Furiously Funny: Comic Rage from Ralph Ellison to Chris Rock

Description

A combustible mix of fury and radicalism, pathos and pain, wit and love--Terrence Tucker calls it "comic rage," and he shows how it has been used by African American artists to aggressively critique America's racial divide. In Furiously Funny, Tucker finds that comic rage developed from black oral tradition and first shows up in literature by George Schuyler and Ralph Ellison shortly after World War II. He examines its role in novels and plays, following the growth of the expression into comics and stand-up comedy and film, where Richard Pryor, Spike Lee, Whoopi Goldberg, and Chris Rock have all used the technique. Their work, Tucker argues, shares a comic vision that centralizes the African American experience and realigns racial discourse through an unequivocal frustration at white perceptions of blackness. They perpetuate images of black culture that run the risk of confirming stereotypes as a means to ridicule whites for allowing those destructive depictions to reinforce racist hierarchies. At the center of comic rage, then, is a full-throated embrace of African American folk life and cultural traditions that have emerged in defiance of white hegemony's attempts to devalue, exploit, or distort those traditions. The simultaneous expression of comedy and militancy enables artists to reject the mainstream perspective by confronting white audiences with America's legacy of racial oppression. Tucker shows how this important art form continues to expand in new ways in the twenty-first century and how it acts as a form of resistance where audiences can engage in subjects that are otherwise taboo. Acknowledgments ix Introduction: A Joke to the Eye 1 1. (Re)Viewing Ellison’s Invisible Man: Comedy, Rage, and Cultural Tradition in an African American Classic 24 2. Dick Gregory, Moms Mabley, and Redd Foxx: Bridging the Gap between Comedy, Rage, and Race 69 3. From Absence to Flight: The Appearance of Comic Rage in the Black Arts and Black Power Movements, 1966–1976 113 4. Fury in the “Promised Land”: Comic Rage in George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum and Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle 154 5. Hollywood Shuffle and Bamboozled: Comic Rage, Black Film, and Popular Culture at the End of the Century 197 6. Direct from a Never Scared Bicentennial Nigger: Comic Rage in the Work of Richard Pryor, Whoopi Goldberg, and Chris Rock 228 Conclusion: On Being Pissed Off to the Highest Degree of Pissivity 252 Notes 257 Bibliography 267 Index 279