Research Description

Black Skin, White Laughs: Vernacular Black Humor and the Politics of American Masculinity

Through the theoretical framework of what W.E.B Dubois terms “double consciousness” this thesis explores the ways in which the black male comedian articulates the Hegelian dialectic between black and white patriarchy and serves as a catalyst for the inscription of and interpellation into black gender ideologies. By examining stand-up comedy routines as mimetic signifying practices crucial to the formation of black subjectivities, I hope to complicate the notions of gender binaries in racialized discourse.

Black feminist criticism locates black womanhood outside of two seminal discourses: white feminism, whose early agendas did not address the concerns of black women, and the Civil Rights movement, whose quest for equality for black mankind seemingly necessitated the subjugation of black womankind. The term “double jeopardy” then, aptly articulates the intersectional nature of the black woman’s oppression but problematically implies that black manhood, because it operates within a system of patriarchy, is not subject to a gendered racialism.

I concede the black feminist impetus towards progressive gender ideologies, but contend that they cannot eschew an understanding of the black male’s distinct position as both a gendered and racial subject or an understanding of how the dialectic nature of his subjectivity is inscribed into and reinforced through popular culture. My research, while reaffirming blackness, “otherness”, as crucial to theoretical inquiry, demonstrates the black epistemologies is susceptible to inculcating similarly oppressive silences. Secondly, it reaffirms the popular, “low culture”, as a site for active contestation of hegemonic notions of gender.