is difficult to determine. It appears often to mock figures of authority, but ideology also relies on comedy to create an investment in the ruling social structure. This essay argues that comedy has no inherent political leaning. We must determine the politics of comedy by analyzing how the conception of the social order that it produces. If comedy creates an image of the social order as a whole, it has a conservative function. But if comedy reveals the incompleteness of the social structure, it functions as a critical comedy that plays an emancipatory role in political struggle.