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Let’s Be Frank Parrhesia and the Black Comedic Tradition Christopher Williams Acknowledgements I would like to thank my parents, Sonji Williams and Harold Thompson. I would not have been able to make it through this process without their support. My advisor Wendell Holbrook has influenced my thinking since sophomore year and I do not know what my scholastic experience would have been like without his instruction. Danielle Cooper is the friend who introduced me to Mom’s work and I am very thankful for that. I am indebted to the kindness (and deadline extensions) offered by Kinna Perry, Patricia Guillaume and Liezza Salgado. To my friends and family who I have shared laughter and sorrows with, you are the ones who kept me motivated enough to complete this. I look forward to what the future brings. Preface I never prided myself on my memory. Some of the earliest ones I have that I am sure are not imagined are of staying up on weekends much longer than I ought to have done watching Comedy Central re-runs. There would be these adults who would say completely the words I could only refer to by their first letter; they would say the things that I would repeat to my friends the next day so that I would be thought of as the funny one and not the nerd. It was my way of fitting in. This particular way of fostering community would often get me in trouble once my mom or pop found out about me acting up. My mom would tell me that I was too smart to be causing trouble. The thing was I never thought of comedy, acting smart, and misbehaving as mutually exclusive. I mean, who needs Marx to tell you about the cultural and economic divide between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie when you could just as easily hear The Aristocrats! As a TV audience member, some comedian’s sets resembled lecture halls. I was exposed to issues of censorship and profanity by George Carlin’s 7 dirty words you can’t say on television far before any teacher in class told me about them. Katt Williams played a part in my formation of what it meant to be cool with the Pimp chronicles. There were elements of Dave Chappelle’s sketches, particularly When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong, which would resonate with me even after the laughs died down. There was something more to them. There were three things about comedy, stand up in particular, which repeatedly drew me back to comedy as an art form. Comedy was a craft I enjoyed seeing performed well. There’s is something inviting about a stage spotlight that draws me in and encourages an audience to take notice of the performer’s small gestures or turns of phrase. Each comedian had this idiosyncratic cadence about them that differed like tracks from different genres. Second, listening to comedians made me feel not as alone growing up. I usually choose to spend time with adults instead of my peers. I considered myself to be more mature mentally than my biological peers because I could keep up with adult topics. Those “mature audience only” messages Comedy Central would plaster in front of the after-hours shows they hosted had to mean something, right? They would often rip into those annoying cultural fads of those generation Y-ers (of which I was a part) that I found annoying. It made me feel like one of the savvy ones who, unlike my sheeple peers, was able to see through all of the bullshit that our normative processes of acculturation piles on. It helped me to find a voice. Most important, I was envious of the comedian’s audacious ability to blurt out bold punch lines or opinions. Although I frequently felt the same way, I at least knew that you weren’t supposed to say those things out loud! It was if they they knew it too, but that did not stop them from saying what they said! Sometimes they hid their protections in their titles. It is almost natural to brace yourself for hearing taboos being broken after learning Chris Rock decided to name the performance “Kill the Messenger” or Patrice O’Neal naming his own special “Elephant in the Room”? The frankness with which comedians often shared their politically incorrect statements, strangely enough, lent what they said a bit of credibility. They were one of the first ones that showed that there was a potential to deploy truths that caused people to cringe. Some reel back at excess honesty. Others strike. Some topics, even secular ones, approach this strange point on the taboo continuum where they almost become sacred. These topics include but are not reducible to war, terrorism, morality, state corruption, and people’s mothers. Most people respect these limits and stay within the parameters of good, clean conversation; no religion, no sex, no politics. Others are apostates, transgressing unspoken rules for the hell of it. This class of speakers can be broken up into different camps. Some are political radicals. Some are merely immature and do not know what devils they can raise with their tongues. Others get paid to do it in public and occasionally have legions of adoring fans. They are called comedians. Consider Chris Rock’s SNL monologue in which he took the time to joke about the Boston marathon bombing just a day before the New York City marathon. He belittled heinous acts of terrorism and blasphemed the Lord Jesus Christ’s birth by reducing these topics to mere joking matters. His performance was irreverent, crass black humor that was broadcast across television screens nationally. He also raised a few points worthy of consideration. Sure, he made an insensitive joke about the Freedom Tower being sponsored by Target, but isn’t that joke a barely veiled criticism of the American braggadocio required to build a near replica World Trade Center in the exact same location where the prior one was attacked? And even if his comments on Jesus and 9/11 were profane, weren’t his comments just symptomatic of the rampant commodification and amorality so integral to American advertising? That is a lot of social and political work considering Rock’s set was only 8 minutes. It is important to be aware that this is not new. The February 22nd 1962 edition of Jet magazine was entitled “Are Negro Comics Too Serious?” There were four faces on the cover; Dick Gregory, Slappy White, Nipsey Russell and Jackie “Moms” Mabley. The companion article drew attention to a jarring shift in Negro comedy. It seemed as if the vaudeville days were closing out in favor of sets that discussed “integration problems, politics and world affairs”. I think that it is clear that comedians like Moms, Red Foxx and all of their contemporaries were trailblazers, but what path were they on? What would a black comedy that dealt with serious issues like Lenny Bruce’s material look like and what could it be used for? Abstract The intersecting lines of politics, rhetoric and humor have had a long relationship. Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal and other forms of humorous social commentary like the work of political cartoonists have often used parody and satire to criticize popular socioeconomic policies and the consequences that they’d have for people at large. This tradition continues today, as shows like Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show have large followings and faux newspapers like The Onion comment on civil rights issues like the Baltimore uprising surrounding the death of Freddie Gray while under police custody. At the White House Correspondent’s Dinner Speech, President Obama invited Keegan-Michael Key of comedy duo Key & Peele to play Luther, Obama’s anger translator. The joke takes as a premise that Obama’s presentation as a calm and passive Tom is a façade and that a raging buck lies hidden underneath (or stands behind of, the case of Luther) his patina of diplomacy. Black comedy particularly has had a close relationship with politics in the United States. The humor of comedians Jackie “Moms” Mabley, Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle are laced with such political commentary. This thesis is an attempt to trace the work of major players in the black comedian tradition to determine if they are examples of what Foucault describes as parrhesiates in Fearless Speech, a collection of lectures he gave on the ethical implications of speaking truth to power. Introduction Let’s be Frank: Parrhesia and the Black Comedic Tradition …[C]ourage wants to laugh. I no longer sympathize with you; this cloud beneath me, this black and heavy thing at which I laugh – precisely this is your thundercloud. You look upward when you long for elevation. And I look down because I am elevated. Who among you can laugh and be elevated at the same time? Whoever climbs the highest mountain laughs at all tragic plays and tragic realities I could not resist the urge to signify upon philosophy as practiced within the academy. While I seriously doubt the blackness that Nietzsche refers to here pertains to racial classification, I hope that the quote resonates with the work of Richard Pryor, Jackie “Mom” Mabley and Dave Chappelle in such a way that racial character of their comedy adds to the already implicit relation of pain and laughter. Nietzsche-as-Zarathustra claims that through exposure to and the overcoming of trauma, one can find humor in even the most horrible of things. Richard Pryor is a prime example of one who was able to make light of heavy circumstances; Pryor ends his Live on the Sunset Strip set with a reference to his much publicized suicide attempt. Comedians have an uncanny ability to make light of events that are taboo or too serious to joke about for others. Richard Pryor is not alone in this, Dave Chappelle and Moms have made jokes about traumatic events including lynching, police brutality, and segregation. In addition to playing with the philosophic tradition, I wanted to draw attention to black political consciousness to thought that upsets the common equivocation of intellectualism with bourgeoisie, respectable forms of scholarship. As easy as it is to associate black scholarship with the likes of W.E.B DuBois and Cornel West, it is dangerous to reduce black scholarship to them. It is sometimes difficult to understand the erudite and occasionally labyrinthine writings of academics, especially those thinking through Marxism, Feminism, Critical Race Theory, and page length requirements. I want to use this thesis as an opportunity to shed light on intellectually rigorous content that often goes forgotten because the audience laughs instead of taking intensive notes. Perhaps they should do the latter as well. . Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra Richard Pryor was a massively popular black comedian whose comedy centered on racial topics. In Critical Race Humor in a Postracial Moment, Jonathan Rossing describes Pryor’s body of work in relation to Michel Foucault’s notion of the parrhesiate. A parrhesiate is an individual who carries out the ethical duty of exposing the truth to an audience that can harm them in response to their testimony. Rossing details the traumatic content of Pryor’s material and the dangers that Pryor opened himself to, considering that he performed for largely white audiences. Rossing exalts Pryor as an example of how comedy can be used to ease discussions concerning high tension topics like race to “[shield] his audience from a sense of besiegement” (Rossing 28). The paper concludes on an optimistic, multicultural note, suggesting that Pryor’s career can be viewed as a model for future forms of parrhesia. Might Rossing’s universal approach to Pryor compromise his method of situating Pryor within the parrhesiatic tradition? In Truth and Power, Foucault draws a distinction between “universal intellectuals” and “specific intellectuals”. While universal intellectuals espouse information that aligns with the popular discursive tendencies of the time, specific intellectuals interrogate what governs statements that produce propositions that are considered to be valid (Essential 303). An example of this would be jokes that criticize the validity of claims that America has entered a post-racial phase. As a black performer who discussed racial concerns specific to poor black communities, it is odd that even after conceding a description of Pryor’s performances as homophobic and misogynist, Rossing concludes that Pryor’s body of work is a model that is universalizeable. Would a specific intellectual reading of black comedy inclusive of but not reductive to Pryor’s work have the same outcome? Would problematizing the comedy of Richard Pryor, Jackie “Moms” Mabley and Dave Chappelle shed light on nuances that go unanalyzed in Rossing’s work that draw the Pryor’s title of parrhesiate into suspicion? What differences in interpretation would a specific reading of Pryor’s work have from a universal one? For Foucault, problematization is a discursive method that seeks to uncover contradictions or inconsistencies in universal claims of truth by presenting how a particular form of life has lived a reality different from that of the