Fury in the “Promised Land”

This chapter examines the development of comic rage after the civil rights movement. These works push back against the popular narrative of America’s colorblindness and that the 1980s initiated a period in which racism had ceased to exist. As part of a new artistic wave known as the New Black Aesthetic, these younger writers used their perspectives as the first post-integration generation to chronicle the new challenges facing African Americans. The unprecedented willingness to use humor as a central element in their work created a perfect site for comic rage to flourish and expand. The works that emerge focus on how cultural mulattoes—as many refer to the post-integration generation—attempt to achieve equality in a country attempting to assimilate them and erase the distinctiveness of their cultural traditions and identities.

From Absence to Flight

This chapter explores radicalization of comic rage in Douglas Turner Ward’s Day of Absence and Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada. Emerging in the middle of the transition from the integrationist period of the civil rights movement to the nationalism of the Black Power movement, both works openly challenge fundamental concepts about race. In addition to targeting fundamental assumptions of Western superiority, these works also question simplistic counter-representations that African Americans present to combat racist stereotypes. Using forms increasingly important in African American literature, like drama and neo-slave narratives, these works enact comic rage as way to depict unique and powerful forms of resistance.

Introduction

This chapter establishes the definition of comic rage and traces the history of humor and militancy in African American literature and history. It distinguishes between comic rage and satire, culminating in an examination of George Schuyler’s Black No More. It details how comic rage acts as an abjection (from Julia Kristeva) that breaks down simplistic ideas about race and representations that appear in literature and popular culture. While identifying Richard Pryor as the most recognizable employer of comic rage, this chapter also points to figures like Sutton Griggs, Ishmael Reed, and Malcolm X; who embody the multiple combinations of anger and comedy that appear in the chapters of the book. It outlines the contents of the chapters that trace the development of comic rage in relation to the various political and literary moments in American and African American life.

Hollywood Shuffle and Bamboozled

On the heels of the expansion of comic rage into art forms beyond literature and stand-up, this chapter examines the presence of comic rage in films directed by African Americans. After the Blaxploitation Era and the surge of black films and television shows in the 1990s, these films critiqued the problematic representations of blackness that have been imbedded in two of the most popular mediums of the second half of the twentieth century. While Hollywood Shuffle castigates the limited roles African Americans are given in film, Bamboozled exposes the virtual return to blackface minstrelsy that black actors are expected to accept in an allegedly more diverse TV landscape. Both works wrestle with questions of authenticity that are imposed by mainstream society or blindly adopted by African Americans responding with simplistic “real” yet destructive counter-representations.

Conclusion

This chapter concludes with a brief look at the continuing presence of comic rage in the twenty-first century. Whether in the literature of Percival Everett, the comedy of Wanda Sykes, or the comic strip/television show The Boondocks, comic rage continues to expand into new forms and new topics.

Direct from a Never Scared Bicentennial Nigger

This chapter examines the work of Richard Pryor and his comic successors, who build on his work while taking it in dynamic and unprecedented directions. In particular, this chapter focuses its attention on comedy albums that combine the live stand-up of the comics with recorded bits that reinforce critiques in other forms. So, Pryor’s Bicentennial Nigger uses skits to help reject the romanticized narrative of the United States at the bicentennial. One of the most immediate successors to Pryor was Whoopi Goldberg, whose Direct from Broadway pulls from the template that Moms Mabley constructed by directly confronting the oppression that sits at the intersection of race and gender. However, Goldberg expands on Pryor’s work not through the inclusion of a female voice but by transforming the exploration of black life into a female-centric critique of white, Western, supremacist, patriarchal hegemony. This chapter argues that Chris Rock most effectively realizes Pryor’s legacy of comic rage. Rock’s work, from Bring the Pain (1996) to Never Scared (2004), engages directly with the historical moment of post–civil rights America and is most clearly represented in Rock’s infusion of hip-hop into the structure and style of mainstream stand-up comedy.

Dick Gregory, Moms Mabley, and Redd Foxx

This chapter links the development of comic rage in African American literature to similar and perpendicular changes in stand-up comedy. While Dick Gregory embodies the convergence of the civil rights movement and the emergence of stand-up as a critical form of expression, this chapter also traces influential figures like Moms Mabley and Redd Foxx to identify the elements from which Gregory pulls in his deployment of comic rage. Mabley’s embrace of community allowed her to challenge patriarchal assumptions about sexual and gender relations while Foxx’s performance of, what I call, the Comic Bad Nigger produces a tone of fearlessness that Gregory imbeds in his act. Gregory’s ability to maintain the balance of both elements creates a space where he and his audience constructively explored race in a way that mirrored the push for integration and equality.

(Re)Viewing Ellison’s Invisible Man

This chapter examines Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man as a foundational work in the development of comic rage, particularly through its use of black folk tradition. Ellison’s use of the tradition of black folk humor on both literal and cultural targets manifests itself in extensive acts of signifying. In particular, the novel critiques black protest novels of the 1940s and 1950s—embodied by Richard Wright’s Native Son—with the use of humor and other forms of African American cultural expressions. This chapter explores how, while the novel contains as much rage and violence as the protest novels do in their critique of racist oppression, Ellison’s novel avoids allowing the rage to become destructive by highlighting the rhetorical skill of the protagonist and the embrace of jazz as a critical aesthetic. The book lays the groundwork for other works of comic rage both within and outside the African American literary tradition.