Through analyzing these limited examples of cultural contact points, I have come closer to discovering how black and indigenous comics interact with racial politics when it comes to their own identity and that of others. I have found similarities in both comedic style, and in how individuals from each group incorporate the group other into their work but there are also so key differences.
What is political comedy? In terms of black performance, E. Patrick Johnson argues, “black performance has the potential of simultaneously forestalling and enabling social change” (Black Performance Studies, 447). He also states that multiple forms of black performance are employed to “transgress institutionalized forms of oppression” (Black Performance Studies, 455). In other words, black performance as a whole, let alone comedy in particular, is political whether by encouraging or inhibiting social change.
What about Native American comics though? The descriptions are pretty similar. Charlie Hill speaks of Indigenous comedy as “[taking] the land back one joke at a time” and many would agree (Morris, 45). Cultural expectations are “the products and the tools of domination and…an inheritance that haunts,” so going against the grain and surprising an audience through a subversion of cultural expectations, inherently breaks down the system of domination (Deloria, 4). Morris quotes Ian Ferguson to say that, “The most surprising thing for most non-Natives is that Indians are funny in the first place” (40). Thus, humor performed by marginalized groups, is inherently political because in making jokes, a comic is asserting their control over the reinterpretation of the situation. Through this process, stereotypes are broken down which leads to the dismantling of systems of oppression.
Website structure:
Use the menu at the top to navigate between my three categories of political comedy:
–African American Political Comedy
–Native American Political Comedy
On each page you will find multiple examples that by no means are meant to represent the category as a whole, but provide insight into certain themes and commonalities within the category.
The last page on the menu (About My Project) includes my reasoning for working on this topic and my citations for all the works I used to analyze the video clips.