Embodied and Disembodied Black Satire: From Chappelle and Crockett to Key & Peele

This chapter argues that Dave Chappelle, Affion Crocket, and the duo Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key have all fallen victim to the black comedic Conundrum of excessively physical comedy. These comedians testify not only to the problems associated with representations of the black male body, but also highlight the lack of strong female comediennes headlining television sketch comedy shows. This chapter also notes, however, that each of these comedians has produced satire that conveys substantive social commentary.

Satirizing Satire: Symbolic Violence and Subversion in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled

This chapter employs Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “symbolic violence” in order to analyse Spike Lee’s film Bamboozled. This film targets both the overtly racist cultural practices like minstrelsy as well as the more subtle, insidious forms of racism perpetuated by the belief of a post-race America. The film demonstrates the ease by which racial stereotypes are adopted, and the difficulty in moving past them.

Dissimulating Blackness: The Degenerative Satires of Paul Beatty and Percival Everett

This chapter provides a reading of three novels – Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle and Slumberland and Percival Everett’s A History of the African American People [Proposed] by Strom Thurmond as Told to Percival Everett and James Kincaid – that engage in degenerative satire, which complicates the mimetic representation of satiric texts. This chapter argues that these novels satirize not only clichéd tropes of blackness but also the presumption that blackness can or should be represented. Ultimately, this chapter shows how these novels destabilize the very notion of blackness.

Who’s Afraid of Post-Soul Satire?: Touré’s “Black Widow” Trilogy in The Portable Promised Land

This chapter provides an analysis of Touré’s fiction in light of his later non-fiction Work that addresses racial authenticity. In Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?, Touré explores the fluid definitions of blackness in contemporary African American culture. These definitions are read against his earlier fiction, where he portrays the varieties of blackness through the character of the Black Widow, through which he explores notions of racial authenticity.

Charlie Murphy: American Storyteller

This chapter argues that the “Charlie Murphy’s True Hollywood Tales” participates in the tradition of the American Tall Tale. As satiric picaro, Charlie Murphy uses his tales – recounting incidents with Rick James and Prince – to critique various aspects of contemporary African American culture. Further, the multi-layered form of the tales itself, along with the subject matter addressing black celebrities, specifically targets the entertainment industry, which is thus depicted as a modern-day slave institution.

Pilgrims in an Unholy Land: Satire and the Challenge of African American Leadership in The Boondocks and The White Boy Shuffle

This chapter provides a reading of Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle and Aaron McGruder’s animated television series The Boondocks in order to explore the satirizing of leadership in the African American community. This chapter posits that a lack of hero figures allows for the satirizing of Martin Luther King, Jr. These texts, and the lack of leadership they portray, highlight the gap between the desire for racial harmony and the complexity of the contemporary African American experience.

Touré, Ecstatic Consumption, and Soul City: Satire and the Problem of Monoculture

This chapter reads Touré’s fiction against his non-fiction in order to highlight a conceptual tension between artistic experimentation and monocultural consumption. This chapter posits that a similar tension exists between the desire to share in cultural products that help construct a unified identity and the necessity to diversity those forms. Ultimately, Touré satirizes the danger inherent in monocultural productions.

Dirty Pretty Things: The Racial Grotesque and Contemporary Art1

This chapter explores the use of the “racial grotesque” as a satiric technique in several recent works in a variety of media, including sculpture and internet videos. This chapter argues that the “racial grotesque” is employed by artists to recontextualize material objects associated with the legacy of slavery. Ultimately, these material objects bear witness to and address the nation’s attempt to erase America’s complicated racial history

Blackness We Can Believe In: Authentic Blackness and the Evolution of Aaron McGruder’s The Boondocks

This chapter explores Aaron McGruder’s use of “comic rage” – comedy fuelled by anger and resentment – as a driving principle behind the satire of his hit comic and animated television series The Boondocks. This chapter demonstrates how The Boondocks challenges the mainstream belief in a “colorblind” society that Supposedly followed the Civil Rights Movement. This chapter shows how McGruder uses satire and parody to critique the inconsistencies present in contemporary discussions of race in America.

Afterword: From Pilloried to Post-Soul: The Future of African American Satire

This chapter offers a snapshot of the current state of African American satire and muses on the possible directions it may take in the future. Using Trey Ellis’s formulation of the New Black Aesthetic as its touchstone, this chapter not only articulates how the New Black Aesthetic characterizes contemporary African American fiction, but also how its blindspot with respect to class issues. This chapter concludes that satire by its very nature disturbs the status quo, and there is no reason to doubt that it will continue to do so.