To Be Real: Truth and Racial Authenticity in African American Standup Comedy

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.


Author: Lanita Jacobs
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 11/18/2022
Pages: 224
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 8.60h x 6.20w x 0.80d
ISBN13: 9780190870089
ISBN10: 0190870087
BISAC Categories:
- Language Arts & Disciplines | Linguistics | Sociolinguistics
- Language Arts & Disciplines | Communication Studies
- Social Science | Anthropology | Cultural & Social

About the Author

Lanita Jacobs is an Associate Professor of American Studies & Ethnicity and Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Her recent research examines constructions of race in popular culture.