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Bill Cosby: A Recent Pioneer
• In the mid 1960‟s, Bill Cosby was recruited from stand-up, to star in a dramatic series. • He created Fat Albert for CBS and helped develop The Electric Company for public television. • In 1968, he starred in the Bill Crosby Show, while from 1984 to 1992, he starred in The Cosby Show about the upwardly mobile Huxtables. • Some Blacks criticize him for being “too white,” while others view him as a hero.
Moms Mabley 1897-1975
• Mabley would come on stage in oversized clodhoppers, a raggedy dress, and an oddball hat. She played the role of a ribald grandmother. • She was nearly 70 when she first played for a white audience at the Playboy Club in Chicago. • She later made guest appearances with Bill Cosby, Flip Wilson, and the Smothers Brothers.
• By today‟s standards, the show was both racist and stereotyped.
• However, Joe Franklin said that the Blacks on the show may have “prepared the ground for the acceptance of real blacks in the American cultural mainstream.”
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Whoopi Goldberg: The First Black Female Superstar
• In the 1990s, Whoopi Goldberg‟s talent for ad lib and for making a stage sparkle with power was showcased in her role as host of the Academy Awards. • She was born Caryn Johnson and raised in a public housing project in Manhattan by a single mother. • She made her performing debut at age eight with the Helena Rubinstein Children‟s Theatre at the Hudson Guild.
•“Yeah Oscar!” “You‟re a grouch!” It‟s like “Bitch I live in a fu**ing TRASH CAN!”
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Dave Chapelle‟s “Black Money”
/watch?v=tnffskKI_IA
• In his most famous skit, he played the world‟s funkiest judge. The audience would say, “Here come da Judge,” a line later used by both Flip Wilson and Sammy Davis Jr.
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Two Comedy Pioneers
Pigmeat Markham 1904-81
• Markham was a blackface performer and when audiences and critics demanded that burnt-cork performances end, they were astonished to find that he was actually darker than the makeup he had used.
AFRICAN-AMERICAN HUMOR
by Don L. F. Nilsen and Alleen Pace Nilsen
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The World-Wide InflHumor scholars have always acknowledged the contributions and effects of Jewish humor on the subjects and the roles of American humor. • It is appropriate to also acknowledge the contributions of African Americans to the overall humor of the United States—and to the world—especially if we consider the elements of playfulness and humor in hip-hop. • Within living memory, the “place” of AA humor has undergone more change than any other genre. Today, the mainstream laughs with Blacks, while a couple of generations ago, the custom was to laugh at blacks.
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Redd Foxx: Another Pioneer
• In a precursor to the creative spelling in Hip Hop, Foxx chose to spell his name with two d’s and two x‟s because he didn‟t want to be either a color or an animal. • A recent quote: “Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.”
2
Until well after WW II . . .
• Traveling minstrel shows were one of the few theater events available in rural areas. • In small town America, amateur actors loved to put on black-face and costumes and perform their own minstrel shows. • Popular children‟s books included the 1889 Story of Little Black Sambo by British author Helen Bannerman and the 1907 Epaminondas and His Auntie by Sara Cone Bryant. • It was the exaggerated drawings, as much as the stories, that offended African Americans and made black children feel embarrassed or ashamed when teachers read the books to mixed school groups.
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Some Contemporary Comedians: Dave Chappelle
Sample Quote:
•They got a character on Sesame Street named Oscar. They treat this guy like shit the entire show. They judge him right in his face. “Oscar you are so mean! Isn‟t he kids?”
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Chris Rock: A Sample Quote
“Barack, man. He doesn‟t let his blackness sneak up on you. Like if his name was Bob Jones or something like that, it might take you two or three weeks to figure out he‟s black. But when you hear „Barack Obama,‟ you picture a brother with a spear, just standing over a dead lion. You picture the base player from the Commodores.”
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Dick Gregory: A Sample Quote
“America is the only country in the world where a man can grow up in a ghetto, go to really bad schools, be forced to ride in the back of the bus, and then get paid $5,000 a week to tell people about it.”