orthodox description of it (Essential 23). The method is useful for uncovering epistemic frictions, interactions between eccentric and mainstream forms of knowing that compete with each other for authority (Medina 21). A truth in this sense is not merely an objective fact, but a perspective on an issue that is made legitimate by the authority of various institutions like the academy, the state, and the Catholic Church (Ross 67). These institutions have means of disqualifying the testimonies of those who speak from perspectives outside of or contrary to an established paradigm of knowing. Subjects whose narratives disrupt the established narratives are classified as pseudo-intellectual, conspirators, or heretics depending on the relevant power-regime that their testimony challenges. Rossing’s description of Pryor as a parrhesiate includes him in a long tradition of truth tellers that harks back to ancient Greece. However, the Greek parrhesiate had very specific characteristics that defined them as such. Greece was a city-state that primarily consisted of citizens and second class citizens. Citizens were men who were often land owning, able to vote, and held an enviable position in society. What interested Foucault in the parrhesiate was that they acted deliberately against the social expectation to maintain their economic well-being and safety out of an obligation to speak the truth. In Foucault’s examples of parrhesiates, respected citizens who were not in any obvious danger would risk their safety to speak to a king about his unjust practices: a philosopher may chastise a sovereign’s tyranny because it is incompatible with justice, knowing that the King’s anger may result in their exile or death (Fearless 16). Even if non-citizens said the exact same things as an established parrhesiate their testimony would not have been classified as such. The transformation into parrhesiate requires a break from the domain of relative safety or social respect for the sake of an ethical relation to oneself (Fearless 17). However, second class citizens are never afforded these luxuries in order to then suspend them in the name of truth. This bars them from accurately being described as parrhesiate. Does Pryor (along with Moms and Chappelle by extension) inhabit a subject position that correlates to being a Greek Citizen in the United States, or are there properties like his blackness or a change in how citizens relate to the state that would disqualify him of the title parrhesiate? Biography Pryor Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor was born on December 1st in 1940 and raised in Peoria, Illinois. An important factor in the rawness of the comedy that Pryor became known for was his upbringing. Many of his family members participated in illegal economies to survive. Some of the pimps and prostitutes that were scattered along his material were his very family members His mother Gertrude Thomas was a prostitute and abandoned him at ten. His father LeRoy Pryor was a pimp. Richard’s grandmother Marie Carter Pryor Bryant took responsibility for Pryor and raised him in an environment that was not the most accommodating for children. She was the well-known Madame of a bordello and raised Pryor there. Before comedy, Pryor worked odd jobs before he joined the Army. Pryor occasionally found himself in trouble, he was punished for a month after stabbing a fellow solder with a switchblade for laughing at a showing of the film Imitation of Life (New Yorker). Surprisingly, Pryor’s initial standup was modeled on Bill Cosby’s act. Cosby was one of the first major black comics who had crossover appeal to both black and white audiences. However, Pryor felt inauthentic for essentially copying Cosby’s material instead of speaking in his own voice. There was a marked shift in his style during a set at The Aladdin in Las Vegas, Nevada. While he was performing, he said that he saw Dean Martin in the audience and imagined that “he looked like a damned fool” performing his material (Omit the Logic). My interest is in the turn that took place after his shift away from Cosbyesque humor. His subject material shifted toward experiences from his own life and current events of the time. Chappelle Born on August 24th in 1973 to William David Chappelle and Yvonne Lee Chappelle in Washington D.C., David Khari Webber Chappelle goes by Dave Chappelle onstage. He is largely known for his namesake the “Chappelle’s Show” which was also co-written by Neal Brennan. The first season of the show remains the bestselling television series of all time. While the show only lasted a span of two, arguably three seasons, Chappelle has spent over a decade doing comedy and has received large amounts of recognition in the process. He began performing for audiences at 14, while he was still in middle school. Chappelle studied acting at Washington, D.C’s Duke Ellington School of the arts. Heavily influenced by comedians like Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor, Chappelle’s comedy is laced with drug use, the trials of inner city black life, and a struggle with racial authenticity that goes to the core of what it means to be black in America. Dave developed his sporadic style from interactions with the street comedian Charlie Barnett. A significant part of the shows allure was its rawness. Each episode was a flow of genius, deconstructions of racial codification, moving music and gut wrenching comedy in a span of about twenty five minutes. In his own words, "[The show] was like taking somebody on a tour through a young black man's subconscious, and I don't think America has been there. So in a way it was kind of like reality TV, right (heaven hell)" He has worked with Paul Mooney on the Chappelle’s Show, an important comedian in his own right. Nominated for an Emmy twice, short amount of time performing when compared to Moms and Pryor makes his achievements the more shocking. Maya Angelou referring to an interview she did with him said that “Dave Chappelle is among the best we have…the truth is I think we lifted each other up.” (Iconoclast, 2006). I think that Chappelle’s career choices mark most clearly the ethical dimension of comedy being performed before large audiences. His career arch, especially, shows that humor in itself is not always enough to distance the performer from the audience’s vengeance. The first two seasons of Chappelle’s Show were a massive success. The show’s popularity was instrumental in developing Comedy Central’s name. In 2005, Comedy Central offered Chappelle an upwards of fifty million dollars for a two year contract in which he’d produce two more seasons because of the unprecedented success of the show. Instead of signing the contract as expected, he cut social ties and walked away from the deal without explanation. It turned out that he flew to South Africa in order to get away from his newfound stardom. Meanwhile, there was a media frenzy overrun with conspiracy theories to explain his departure. Some claimed that he went on a drug binge. There were accounts of him becoming mentally unstable and being checked into an asylum. A particularly intricate theory claimed that a collection of “Dark Crusaders” culturally influential people like Oprah Winfrey Louis Farrakhan and Jesse Jackson, banded together to run him out of show business. Moms Born Loretta Mary Aiken, Jackie “Moms” Mabley remains the highest charting female comedian on Billboard. One of sixteen children, she was born March 19th 1894 in Brevard, North Carolina; her career as a performer began in 1919 and lasted until her death in 1975. Her career began to take root when she was 14 years old in Cleveland Ohio. She made a name for herself as a vaudeville performer on the Chitlin’ Circuit. She toured with Butterbean and Susie, a singing husband and wife ensemble. She was wildly popular. Presented as “The Funniest Woman in the World”, Moms had the accolades to prove it. With 24 albums to her name, she worked with greats like Zora Neale Hurston on a 1931 play called Fast and Furious: a colored revenue in 37 scenes, she stood alongside Paul Robeson in “The Emperor Jones” and she was the first black female comedian to perform at Carnegie Hall in 1962. She acted in five films : “The Emperor Jones” (1933), Killer Diller (1948), Boarding House Blues (1948), Amazing Grace (1974), and a documentary called It’s Your Thing (1972). Her comedy sprung from the intersections of race, age and gender. She teased laughter from her audience as easily as she pointed out latent racial tensions. A staple of Mom’s act was playing with age and desire on stage. One of the names of her albums was Young Men, Si Old Men, No. At the age of fifteen, she was forcefully married to a much older man; it is likely that this is what she drew on as inspiration for her material (Haggins 148) Discussing sex frankly was and remains a bit of a taboo; the comic’s stage was a space where “lewd” conversation about sex was an almost expected part of the show. An apparent grandmother brazenly lusting over young boys was a great parodying of the older men chasing after younger women. However, the gender performance of Moms offstage would have likely layered the humor of her staged “robbing the cradle”. Moms was nicknamed Mr. Moms offstage. She came out as a lesbian at 27. The fact that she was a male presenting lesbian would have added a unique comedic layer to the costume she donned onstage, a floral dress with a floppy hat to match. It is interesting to think of Moms gendered performances specifically as stage(d) ones. Understood as events on the stage that were bracketed off from her lived experience, the constant chase of young men might poke fun at the follies of a woman past her time. Coupled with this was a constant disregard for men of her own age, suggesting a degree of independence insofar as she doesn’t rely on an older man to provide for her. To think of the desire for (young) men as staged, a put on for the sake of performance draws the very importance of men as a whole in question. If this is the case, her naysaying toward older men could spillover toward men in general. While I in no way mean to paint Moms as a misandrist, her staged professed love for young boys could have opened space for queered desire beneath apparently heteronormative scenarios. This would not be the first time black comedians used double consciousness or linguistically tiered metaphors to communicate with certain audience members and humor the rest. Methods I am more concerned with the comedians’ content than the audience’s reaction. A “joke” could be performed and evoke no laughter. However, if the goal was to gauge the ability for comics to speak truth, discarding jokes because they had punch lines that did not result in laughter would exclude potentially valuable content. It is possible for a joke to be deployed and purposefully hit its mark without laughter. A focus on laughter would also gloss over the importance of another significant reaction to hearing someone’s brutal honesty: silence. Foucault lifts an example of this from a dialogue between Alexander the Great and Diogenes the Cynic. He states, “Here the game reaches a point where Alexander does not become conscious of his lack of knowledge, as in a Socratic dialogue. He discovers, instead, that he is not in any way what he thought he was… He is brought to a point where Diogenes tells him that the only way to be a real king is to adopt the same type of ethos as the Cynic philosopher. And at this point in the exchange there is nothing more for Alexander to say” (Fearless 132). An analogous event can happen at comedy events where the audience member who expects to hear a joke is instead confronted with a serious issue that, if only momentarily, warps what one considers to be funny. While most bits are met with applause and laughter, some jokes are meant to encourage thought or productive discomfort. While there are theories of comedy that argue that humor comes from personal discomfort or unexpected turns of phrase, an in depth analysis of why people laugh at the truth is beyond the scope of this paper. While I think that interest in what makes humor humorous is an important meta-framing of comedic analysis, it would trade off the social effect of humor for abstractions that focus on the affect or effect generated by comedy. While that has interesting epistemic implications, I am much more interested in an ontic inquiry of the one who chooses to be honest. The performances of the comics interest me in that they elucidate things about the speaker’s social position or practice of ethical self-mastery. This is of course based on my position external to the performer. While I am concerned merely with tracing the language and performance of my subjects, the experiences they went through were by definition deeply personal and much more focused on what truth or humor were, given that their humor was strained through truth and vice versa. As performers, comedians on stage could be thought of as characters. I am also interested in apparent suspensions of the stage