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.

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.