To Be Real: Truth and Racial Authenticity in African American Standup Comedy (OXFORD STUDIES IN LANGUAGE RACE SERIES)

Synopsis

To Be Real: Truth and Racial Authenticity in African American Standup Comedy examines Black standup comedy over the past decade as a stage for understanding why notions of racial authenticity--in essence, appeals to "realness" and "real Blackness"--emerge as a cultural imperative in African American culture. Ethnographic observations and interviews with Black comedians ground this telling, providing a narrative arc of key historical moments in the new millennium. Readers will understand how and why African American comics invoke "realness" to qualify nationalist 9/11 discourses and grapple with the racial entailments of the war, overcome a sense of racial despair in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, critique Michael Richards' ["Kramer's"] notorious rant at The Laugh Factory and subsequent attempts to censor their use of the n-word, and reconcile the politics of a "real" in their own and other Black folks' everyday lives. Additionally, readers will hear through audience murmurs, hisses, and boos how beliefs about racial authenticity are intensely class-wrought and fraught. Moreover, they will appreciate how context remains ever critical to when and why African American comics and audiences lobby for and/or lampoon jokes that differentiate the "real" from the "fake" or "Black folks" from so-called "niggahs." Context and racial vulnerability are critical to understanding how and why allusions to "racial authenticity" persist in the African American comedic and cultural imagination.

Copyright:

2022

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

Book Size:

224 Pages

ISBN-13:

9780190870119

Related ISBNs:

9780190870102, 9780190870089, 9780190870096

Publisher:

Oxford University Press

Date of Addition:

12/20/22

Copyrighted By:

Oxford University Press

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

Nonfiction, Social Studies, Language Arts, Communication

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.