role or persona. Interviews and films that are distinct from their personas show new dimensions of these already complex people. For Chappelle, I focus mainly on the show he co-wrote, interviews, and Dave Chappelle’s block party. I personally think of standup comedy as the exemplary stage of the parrhesiate. Standup comics usually stand alone with a spot light upon them facing many people. I would imagine that there is a sense of vulnerability performing in that way since hecklers or other unexpected events may disrupt the performance. Skits or pre-recorded episodes are not as raw in character. However, Chappelle is most known for his television show and I will draw much of my material from there. Much of interaction with Mabley and Pryor’s work will be through audio recordings and the occasional extended visual clip. What is Parrhesia? Foucault After determining what a parrhesiate is, I would like to state why they are important. Parrhesiates are important because they make plain the nature of things we have deluded ourselves of. Since the time of the Greeks, there has been a recognition that we are not fully accurate in creating a self-image that corresponds to how we actually are seen by others. Plutarch said that the tendency for people to love themselves means that we are our best flatterers (Fearless 68). Through self-deception, we assign ourselves qualities which may not be based in fact, but for the sake of how owning such characteristics would make us feel. Parrhesiates disconnect us from phantasmatic self-projections (Fearless 136). Parrhesiates do this by attacking their target’s pride. Foucault articulates an important distinction between purpose of a Socratic dialogue and that of a parrhesiatic one. He argues, …whereas Socrates plays with his interlocutor's ignorance, Diogenes wants to hurt Alexander's pride. For example…Diogenes calls Alexander a bastard and tells him that someone who claims to be a king is not so very different from a child who, after winning a game, puts a crown on his head and declares that he is king. Of course, all that is not very pleasant for Alexander to hear. But that's Diogenes' game: hitting his interlocutor's pride, forcing him to recognize that he is not what he claims to be-which is something quite different from the Socratic attempt to show someone that he is ignorant of what he claims to know. In the Socratic dialogues, you sometimes see that someone’s pride has been hurt when he is compelled to recognize that he does not know what he claims to know… But this is only a side effect… the main target of Socratic irony, which is: to show someone that he is ignorant of his own ignorance. In the case of Diogenes, however, pride is the main target, and the ignorance/knowledge game is a side effect. (Fearless 126-127) Black comedians do this regularly by using (occasionally fictive) events that show fundamental stories Americans tell about themselves to be a sham. Much of Dave Chappelle’s “Killin' Them Softly” is a direct criticism of the judicial system and how racial prejudice in policing has created a secondary system of justice for blacks. Chappelle provides several scenarios in which he is being driven by a white friend named Chip who frequently breaks the law, interacts with police officers, and is punished with a slap on the wrist. On one occasion, Chappelle says that Chip is pulled over for speeding. When being reprimanded by a police officer who pulls him over, he tells him that he did not know that he could not drive past the speed limit and is let off with a warning. In disbelief, Chappelle asks him about the encounter. Chip replies “That was good, wasn't it? Because I did know I couldn't do that!” while laughing hysterically. Much like the cynic dialogue, the point was not to point out the ignorance of someone who thought they were smart, but to draw attention to how absurd a thing in reality is when compared to how it represents itself, namely the criminal justice system. While some people claim that accusations of police brutality are actually realistic responses to black criminality and criminal culture, Chappelle gives a fictive example where he is assaulted by a police officer for no wrong doing of his own. He provides a scenario where he is assaulted by a police officer who enters his home and assumes that he broke into the house and placed pictures of his family on the walls. As ridiculous as this example was, Henry Louis Gates found himself in an eerily similar scenario when he, a professor of African American studies at Harvard who happens to be black, was arrested for trying to break into his own home. While Chappelle had no way of knowing that this would happen to Gates as Killin' Them Softly took place six years prior, black comedy is often marked by an eerie untimeliness as police brutality is a reoccurring theme in black humor. In Richard Pryor’s1978 special Live in Concert, he jokingly refers to police officers killing a black person with a chokehold and asking afterward, “Can you break a nigger? Is it okay? Let’s check the memo. Yep, page eight, you can break a nigger, right there. Let’s drag him downtown.” Thirty six years later, a man named Eric Garner was killed by a police officer who restrained him with an illegal chokehold as about 5 other police officers held him down. The only person that was charged with a crime was the citizen who recorded the video. While the jokes themselves may not be inflammatory, their contextualization by current events can result in recoiling or discomforting laughter. Untimely jokes are marked by a feeling of being too soon or point to the audacity of the joke teller, when in fact they problematize he political climate in which the jokes are said, similarly to how Diogenes’ comparison of parading regality as akin to a child bragging over winning a game unsettles Alexander. The predictive element of the joke destabilize the way that individual acts of police violence are justified; if Garner did not resist arrest, there would have been no need to restrain him and he would not have died. Jokes about potential police brutality and the actual events that give them their sense of untimeliness situate the injustices in a historical relationship that makes dismissing police brutality as the result of a few bad cops much harder to do. Finely tuned political jokes are often used as iconoclastic tools that shatter mythic claims to have reached an age of colorblindness or equality. The people who tell them subvert the self-assured post-racial narrative that is so often used to gloss over the economic, judicial and racial barriers that folks of color face daily. Dave Chappelle has explicitly put an authentic relationship to himself before financial or social gain. One of the reasons that he was driven to say no to Comedy Central’s fifty million dollar deal was that he felt the sketches were beginning to compromise his agency. Out of his oeuvre, Chappelle picks out the recording of a sketch about racial pixies that crossed the line. In the sketch, Dave is asked by a flight attendant if he would like to have fried chicken or fish as his in-flight meal. As he decides, a miniaturized Dave appears parallel to himself in blackface wearing a bellhop’s uniform and a Pullman Porter cap. Pixie Chappelle chides Chappelle proper with racial epithets and stereotypes, encouraging Chappelle to purposely refuse conforming to the stereotyped activities of blacks. He decides to order the fish, however the flight attendant tells him that the only option left is the chicken. Seemingly defeated, Chappelle takes the plate of chicken. Soon afterward, a white passenger in the seat ahead of him offers to trade the chicken for his fish. Chappelle happily trades his plate for the passengers. The pixie responds by saying that Chappelle is eating catfish and starts tap dancing. As ridiculous as the sketch is, it neatly addresses the performative ways that blacks try to escape being defined by stereotypes by adopting “respectable” dispositions that are counter to the stereotypical expectations of blacks, even if this actively conflicts with their actual desires. As poignant a sketch for pointing out how social expectations can cause people to internalize the assumptions that strangers make and police themselves, there is no moment in the sketch that presents the bit as being satirical. The ambivalence of the sketch leaves it open to accusations of reinforcing racism. The risk of minstrelsy was something Chappelle was acutely aware of, he quit the show twice prior to Comedy Central’s fifty million dollar contract. What drew him over the edge with the pixie sketch was a laugh he heard from a white crewmember that he felt was laughing at instead of with him, saying that “I want to make sure I'm dancing and not shuffling…Your soul is priceless" (Time). The white crew member’s laughter…”made me uncomfortable…As a matter of fact, that was the last thing I shot before I told myself I gotta take f______ time out after this. Because my head almost exploded” (Farley, 2005). The intent of anti-racist bits are lost if the audience cannot sift the parodic elements from those that normalize or prove the validity of racial tropes. The one who calls out dishonesty or self-deception is an important person to have if one takes the project of democracy seriously. Unrestrained flattery, self-originating or otherwise, tends to ignore the material realities that shape our lives. A concrete example of this is how Moms, Chappelle and Pryor have used their comedy to lampoon those who claim that America has moved into a post-racial phase. As the truth may often sound abrasive or insulting, it is necessary to distinguish parrhesiates from mere hecklers or iconoclasts by taking note of their character. The life of a parrhesiate is one of rigor and as such requires necessary characteristics to lead a life that is consistent with speaking honestly: namely authenticity. A parrhesiate’s behavior must be coherent with their speech (Fearless 136). Parrhesiates need to be tested on the authenticity of their claims by determining if they live in line with what they recommend (Fearless 142). In the multiple interviews where Chappelle was asked why he walked away from an upwards of fifty million dollars, he had a tendency to return to the same justification. His father advised him to “Name [his] price before you get there”, or in other words to establish his limits before he got famous and to leave if he felt that he was crossing the line he set (Farley, 2005). The primacy of remaining honest with oneself is an important characteristic that sets the grounding for all other behavior. Foucault provides a lengthy quote from Serenus on the stoic nature of self-reflection. Serenus says that “[T]here is no reason for you to suppose that the adulation of other people is more ruinous to us than our own. Who dares to tell himself the truth? Who, though he is surrounded by a horde of applauding sycophants, is not for all that his own greatest flatterer? I beg you, therefore, if you have any remedy by which you could stop this fluctuation of mine, to deem me worthy of being indebted to you for tranquility…to express what I complain of in apt metaphor, I am distressed, not by a tempest, but by sea-sickness.” (FS 157) The claim that self-adulation is more dangerous than the flattery of others resonates with Chappelle’s father’s advice to not be led astray morally by temptations that would compromise his credo. Serenus’ comparison of moral unrest to sea sickness aptly captures the feeling of moral unrest or in Chappelle’s words, the need to take time out before your head explodes. Chappelle has multiple skits that focus primarily on the problem of authenticity, namely the When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong” series. Strangely, the scenarios given point to times when needing to prove one’s authenticity actually backfires on the person who refuses to compromise. These sketches are a humorous way of discussing the importance of double consciousness when navigating day to day life. However, this also means that the sketches cannot be parrhesiatic, as parrhesiates necessarily eschew the safety that double consciousness provides because of the transparency that comes with being honest. Double consciousness is as an opaque survival strategy that is the antithesis of parrhesia. What is interesting considering the nature of these sketches is that Dave faced an outcome that was similar to Vernon Franklin’s predicament and chose to follow his father’s advice instead of compromising, as did Vernon. Can we really call them parrhesiates? It should be said that there is some readily apparent conflict in Foucault’s definition of the parrhesiate and the comedic style of Moms, Chappelle and Pryor. As a comedian, one constantly risks an audience not understanding or “getting” the comedians joke. This seems to be at odds with the language of the parrhesiate in that it is defined by its frankness and absence of rhetoric. There are two initial problems with the comedian’s speech and the