Dlhughley, Kevin Hart and Stand-Up Comedy
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1 THE HUMOR IN BEING BLACK: D.L.HUGHLEY, KEVIN HART AND STAND-UP COMEDY - Isha Bihari, Joe Varghese Yeldho, National Institute of Science Education and Research, HBNI, Odisha, India ABSTRACT Comedy scripts the monotony of life in a language that humors all and mirrors the disruptive social reality of private life. Stand-up comedy, today, is a billion dollar entertainment industry and the comedians, pop-culture icons. The paper evaluates the performances of two celebrity stand-up comedians, D.L Hughley and Kevin Hart through their respective Netflix specials. Their content is drawn from the lived experience of growing up black in America, yet differs in comic style. While D.L Hughley traverses the highs and lows of African-American lives in the States, presenting a satirical take on social issues; Kevin Hart paints a self-deprecating portrait of his personal life, he is animated, free-spirited and exaggerates anecdotal familial episodes to humor the audience. Their performance reveals the meaning of comedy in black lives, and its importance as a public-communication tool beyond entertainment. Laughter and deep sighs, humor to spice up lives A joke in troubled times, to impress funny smiles An escape from the drudgery, from a life of slavery A thoughtful comedy is a one that coats a tragedy1 In his 2013 novel Inferno, Dan Brown extols the legacy of the famous Italian poet-philosopher Dante Alighieri and explains why the latter’s magnum opus Divine Comedy is named such. He writes, "The Divine Comedy has nothing comedic about it. It is called a comedy for another reason entirely. In the fourteenth century, Italian literature was, by requirement, divided into two categories: tragedy, representing high literature, was written in formal Italian; comedy, representing low literature, was written in the vernacular and geared toward the general 2 population” (90). Written in the native dialect as opposed to the high Latin, the language of the elites, Dante made his poem accessible to the general masses who could picture the writer's journey in the poem through damnation and divinity. The language becomes a means to an end: the reader lives through the horrors of hell and purgatory to finally reach the heights of paradise and attain bliss. Dante's comedy thus ends on a high note: the happy ending that humans always wish for as opposed to the lows of a tragedy. Stand-up comedy, likewise, is scripted in a language that arouses laughter in a diverse audience. It is a refuge for the weary souls to get lost in innocent smiles culminating in a fantastic escape from the lived routine. Out of the many inspirational quotes that keep making guest appearances in social media, there goes one that says, "Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious" by the academy award winner Peter Ustinov. Though the veracity of the quote's origin may be questioned given the source, its meaning is not suspect. Comedy allows one of the best forms of social commentary. Like Dante's poem needed telling in an understandable way, comedy mirrors society, in a form that is digestible to most. The immediate response to a joke may be laughter, but given a second thought, many will find themselves debating its content. The mental dialogue, thus created, presents an opportunity to think beyond the humor to reflect on the underlying questions. And quiet akin to Dante, reaching paradise, comedy creates a paradise where people are humored and inspired to put on their thinking caps. To lay it bare, making people laugh is not an easy job, more so when the subject of comedy is a sensitive one. One such issue is of racism in America. In her book, Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery, writer Glenda Carpio traces the origins of African-American humor and notes, “Black American humor began as a wrested freedom, the freedom to laugh at that which was unjust and cruel in order to create distance from what would otherwise, obliterate a sense of self and community” (4). Blacks used humor as a tool to survive the maddening times of slavery and find moments of relief in joking with fellow slaves. With the abolition of chattel slavery and subsequent devolution of rights, acerbic humor formerly contained in intra-group interactions took visible forms in the mainstream as a form of political critique. To stage a performance where the black audience splits at the white-man jokes would have been an act of sacrilege a few hundred years ago. Today three out of ten of the world's highest-paid comedians are black (Berg). What sets these performers apart is the historicity of African-American humor. 3 The content has added meaning for the blacks who can identify with the lived experience of the comedians. The jokes and punch lines sound better with a context that people can relate to. The humor is amplified in the shared understanding of an issue that assures people that others go through the same hardships too, that they are not alone in the quest to negotiate with their troubled identity in a country where they are the minority. This does not mean that everyone resorts to comedy to find their comfortable space. Some do not need euphemisms to voice their concerns. In his book Between the World and Me, Ta Nehisi- Coates is critical of American democracy and writes, “Americans deify democracy in a way that allows for a dim awareness that they have, from time to time, stood in defiance of their God [democracy]” (6). Racism is an implicit reality in America today. How this reality directs black comedy and vice-versa can be studied through stand-up comedy. Black comedy here refers to funny/witty narratives by African-American performers. Comedy being one of the most preferred forms of entertainment, has become a staple across most video streaming platforms. Netflix, the American media service provider, for example, has been taking giant leaps when it comes to investing in comedies. The variety of stand-up comedy shows is only proof of their ambition of dominating the comedy market (Schwerdtfeger). Stand-up comedians need only a stage, mic and a stool to perform, drawing a large crowd which gathers for the entertainment. Black performers are making steady strides in this field, with many having their specials on Netflix. A special, as opposed to a series (having several episodes over one or many seasons), is an episode dedicated to the performance of a single comedian. One such special is the 2018 show, D.L Hughley: Contrarian, which is introduced by Netflix as "a sly take on changing times, political firestorms and growing up black in America." Winner of the 2012 Peabody Award which honors excellence in broadcast and digital media, Hughley, stands tall in the world of comedy. Dressed sharply in a suit and hat, Hughley's signature look, he means business when on stage. His jokes are a satirical take on essential issues, carrying a social message. Minutes into his performance in the show, Hughley talks about the movie Black Panther which is the first black superhero movie to be made in America and says, "Man, we really showed up for [it]. We [were] all at the mall. White people were shook [and wondered why] there [were] a lot of black people in the food court. ..We all went [to see the movie] for different reasons. Black people [went] for inspiration. White people went for information [to 4 know what] they (blacks) were up to” (Contrarian, 3:89). Hughley talks about the white fear in this joke as the innocuous community act of gathering together to enjoy a movie celebrating black heroism is seen by the whites suspiciously. It is assumed that blacks anywhere in groups must always be up to something. And lest the whites feel threatened by their presence, blacks will always have to be extra cautious to not be in a big group. This white fear of the black is not just abstract but takes solid form when blacks become vulnerable to police excesses, and the majority of whites support the same. Blacks are most likely to be killed and tortured by the police for no apparent reason (Jennings, 77). Rodney King's 1991 torturous beating in jail, which was caught on camera, is when police brutality against blacks first came to be acknowledged publicly (Chaney and Robertson, 483). However, almost 27 years after that incident, racial profiling of blacks continues in America, that projects itself as a colorblind nation and officially denounces racial practices on all platforms. The substantive evidence to this conclusion is reflected in a 2015 report submitted to Inter-American Commission on Human Rights by Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights organization and others, which states that even though blacks constitute just 13.2% (as of 2014) of America's population, when it comes to law enforcement, 26.2% of those killed by police were black in 2015 (22). And these figures are a testimony to black victimization which has been going on for centuries. Starting with slave patrols, restriction of the freedom of the blacks continued even after the end of slavery through Jim Crow laws, which promoted racial segregation, the vestiges of which remained after the civil war through the police who acts as the guardian of white privilege. Adding a comic element to this issue, Hughley says, "You want a policeman to run into a building with a sense of urgency, do not tell him it's an active shooter. Tell him something that'll really get him going, like there’s two black men sitting in Starbucks” (Contrarian, 15:56).