parrhesiate. Comedians often impart flourishes in their act or double entendres that allow for a writerly interpretation of their performance. This could be thought of as a defensive maneuver in that the comedian has the option to side with a less offense giving position or claim if their audience were to react violently. An example of this would be Dave Chappelle’s first episode of season one where he played Clayton Bixby, a black white supremacist. While the skit is meant to draw attention to how fragile the ideological justifications for racism can be by showcasing a blind black man as one of the best white supremacists because he was raised that way, there is more than meets the eye. The skit could be interpreted as a way of saying that even blacks would hate themselves if they were honest about it. While I am sure that Chappelle’s vision was more in line with the former interpretation than the latter, words cannot be taken back after they’ve been said. Analogously, Chappelle would be able to reframe the intent behind creating the sketch as testing the limits of free speech if he were to come under attack for the implicit racism of the sketch. The reason this poses a problem is that the parrhesiate in their frankness would seem to not mince words and be fully willing to bear the brunt of whatever consequences their language yield. A good example of this is when Foucault discusses Diogenes the Cynic’s interactions with Alexander the Great. After calling Alexander an inauthentic king, Diogenes is threatened. He responds that Alexander could kill him, but if he were do so that he’d be killing because he was too much of a coward to hear the truth and that there would be no one left to be honest with him (Fearless 128). The way that Diogenes stood by his words without a glimmer of an apology is potentially worlds apart from how comedians may react to threats based on their language. However, I do not think that this structural opportunity in itself is enough to bar comedians from parrhesia. A definitive element of the activity is the decision to give an honest opinion even if there would be backlash. After the decision is made to craft a racial joke and perform it, it is only a matter of time before the comment is divulged of its ambiguity and understood for what it is. Beyond this, Foucault continues to talk about the discussion between Diogenes and Alexander. Diogenes himself seems to revoke his word. Diogenes, while never apologizing for what was said, does engage in flattery that retroactively colors the implications of his words. He said to Alexander that if legend were true, Alexander was the descendent of a dragon or a demi-god and hence, a bastard (Fearless 129). Diogenes’ flattery was a redemptive element of the parrhesiatic contract that allowed for the parrhesiatic dialogue to be maintained. Likewise, comedians recognize that merely denouncing societal discontent would be what is expected of a lecture and not a leisure event, so the criticisms are meshed with humor to maintain the audience’s attention. This revising is parallel to the room comedians have to deploy their words in ways that are fluid without violating the particular relationship to honesty that parrhesia entails. An important relation between the comedians performance to that of the Cynic’s is the assumption that their audience understands them. Even if an audience does not laugh, it doesn’t mean that they did not understand the joke or claims made. Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal is recognized as a satirical work even if it was written in a style that was meant to appear serious. The expectation of the audience to understand or to have the joke explained to them means that the comedians delivery is as audacious as a frank one, even if what was said is up to interpretation. The problem of the comedian’s rhetoric is much more difficult, especially when jokes made are of an explicitly political nature. As the parrhesiate who speaks from their particular social location challenges the very idea of an objective politics, it would be paradoxical to argue that Pryor, Moms or Chappelle did not have political leanings in their material. In fact, it is their political skew and honesty about their opinions that qualify them as truth tellers. Rhetoric in this instance is to be understood in relation to sophistry. The sophist is one trained in rhetoric who knows the craft of argumentation. They are able to suspend their personal opinions in order to convincingly argue for whichever point of view they need to defend. This is different from the skeptic’s desire for ataraxia in that sophists don’t know all positions equally well to learn or embrace the inability to do so, but are motivated by social standing or wealth to be gained. While this seems descriptive of many Hollywood performers, Moms, Chappelle and Pryor differ from most in that their humor is very personal. Their political commentary was still an accurate representation of their thoughts. But, how do audience members know which representations are actually true or merely interpretations? This is difficult content to prospect. In clarifying a strong convictions particular relationship to “truth”, it is important to be aware that what is “true” is not merely what the speaker feels. The parrhesiate says what is true because the he “knows that it is true; and he knows that it is true because it is really true (Fearless 14). The parrhesiastes is not only sincere and says what is his opinion, but his opinion is also the truth. He says what he knows to be true. The second characteristic of parrhesia, then, is that there is always an exact coincidence between belief and truth” (Fearless 14).” I think that this can be said without circularity; contemporary examples of whistle blowing like the Eric Snowden controversy are examples of what the parrhesiate’s relationship to truth look like outside of a comedic setting. Focusing on problematization as a method of inquiry is helpful to rethink how events are classified, interpreted, and how those values are synthesized and condensed into a coherent narrative supported by institutions or “common sense”. In Why is ‘Speaking The Truth’ Fearless, Alison Ross complicates the accuracy of referring to contemporary whistle blowers as parrhesiates due to methodological changes in ruling one’s constituency. She writes. The historical place in which this criticism of power occurs is worth emphasizing. After all, given the historical context of parrhesia, understood as a verbal activity that performs an ‘exact coincidence between belief and truth’, Foucault concedes that this Greek sense of parrhesia ‘can no longer occur in our modern epistemological framework’. We might add that the examples of Greek parrhesia against a tyrant are themselves incompatible with the terms of Foucault’s account of the shift from sovereign to disciplinary power in the modern period (Ross 68). The epistemological difference between the time of the Greeks and now is a shift toward providing direct, ideally objective proof of the claims one makes. Prior to the Cartesian conception of justifying statements with “objective facts”, truth was made legitimate by the lived experience of the speaker. If Moms’, Pryor’s or Chappelle’s work were viewed today, their relationship to truth would be determined by data like censuses or other peer reviewed material (Fearless 14). Secondly, the difficulty in describing contemporary comedy as parrhesia is the accelerating shift toward diffuse mechanisms of social control. The clearest examples of parrhesia are when subjects speak directly to a powerful figure. This interaction between ruler and ruled was most prominent during the sovereign phase of biopolitics. The concept of speaking truth to power becomes muddled in biopolitical regimes that have moved on to disciplinary power because it is much harder to isolate a single external locus of power like a ruler. Publically confronting a king would appear to be simpler than speaking out against a system like racism, capitalism, or sexism. If one were to speak out against a multinational corporation, would they target individual shareholders or the corporation as a whole? In the case of cultural control mechanisms like racism, they are often able to carry on via inertia without any primary leader that dictates what happens. Mimesis as Strategy Mimesis historically has been associated with “copying”. Aristotle and other philosophers used the word to discuss aesthetics. Copying is usually understood as a reproduction of an object or thing that is a mere doubling of that object’s characteristics. Luce Irigaray is a theorist that has focused on the productive potential in reproducing the characteristics of a piece of art. Irigaray’s account of mimesis extends beyond just artistic representation and refers to ways of mimicking the rigid gender roles that men and women are interpolated into. In “This Sex Which Is Not One”, she argued against a Freudo-Lacanian account of psychoanalysis which positions the feminine in a necessary and inferior relationship to masculinity. There is a sense in which femininity itself is a masked expression of the masculine so long as meaning is established in a phallocentric economy. In other words, business women can be successful entrepreneurs so long as they don’t let being a woman get in the way of how they engage commerce. A phallocentric economy extends beyond mere respectability politics; women as such are anchored in masculine expectations and dependency, even in areas that would appear to be exclusively female. Motherhood itself, the production of male offspring and housekeeping are based on male standards of success for what determines one’s value as a woman. The most reductive example of this was how Freud’s theory of feminine lack was formed. He asserted that a constitutive traumatic event for women was the realization that they did not have a penis. This axiom was the bedrock for several psychoanalytic diagnostic categories: penis envy, hysteria, and the notion that women desire children as a way of making up for their lack of the phallus. While I do not defend psychoanalysis as a method necessarily, Irigaray’s writings on mimesis disturbed the normative psychoanalytic model in an analogous way to how black comedians ridicule the prejudices that codify their racial identity and the value of their performance. Irigaray advocated for mimesis as a way of improperly copying the expected gender norms assigned to women. Mimesis is a deliberate assumption of inaccurate projections of self in order to tease out mechanisms of exploitation and misrepresentation (Sex 220).This method of copying is productive because the inability to properly conform to the expected stereotypes implies that the person is something more than was within the established realm of possibility; the predetermined symbolic assignments of what “woman” is do not correspond to the lived experiences of women. Chappelle’s first episode of Chappelle’s Show pulled no punches. Its second half started off with a skit where a newscaster going to interview a high ranking member of the KKK named Clayton Bixby. Clayton is a blind white supremacist who happens to be black. Throughout the interview, Bixby showers racial epithets toward black people when the reporter asks him to explain why he hates people of color. What is so shocking about Bixby, whose written books with titles like Nigger Book, Nigger Stain and I Smell Nigger, is that he doesn’t know that he is black! Bixby was raised in a home for blind children and acculturated to believe that he was white so that his peers would not treat him poorly because of his race. The idea of a black white supremacist who is better at hating blacks than the white members of the KKK who adore him is a mimetic doubling of what it means to be a clan member that delegitimizes the axiom of black inferiority that this community organizes around. The care taken to protect Bixby and keep him cloaked whenever he appears at rallies speaks to the frailty that must be covered over in order to speak with and as an authority figure. Irigaray appropriates Freud’s notion of the masquerade in a way that can also apply to how minorities must perform in order to succeed within majoritarian communities. The masquerade is how one recuperates elements of desire to participate within the popular system of evaluation at the cost of renouncing his/her subject position (Sex 133). Similarly, Bixby’s content is valuable so long as he speaks as white. There is overlap in Bixby’s symbolic importance as a leading member of the Klan and the white hood he must don in order to be recognized as such. Clayton becomes normal only after he and others are made unaware of his racial difference. It is this tension between his ignorance and authentic hatred of blackness that points to the inconsistencies that make this sketch so useful for ridiculing discriminatory racism. When he is at a gas station, two working class white men threateningly beat on the hood of his car and say to him that he needs to get out of [there] before something bad happens (italics mine). Assuming that the words were not directed at him, he joins their threating behavior until a white KKK member who watches closely over him takes him out of danger. This scene is pivotal because it is unclear if it displays a KKK member’s compassion for a black man or a dependency on a black man’s writing for the clan’s coherence. This would expose racism as a defense mechanism, white working class men threaten Bixby to maintain the wages of whiteness, as does Bixby since he knows no better. His guardian protects Bixby because without him that section of the KKK he represents would lose an author largely responsible for their solidarity and recruitment of working class whites. If the motivation was economic, it points to the frailty of the racist psyche. How does one rationalize the KKK’s dependence on black authorship? The concept of the most successful white supremacist being a black person is an example of being a model minority in a way that is, dare I say, mind blowing. As Bixby and his guardian leave the gas station, he meets 3 white males wearing stereotypically “gangsta” clothing in a low rider listening to rap music on very loud speakers. Bixby yells Hey, niggers! Turn that jungle music down! Woogie boogie, nigger! Woogie boogie!” as the car drives off. Shortly after, the two people sitting in the front seat turn to each other. The passenger says “Did he just call us niggers?... Awesome!” This short exchange is interesting because it calls into question the accuracy of the signals which we assume point to authentic expressions of identity. Were the people in the low rider merely mimicking blackness (and if so, how can we label signs or music as authentically black if it can be mimicked by non-blacks so easily?) or was Bixby’s derogatory indict of nigger to refer to them an event that validated their blackness? Both Bixby’s mimicry of whiteness and the low riders conformity with blackness shows how performative dissonance can make both the positions which depend on authentic blackness or whiteness seem rather silly. As parrhesiatic figures, comedians who target political issues filter their material though their personal lives. When describing the Chappelle’s show, David said that it was like taking America on a tour of a black man’s subconscious (Powell, 2006). Part of what made the show so appealing was its rawness, similar to the stylistic choices Pryor made when delivering Bicentennial nigger. The initial jovial peace works toward a dramatic retelling of black America’s experiences in the United States. The bit performs the initial conflict in being raised in America without being able to find one’s proper family, return to one’s spiritual home, or forget the generational trauma that is constitutive of what it means to be a descendant of enslaved people in the land of the free. As much as Pryor’s blackfaced creation laughs and boasts its love for the United States, there is an uneasiness that comes with accepting these assertions at face value. It is Pryor’s definitive “I will never forget” and the memories that, part confessional and lamentation, point to the psychological complexities of coming to terms with what it means to be a descendant of the enslaved in the United States. Pryor’s delivery of such a bit as America celebrated its 200th year as a country is of no coincidence. It was a calculated maneuver that thematically echoed Fredrick Douglass’ What does the 4th of July mean for the Slave? What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.” Like Douglass, Pryor reconfigures what is thought of as a celebratory occasion as a site of mourning. The celebration for Pryor is a reminder of the centuries in which the liberty and freedom for which the day is meant to commemorate were not available to the African Americans that built the nation up. Another method of moving beyond tropes that are used to demean African Americans is an embrace of those stereotypes without pathology. While this is not a direct speaking truth to power, it is a performative over identification that, by no longer caring about what people will say to harm you, deliberately chooses authentic behaviors to respectable censorship of oneself. Moms Mabley directly acknowledged stereotypical food associated with black people and, far from disassociating herself with the stereotypes, talked about how much she liked the food! “My folk sent me some of those backbones with a lot of meat on than, not like these neck bones you get up here ... nothing on them but the bones. Baby, I put that meat on with a pot of cabbage, and my aunt sent some cracklin' bread, went down to Bordens and got me two quarts of buttermilk, and then I cooked me some greens and corn on the cob." (Williams 130) There is a tradition of comedic as well as literary figures like Langston Hughes in Not Without Laughter and Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man who’ve played with African American means of reacting to stereotypes which try to bind blacks to a caricature of their culture. These refusals to act differently in the company of others are small reclamations of tropes that break away from the need to be on one’s “best behavior” when around prying eyes. It shows that it is possible to be comfortable with the differences a cultural background has from majoritarian cultures, it is not required to judge yourself based off of a different culture’s standards. There is a moment in Invisible Man where the narrator, no longer ashamed of being associated with Negro culture, eats a yam and yells out ‘They’re my birthmark-I yam what I yam! (Ellison 230)” While this strategy does not defend against a foreign culture’s reduction of racial stereotypes to biological circumstance, it attacks that danger on another flank by not caring enough about outside voyeurs to mask oneself. While this is not Parrhesia proper Such an embrace of pathology does not require speech or an interlocutor as necessary components., what is interesting is that the individual responds to the danger by doing as they please, being fully aware of the associations that come with acting as they wish to. Linguistic Ambiguity It is important to recognize that comedians are always already interpolated into the aftermath of cultural and historic events. If a comedian performs a racially degrading joke, it is unfair to say that they single handedly naturalize racial tropes without accounting for the accumulated meanings assigned to race prior to their performance. It would be simplistic to demonize Chappelle for “setting the race back” with a sketch because it assumes that those assumptions were not already latent before the bit was performed or seen At the very beginning of episode 8 on season 2 Chappelle tells a story about a man who confronted him about the racial content of his sketches. He said “You know I almost was afraid no one would be here. I had a conversation that upset me where a dude said that my show was offensive to black people. Normally that doesn’t bother me but he was white, so it freaked me out. He had me thinking for a second like, word nigga? But he might have a point! I’m not gonna discount him just because he was white, who knows? . Racial comics tap into a preexisting racial narrative. Instead, I am more interested in how comics who play with racial tropes in the hopes of delegitimizing them protect against or cope with the threat of minstrelsy and exploitation. Interviewer: Alright, Mr. Wilson, you've done just fine on the Rorschach... your papers are in good order…your file's fine…no difficulties with your motor skills... And I think you're probably ready for this job. We've got one more psychological test we always do here. It's just a Word Association. I'll throw you out a few words - anything that comes to your mind, just throw back at me, okay? It's kind of an arbitrary thing. Like, if I say "dog", you'd say..? Mr. Wilson: "Tree". Interviewer: "Tree" After a few words, the associations quickly become racial. Interviewer: “Negro Mr. Wilson: "Whitey". Interviewer: "Tarbaby". … Interviewer: [ aggressive ] "Spearchucker". Mr. Wilson: "White trash!" Interviewer: "Jungle Bunny!" Mr. Wilson: [ upset ] "Honky!" Interviewer: "Spade! Mr. Wilson: [ really upset ] "Honky Honky!" Interviewer: [ relentless ] "Nigger!" Mr. Wilson: [ immediate ] "Dead honky!" One of the more interesting elements I find in Chappelle’s racist pixie sketch is that the Chappelle’s character was caught in a double bind; it did not matter if he chose either of the only options offered to him, he would have appeared to have been reinforcing racial stereotypes. In The Other Laughs Back Simon Weaver argues convincingly that anti-racist humor is polysemiotic; the ambivalence of parody means that jokes meant to delegitimize stereotypes may actually reinforce them. Weaver uses a joke made by Lenny Henry to elaborate his point. Henry jokes about having a white friend that wanted to be black so much that he began listening to Bob Marley and stealing hubcaps. Referring to Henry, Weaver cautiously writes that” …[he] attempts to show the absurdity of such stereotypes through this technique, and attacks the content of cultural racism, the examples do not remove the polysemic potential in the discourse and the jokes could also support the earlier stereotype. In the first example a racist reading might mock white men who choose a ‘lesser’ racial group or culture with which to identify. In the second, the reversal might simply be taken as an absurdity, rather than seeing the absurdity in the original stereotype of black criminality. Thus the rhetorical potential is ambiguous (Weaver 40). In the same way that Henry’s bit naturalizes reggae and criminality as essential properties of blackness, some of Chappelle’s bits risk legitimizing racial tropes like hyper aggression in the case of Vernon Franklin or drug addiction in the character of Tyrone Biggums. An important step in limiting the degree to which a racist reading of anti-racist performances take place is to include a marked pivot or break that marks the bit in such a way that an interpretation of the bit as a whole that glosses over the break can easily be identified as a misreading. In this sense, there is a particular hermeneutics of black comedy that must be applied to the form of jokes to get at their actual content. In Signifying Monkey, Henry Louis Gates argues that a fundamental element in African American speech is the process of signifying. Signifying, occasionally spelled signifyin(g), is an often playful process where language and performance are deployed to complicate how performance and language are understood at face value. The person who signifies tricks or criticizes the one that is being signified upon in ways that they are oblivious to while listeners who can decode the signification are able to discern what is actually being said. Signification is a hermeneutically complex process that many African Americans are taught growing up. Signifying as a learning process is so integral that talking in coded ways (ie. Speaking “job interview” during important interactions or when on the phone with strangers) is a well-known phenomenon. Gates argues that signification both reconstitutes and demystifies the subject (Gates 54). The performance of signification in social settings is clearly shown in Dave Chappelle’s When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong sketch series. The first sketch begins with Vernon Franklin, a man who was the valedictorian of his high school class and became the vice president of Viacorp Corporation after being the first of his family to graduate from college. There is an altercation between Vernon and his mentor Frank Murphy after Frank colloquially says to Vernon “give me some skin” at the end of a business meeting. The narrator of the skit says that Vernon felt like an uncle tom because he was on agreeable terms with everyone that he worked with; this comment made him feel react confrontationally to Frank. Vernon responds by telling Frank to “get [his] motherfucking hands out of his face” and threatens him by saying “I used to beat motherfuckers up just like you, just for walking around my way, nigga!” He is quickly fired and forced to work at a gas station on route 80 in New Jersey. Functionally, the skit serves as a warning of what dangers may arise when African Americans are placed in situations where what is socially expected of them clashes with what their authentic self urges them to do. The series is a break from parrhesiatic behavior because the sketches imply not just that the protagonist would have been better off if they were to act inauthentically, but that they should have done so in order to maintain the security of their job or social mobility. Instead of a focus on authenticity, When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong is a parable meant to cause the viewer to re-access how they would react to situations similar to the sketches. Louding is a type of signifying in front of crowds that black comedians frequently use. In a sustained reflection on racial prejudice and law enforcement, Chappelle retells a ride with a white friend of his named Chip and their encounters with police officers. As a whole, it is a practical example of how different African American interactions with the police are from those who benefit from white privilege. As it is told, it is apparent that the story is also a pointed criticism of law enforcement. When louding, one speaks to a second person or audience when what is said is actually meant for a third other (Gates 82). Elaborating on Mitchell- Kernan’s focus on louding as a part of signification, Gates draws attention to practical examples where a speaker could signify on an audience member in this way: a woman complaining to a person how unsightly leggings look on overweight women while an overweight woman in legging is in earshot or a preacher reading particular passages of the bible in order to confront the actions of his congregation. (Gates 83). Chappelle’s bit targets White Americans who have benefited from white privilege and police officers who racially profile in the age of colorblindness by, paradoxically, not mentioning them at all. Chappelle’s benign scenario was actually a clever way of conveying messages that attacked the pride of those who implicated themselves in the seemingly innocent narrative. Mitchell-Kernan gives a great example where three women sit down to eat and the first asks the second if she was willing to eat “chit’lins” (Gates 82). The question itself is loaded; what the first woman is asking the second is if a commitment to respectability politics prohibits her from eating food associated with negative stereotypes. The third woman gives an unprompted justification for preferring prime rib and T-bone steaks to chitterlings and leave, outing herself as a respectable Negro. In response, the first woman says “[I] wasn’t signifying at her, but…if the shoe fits wear it (Gates 82)”. Chappelle’s address to white audience members and police officers works similarly. Chappelle is implicitly calling out White Americans as criminals who, because of racist policing, walk away unpunished on a day to day basis. With that said, he is merely telling a joke. Were he to come under fire, anyone who takes offense could feel free to, but they would be blamed for being defensive. While this means of social commentary targets who it is meant for, the tendency for the original speaker to circumvent accountability for the consequences of their language is so strong that louding doesn’t encompass the authenticity and preparation to be punished that Parrhesia entails. The word nigger and vernacular variations on it like nigga when used in comedic settings can draw attention to how the use of language has affectual implications for its social meaning. While nigger and nigga are often considered as racial epithets when used by whites, its use by African American comics can have different social consequences altogether. The different subject positions of the speakers and the context in which the word is used could be the difference between an offensive performance and a mediation on how race colors our daily lived experience. On November 17th in 2006, Michael “Kramer” Richards used the word nigger repeatedly in response to a black audience member he thought was heckling him at the Laff House. This outburst was recorded. In it, he made multiple references to segregation and lynching. Backlash from the incident has severely limited his desirability as a comic. In 1969, a period when the FCC was very strict on television censorship, Moms used an implicit variation of the word nigger to highlight the race relations of the time on the Merv Griffin show. This is the short exchange that followed after Griffin asked Moms about how she was received in the south. Moms: “What’s that man got that horse in pictures…that Western man?” Griffin: “Roy Rogers?” Moms: “They name me Roy Rogers’s horse. . .” Griffin: “Trigger?” Moms: “Yeah, everywhere I go, they’re, ‘Hello, Trigger. What you saying, Trigger?’ At least I think that’s what they say.” The substitution of nigger with trigger was not only a crafty means of evading FCC censorship, it was an opportunity to air out the baggage that nigger carried with it vis a vis its relation to words similar to it. In more contemporary times, the use of the word nigger has become democratized. As black performers encounter more paying white audience members and “crossover” to mainstream entertainment while still keeping their black edge, curious spaces opened where audience members would repeat a comedian’s joke that happened to contain the word nigger. The popularity of black comedians among white audiences draws what is properly black into question. If the word has been defanged, can whites use it freely? If not, why so? At a show, Pryors 4th wife Jennifer Lee said “that’s my nigga” from the audience at a show. He responded by taking her out of the club, pointing to the stars and asking her which one of the stars was a nigger (Grundfest, 2003)? The question was meant to mark an important shift in the meaning of the word and question what, if, anything, it referred to. In Live on the Sunset Strip, Richard Pryor tells his audience that he came to the decision that he would never use the word nigger again. He tells the audience about his trip to Africa. “One thing I got out of it was magic I’d like to share with you. I was leaving and I was sitting in the hotel and a voice said to me, said ‘look around, what do you see?’ And I said ‘I see all colors of people doing everything’, and the voice said ‘Do you see any niggas?’ And I said ‘no’, and said ‘you know why? Cos there ain’t any’, and it hit me like a shot man. I started crying and shit. I was sitting there and I said ‘I’ve been here three weeks and I haven’t even said it, I haven’t even thought it’, and it made me say ‘oh my god, I’ve been wrong, I’ve been wrong, I’ve got to regroup my shit. I ain’t never gonna call another black man a nigga’. You know cos we never was no niggas, that’s a word that’s used to describe our own wretchedness, and we perpetuate it now, cos it’s dead, that word is dead” (Pryor 1982). Nigga for Pryor was described as a very American way of degrading blacks that had become so normal that it was no longer seen for the corrosive epithet that it was. Events like Pryor’s realization that there were no niggas in Africa isolates the ambivalence that black comedians often draws to discussions of racial identification. Some African Americans, usually those who did not grow up during Jim Crow segregation, often use the term nigga colloquially to refer to each other. The psychological rumination of Pryor’s return from Africa predates the NAACP’s symbolic laying to rest of the “N” word. However, this funeral was not binding for all. Chappelle in a mimetic mediation on nigger analogous to Moms’ use of Trigger on the Merv Griffin show, tries to determine if there is some force in inherent to the articulation of the word that sounds like nigger by imagining a white family whose name happens to be Niggar. While these performances do not speak directly to any one person or force as the parrhesiate under a sovereign power regime does, I think that these mediations on the word are an accessible By accessible here I mean a catalyst for discussion that is accessible (and targeted toward) working class folks. While these performances are not nearly as in depth as say Randall Kennedy’s Nigger, an episode of Chappelle’s Show for example can still tease out contemporary issues in a concise way. There was an open floor discussion on episode 3 season 2 that is a perfect example of this. The audience members discussed the artistic and social merits of the sketch. While many of the audience members found the sketches funny, it was disturbing that the white pixie did not embody harmful stereotypes of whites, it instead references white stereotypes as the opposite of black ones. way of engendering black responsibility in regulating our language, while determining if it needs to be regulated. Some black communities are raised within a tradition where jokes and humorous misdirection are used as tools to recreate or demystify their referent (Gates 54). In Killin' Them Softly, Chappelle has a bit on judging politicians not on their political affiliations, but how they interact with persons of color. While the joke was delivered in an over the top way, its intent was clear; how politicians interact with their constituency can be used as a guide to determine how they will act towards them once they are in office. Clinton’s enthusiastic kissing of a “little nigger baby” is juxtaposed with Bush recoiling from doing the same. What I found interesting is that this is two years before the Kanye West controversy where he stated that “George Bush [did not] care about black people” (Michaels). Continued (re)presentations I place emphasis on the re of representation to point out the importance of replaying when engaging with comedy. Jokes are complex and may not be understood by the listeners the first few times they are heard. In White Men Can’t Joke, Alvin Tillary. Argues that the continued use of racial tropes in humor will serve to prolong the effort of getting rid of racial hierarchies in the United States (Tillary 9). While some argue parody is not a viable means of upsetting racial discourse, a mimetic reading of these performances show that parody is an important step in mining through apparent “truths” to understand that these stereotypes have been socially constructed and dismissed as such. of the “N” words deployment gives listeners the chance to be honest about the actuality of a colorblind America. Playing with the use of an epithet or form of endearment as Moms, Chappelle and Pryor do challenges the readiness of the one who commits to colorblindness just as the cynic challenges the pride of their interlocutor. Overt Politics In the 1960’s, there was a string of race uprisings that took place from 1964 to 1969. These uprisings took place in Black, Asian, and Latino communities and frequently responded to police brutality and economic instability in the cities. Wattstax was a music festival that took place in Los Angeles, California on August 20th of 1972, seven years after the 1965 rebellion in Watts. The concert was an attempt to rebuild community after the conflict. The concert was a star studded affair, Isaac Hayes, Jesse Jackson, and Richard Pryor each played important roles throughout. Hayes’ provided the community with a strong black icon and his music was a sound they could call their own, Jackson fanned the flames of a dying sense of belonging to American politics, and Pryor’s humor made understanding black people’s relationship to the police, the law and themselves easier. He commented on Californian police specifically, saying that “California's a weird state because they have laws for pedestrians. Like, you cross the street, they have laws for pedestrians...but they don't have laws for people at night...when cops accidentally shoot people. They accidentally shoot more niggers out here than any place in the world. Every time you pick up a paper, ‘Nigger accidentally shot in the ass.’ How do you accidentally shoot a nigger six times in the chest? [imitating police officer] ‘Well, my gun fell and just went crazy.’ (Pryor, 1972) Pryor’s joke about the laws for police officers speaks to an ancient problem: who will police those who police us? As important it is to know who will protect citizens from danger, it is sometimes difficult to hold those to abuse their power accountable. The frequency of “accidental” shootings is meant to say that the frequency of police brutality that is more than incidental. The officer’s defense that the gun “fell and went crazy” comments on the sheer lack of accountability that officers are held to when blacks are killed by the police. As contemporary groups like the Black Panther Party would engage in police patrols where they would follow around police officers to make sure that they weren’t unjustly harassing citizens, the joke speaks to a thread of black political agency that aimed to hold police officers and other extensions of the law accountable to the very laws that they ought to have been working in the name of. Contemporary movements of the time like the black arts and black power movements meant to reclaim blackness as something to be valued that was not dependent on white standards of beauty. Pryor takes this idea full on with the idea that African Americans are the descendants of the best of Africa. I think like niggers are the best of the people that were slaves. You know what I mean? And that's how they got to be niggers. 'Cause they stole the cream of the crop from Africa and brought them over here... and God, as they say, works in mysterious ways. So he made everybody a nigger 'cause we was arguing over in Africa... about the Watusi, the Huwagada, the Zagumbo, and the Zamunga. You know... In different languages. So he brought us all over here... the best, the kings, the queens, and the princesses and the princes... shit, and put us all together and called us one tribe: Niggers (Pryor, 1972). The move from diasporic blacks with no cultural connection to each other toward being a tribe called niggas is important for two reasons. It defangs the word nigger, Pryor in his autobiography explicitly states that one of the reasons he said the word so frequently was to get rid of the hurt it can cause when used in racist ways. Secondly, it establishes a fictive kinship in which black descendants of slaves can take some measure of pride in their past to counteract the message that slaves were ignorant and abject. The Niggas as tribe is an important move from how non blacks describe black people to how black people who had the audacity to love themselves would describe blacks. Pryor tells a story about a black man who would walk about his neighborhood. He recalls, “In my neighborhood, used to be some beautiful black man...would come through the neighborhood, dressed in African shit. Really nice shit. And he'd be, ‘Peace, love, black is beautiful. Remember the essence of life. We are people of the universe. Life is beautiful.’” My parents would go, ‘That nigger crazy.’” (Pryor, 1972) The content of this joke is powerful considering the conditions that Pryor was raised in.. One example of this is used in the film Omit the Logic to showcase Pryor’s uncompromising honesty about his childhood. “And I remember tricks used to go through my neighborhood, that’s where I first met white people. They come down to our neighborhood to help the economy. Man, but I meant nice white man just come up and say ‘Hey little boy is your mother home? I’d like a blowjob.’” (Omit, 2013) This apparently simple joke provides examples of how culturally reinforced associations of blackness with criminality (prostitution) and kind of exotic aesthetic (he describes the white men as sex tourists). The experience of someone whose parents were involved with prostitution to think of a man who says that black is beautiful had to be a jarring one. The tension between determining if “that nigga [was] crazy” for loving his blackness and if an embrace of one’s self as valuable was even possible is a difficult, formative decision that would determine one’s politics. Pryor’s jokes extend beyond cultural problems and touch on economic issues in the black community. A bartender asks a drunk man he is serving at the bar why he won’t just go “get a job and be respectful”. Pryor-as-drunk responds with a story that would have resonated with many African Americans who’ve tried to find employment after serving their sentences. "Shit! Man, get a job? What the fuck you talking? I went down. Man, I ain't bullshitting, baby. I went down to the unemployment bureau. You dig? I just got out the joint. You know what I mean? I'm in the joint, I go to the unemployment bureau...the bitch telling me 'What's your occupation? 'I said, 'Pressing license plates. Where you gonna find a job for a nigga out here pressing license plates? And I'ma license plate-pressing motherfucker. You dig? Old bitch has got a tiara and shit up there. Old, ugly white whore with old wrinkles and shit. Bitch got funky with me. I said, Fuck the job, bitch. Kiss my ass. And your mama, too.” (Pryor, Wattstax) Felon disenfranchisement is a vital issue in African American communities that are over policed in relation to their white counterparts In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander argues that the heaviest policing and drug arrests happen in racially segregated and poverty stricken ghettos because the inhabitants lack the political power that white affluent communities do. She quotes a student at the University of Chicago who said that the militarized nature of law enforcement was so ingrained that ‘[E]ach time we drove into a public housing project and stopped the car, every young black man in the area would almost reflexively place his hands up against the car and spread his leads to be searched [by the police]. (Alexander, 2010)”. The drunk Pryor presents is self-medicating to cope with his lack of work experience outside of prison. Considering that homeless and unemployed people are often told to just “get a job and be respectful” to solve their problems, Pryor’s scenario shows that the services that are meant to ameliorate unemployment are not always enough. The character’s shift to insulting the woman at the unemployment bureau is a defensive shift away from his vulnerability in the face of inadequate resources. Rehabilitation is important because treating formerly incarcerated people as criminals and preventing access to upwardly mobile jobs makes crimes more likely as ex-felons are pushed into underground economies. On the first season’s second episode of Chappelle’s Show, Dave begins the episode by directly saying to his audience that he as a black male cannot say the things that come to his mind without being censored or ignored. He takes this opportunity to invite a singing white woman to say the things that he cannot. Although he uses this opportunity to joke about the ad revenue that Comedy Central gets from his show without sharing with him and the sexual acts he’d like to perform on Jennifer Lopez, he uses the opportunity to vicariously claim that the United States government manufactured crack and AIDS as a way to destroy the black community. Even if these particular accusations are not true, it is a bold statement to make as it draws attention to the confirmed instances where the government in fact attempted to destroy black communal politics. Community building organizations like the Black Panther Party were flooded with heroin and spies, a justification for public black paranoia of government action. In season two, Dave dedicates two extensive sketches on racial inequalities in the American judicial system. In episode 5 of season 2, he imagines what it would look like if black drug dealers were treated as well as rich white Wall Street bankers were treated by the judicial system. The court case of a black wealthy drug dealer is juxtaposed with a white man who is framed for a crime he did not commit. The white man is given a public attorney and is quickly deemed guilty by a jury of his peers, 12 stereotypically “thuggish” presenting blacks. While he is assigned a gratuitous amount of time for a crime that he did not commit, Chappelle’s character who is guilty on all accounts is free to decide when he wants to turn himself in, is protected by federal agents, and defended by the best lawyers money can buy. During the case, Chappelle abuses the Fifth Amendment and is charged with 5 months of (specify punishment) that his lawyer promises to get dropped down to 3 months, a slap on the wrist. The sketch implicitly calls out the judicial system as a racially and economically biased system that has little interest in justice or a fair trial. Chappelle’s depiction of federal officers lying under oath and committing crimes while enforcing the law (an officer needlessly murders the man’s dog and sexually harasses his wife) speak to a decadent judiciary. He continues his scrutiny of the American judicial system in episode eight of season two where he lambasts the absurd standards it takes to charge white people charged with crimes compared to the minimal thresholds for African Americans. Riffing on more contemporary cases for the time like the OJ Simpson murder trial, R Kelly’s child pornography trial and Michael Jackson’s child molestation accusations. Drawing extensively on the Kelly trial, Chappelle concedes that R Kelly was in fact on the recording, however he was unsure if the urine was real or digital. When asked what it would take for him to be sure of Kelly’s guilt, he provides an absurd laundry list of requirements like R Kelly singing a parodic song called “Piss on you” while his entourage and grandmother were in the room cheering him on as the young woman held two valid forms of identification. As ridiculous as this was, the sketch approaches the uncanny in the aftermath of the murders of Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner, two events where the deaths of the victims were recorded and their murderers were deemed not guilty on all charges. Chappelle has used his status as a cultural icon to organize community building events like Dave Chappelle’s Block Party. The film is a multicultural blend of Spanish, Black, White and other racial community members in Brooklyn, New York City. As Chappelle traces the history of his involvement with the community, there was a focus on what growing up on political Brooklyn was like for the people attending. While Chappelle’s stage presence was focus primarily on orchestrating the events, Chappelle’s political views were expressed by proxy via his selection of performers and the conversations that were allowed to be had on the stage. While this ventriloquous political message cannot properly be called parrhesiatic, it is still worth including as an example of how comedic figures make transitions to overtly political content. Chappelle displays a commitment to using his cultural platform to speak on social issues. While he explicitly references the hip hop duo Dead Prez, this equally applies to political vantage points that lie outside of “normal” politics. “I think like the more you say with it, the less airplay you get. You know, guys like dead prez they say it all, but you hardly ever hear them on the radio. Because they say things like “ the white house is the rock house, uncle sam is the motherfucking pusher man, what I gotta do to make you understand!? You know, they don’t want to hear that on the radio, the white house is the rock house and all these kinds of things, but you hear it in the barbershop all the time” (Chappelle, 2005). In addition to suggesting that political dissent is enough to be spoken of frankly in barbershops, Chappelle says this in a calm and frank way that can’t be embodied in text. For him, (at least for Block Party) Dave expresses his political opinions in a way that allows him to “keep it real” as others do throughout the taping. Fred Hampton Jr is the son of a Black Panther member who was murdered while he was lying in his bed by the police, used the block party as a platform to voice political concerns about the judiciary and the state’s divide and conquer strategies meant to silence black radicalism. At first he speaks directly to the camera and offers a short list of demands to the audience. “Free all political prisoners. Don't edit that. Don't cut that. Make sure you put that on there. Free all political prisoners. Make sure that on there. Don't edit. Don't cut it. In the raw, no mix, no segue. Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, Sundiata Acoli and all political prisoners. Free the New York Three. Don't edit that. Make sure they go there. Uncut. Tell it, Fred Hampton.” (Hampton, 2004) While the list itself is incendiary, Chappelle knowingly honors Hampton’s wishes and presents Hampton’s entire list (to my knowledge). Chappelle commented on the consequences of explicitly voicing radical political views once one has access to the public sphere. He references particularily incendiary Dead Prez lyrics to make a point about the dangers of Hollywood for black performers. Chapplle says, “How about when they say, ‘Who shot biggie smalls, if we don’t get them they gon get us all. I’m up for runnin up on them crackers in they city hall!’ You’ll never hear that shit on the radio. Never in a million years will you hear somebody say on the radio ‘I’m up for running up on some crackers in city hall, and people have stopped asking who shot biggie smalls. But if you in show business and black, you wonder about that every day. Cause they might get you too.” As a black performer, I think that Chappelle is recognizing that he is purposefully putting his carreer, sanity, and potentially safety on the line by associating with or endorsing the political views of Hampton or Dead Prez. The reoccurring fear of one’s safety in addition to the general nausua that Serenus mentions is a danger of engaging with Hollywood that Chappelle has spoken on in situations prior. In an interview with James Lipton on Inside the Actor’s Studio, he says that one of the worst things that has been said about him after he left Comedy Central was that he was crazy. While he never gives an explicit reason for why it is the case, Chappelle says that when people dismiss celebrities as crazy it glosses over the possibility that the environment itself is “a little sick” (Studio). He speaks of Martin Lawrence running around in public with a gun in his hand yelling that “they” were trying to kill him and Mariah Carey stripping on Total Request Live as related incidents that exemplify the psychologically taxing nature of fame. Nevertheless, Hampton is then permitted to go on the stage in front of hundreds of people and shares a similar agenda. Right on. Right on. Heads up, eyes open and fists clenched. Heads up, eyes open and fists clenched. Heads up, eyes open, fists clenched. Look here, right on. Say, "Power to the people. ”Power to the people. Right on. We sense a lot of talk going around about terrorism. We say black people are the O. V. S, the original victims of terrorism. We say political prisoners are victims of terrorism. We say our position is "Free them all. "We say, those soldiers in Attica, free them all. What's the call? Free them all. Mumia Abu-Jamal. Free them all. Sundiata Acoli. Free them all. Ruchell Cinque Magee! Free them all. The New York Three. Free them all. Man, we say, free all political prisoners and prisoners of war. Power to the people. Free them all. While Chappelle decided to use his popularity to provide a stage for lesser known political activists to share their views, some comedians use their popularity to speak directly about social issues that concern them. The later part of Moms career was in the 1960s, a turbulent time in politics for African Americans. She frequently used her humor to re-focus discussions on race and politics, one such instance was a bit she performed on Moms At The White House about a man named Sam Jones going to heaven and meeting St. Peter at the gates. Colored fellow down home died. Pulled up to the gate. St. Peter look at him, say, “What do you want?” “Hey man, you know me. Hey, Jack, you know me. I’m old Sam Jones. Old Sam Jones, man, you know me. Used to be with the NAACP, you know, CORE and all that stuff, man, marches, remember me? Oh, man, you know me.” He just broke down there, “You know me.” He looked in his book. “Sam Jones,” he say, “no, no you ain’t here, no Sam Jones.” He said, “Oh, man, yes, I am; look there. You know me. I’m the cat that married that white girl on the Capitol steps of Jackson, Mississippi.” He said, “How long ago has that been?” He said, “About five minutes ago.( Haggins 150)” In many protestant iterations of Christianity, there is often a focus on good works as an important part of the road to salvation. Moms deliberately creates a man she calls Sam Jones whose good works include participating in human rights organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Congress of Racial Equality in order to discuss the lynching of politically active black men. The moment of shock in the joke is that the man was murdered for marrying a white woman on the steps of the capital in Jackson Mississippi. What is chilling about this is that black citizens who were romantically involved with white women have been killed for it, even if the relationship was consensual. The man’s status as a NAACP and Core member draws into question the group’s efficacy at protecting their community members from lynch mobs. However, the most troubling aspect of the joke is that St. Peter was not able to find Jones in the book. While its important to recognize that on some level Moms is merely telling a joke, the implicit potential for Jones to not be granted entry into heaven even after his good works would indicate not only the political futility of his actions (as he was still lynched), but the spiritual uselessness of spending one’s life fighting for equality and to not have that labor recognized in death. Although the 15th Amendment to the constitution guaranteed that the right to vote for male citizens could not be denied by the United States government at the federal or state level on account of race, color or prior servitude, the amendment was frequently maneuvered around. Historically, White voters have found ways to bar blacks from participating in voting. Blacks would be prevented from voting by being made to pass extremely difficult tests in order to exercise their right to vote while whites were able to bypass such tests because of grandfather clauses which exempted them based on their family history. …the lil’ boy happened to be a college graduate ... so he went up to the desk, the man say "Let me hear you say the Constitution backwards." He said the Constitution backwards. Say, "Let me hear you say me Old and New Testaments—forwards and backwards ..." He said it to them forward and backwards. He then give him a Chinese newspaper. Say, "Let me hear you read that paper." Fellow looked at him, he say. What did it say? What did it say?" The fellow say, "It say it makes no difference what I do, you ain't gone let me vote no how." (Humor 123) Implicit in Mabley’s joke is the harsh truth that the end of legally mandated racism is not enough to compel the end of de facto racism. The literacy tests were said to ensure that blacks who wanted to vote were educated enough to make informed decisions on why they chose one candidate over the other(s). However, the questions, like the ones Mom’s hypothetical proctor asks, had nothing to do with the political election. Instead, the tests were political tools meant to ensure that whites had majority control of votes even in places where black either outnumbered whites or were a potentially influential voting bloc. Though he is over qualified to vote, the college graduate is quick to catch on that it is not his education, but his pigmentation which prevents him from voting. The joke exposes the way that political agency is silenced in insidious ways even as government officials can espouse a rhetoric of racial equality and progress. Even if the joke in itself is not boldly parrhesiatic because of its signifyin(g) by sounding, it functionally challenges the usefulness of mere political action that is not bolstered by cultural changes in an analogous way. Mom’s Young men Si, Old Men No was about more than her sexual preferences. Moms was known for her singing as well as her comedy. She would occasionally blend her talents in order to grab her audience’s attention. One of those songs was about desegregation and its effect on integrating the school system. Now I ain't go'n sit in back of no bus./ And I'm goin' to the white folks school./ I'm goin praise the Lord in the white folks' church./ And I'm goin, swim in the white folks' pool!/ I'm goin vote and vote for whoever I please./ And I'll thumb my nose at the Klan./ And I'll double-dare 'em to come out from behind/ them sheets and face me like a man./ They don't scare me with their bomb threats./ I'll say what I wanna say!/ And ain't a damn thing they can do about it./ 'Cause I ain't goin' down there no way!/ And you know why?/ Because it took a marshall, the Army too, JFK, and/ I don't know who!/ Every law, and every rule/ To try to get one boy in the Mississippi School./ School days, school days/ Barnett said, "To hell with-the-congressional-rule/ days!" Lead pipes and blackjacks and pistols, too!/ Those are the books that they take to school!/ They don't study science or history./ They study hate and bigotry./ They been scaring the heck out of you and me/ Since we was a couple of kids./ What kind of school is this?/ (What kind of fool am I?)/ The school they call "Ole Miss?"/ I know that sticks and stones may break my bones/ But this is ridiculous./ How can we pretend/ We love our foreign friends/ When they can plainly see/ What kind of fools they've been./ So, take me out to the ball game (to the campus)./ And if we don't win it's a shame./ But with our trust in the Lord/And the National Guard/We'll get in just the same! (Williams 121-122) The song signals a strong black citizen who is no longer passively asserting of Jim Crow and the terror that keeps it in place. The first two lines are a bold promise to ensure she will interrogate and by extension, be fully included within the body politic. Mom’s declaration that she will go to the white folks church, pool and poll shows more than that she has the audacity to go to these places, but that the church, public areas and political ones are no longer the sole property of white America. Mom’s song intersects the discrimination that happens along both racial and gendered lines. She deliberately ridicules and emasculates the Klan. Thumbing her nose at men who hide like cowards behind sheets banalizes a terrorist organization that for decades has been successful in striking fear into black communities and institutionalizing their hatred. For a woman to dare Klansmen to come from behind their sheets and face her like a man and to call them cowards who are only bold enough to do what they do when they cannot be seen by others or retaliated against. Moms recognizes the danger that comes with saying these things and calls their bluff on bomb threats. However, this threat was very real. In 1963, KKK members planted several sticks of dynamite at the 16th street Baptist church in Birmingham Alabama, killing 4 small girls in the explosion and injuring others. Moms is directly referring to hot button issues that position her as an outspoken black woman at a time when such outspokenness often resulted in lynching sanctioned by the very officials meant to enforce the law. When Moms says that there’s not a damned thing [the KKK] can do about it, this is not only an assertion of the 1st amendment which grants freedom of speech, but an audacious declaration. History has shown that a citizen’s rights on their own are insufficient in protecting them from external dangers. She moves toward an internal criticism where she holds up the national credos of education and compassion for our “foreign friends” while bigoted Americans educated in hatred brutalize people in their own country for having the desire to learn. Moms closes with a riff on take me out to the ballgame in order to cement her criticism of structural racism as an American call to live up to the standards that we as a nation set for ourselves. This is an obvious blow to America’s pride and character at large. Historically, political progressives like W.E.B. DuBois, Ida B Wells-Barnett, and Paul Robeson have spoken internationally about American racial atrocities in order to shame the American public into proper action; Moms is doing the same here. She uses American rhetoric to mobilize action against institutional racism, pushing for political changes that are meant to offset deep rooted cultural prejudices. The ethical demand for America to be its best self in an endorsement of political actions that finally protected African Americans like Dwight D. Eisenhower’s order for the national guard to prevent whites from abusing the little rock nine as they tried to go to school. Conclusion In episode 13 of the second season of Chappelle’s Show, Dave imagined what it would press coverage would be like if the then President George W. Bush were black. Bush was, overall, not a well-liked President for the black community. While he is often associated with the war on terror and the September 11th World Trade Center attack of 2001, his delayed reaction to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina only served to add to accusations of racism and a general disregard for human life. The sketch plays with the motivation for and justification of the war on terror. After showing a news clip that says the United Nations has found no evidence of Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction, Black Bush answers that he was found to be in possession of aluminum tubes and yellow cake, justifying the search. While the connection is never made explicitly, the shoddy justification is likely a reference to the United Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s “Unknown Unknowns” comment pertaining to a news reporter’s statement that there was no evidence of a link between Baghdad and terrorist organizations (Service, 2002). Later on in the sketch after a reporter asks Bush why there was continued upheaval in Iraq even after the capture of Saddam Hussein, Bush responds that thinks that reporters are trying to district him with petty issues like the war and the economy in order to prevent him from talking about what issues are actually important: the space program (Chappelle, 2003). As creative a discussion of political obfuscation the Black Bush sketch is I find that it, like most of Chappelle’s, Mom’s and Pryor’s work, falls short of parrhesia. I say most instead of all for two reasons. As my research pool was limited, it is possible that any of the three comedians have released parrhesiatic material that I have not had access to. Second, as Chappelle is still alive, he may go on to use black comedy in new parrhesiatic ways that I would not have had access to at the time of writing this. With that said, I do not think that comedy as an art form is frank enough to relay information parrhesiatically; a close form of comedy that may lend itself nicely to parrhesia is deadpan but even it is mediated by artifice. Pryor’s Bicentennial Nigger is the closest bit to parrhesiatic expression that I found. However, to identify someone as a parrhesiate opposed to someone who spoke publically about political events, one has to take into consideration the person’s oeuvre. Once this is done, I think that Pryor, Moms, and Chappelle, while they all have meaningful things to say toward those in power, do not speak to them directly. References Iconoclast: Dave Chappelle + Maya Angelou. 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