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UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Firespitters: Performance, Power, and Payoff in African American Women's Humor, 1968- Present Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8wf7881t Author Finley, Jessyka Nicole Publication Date 2013 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Firespitters: Performance, Power, and Payoff in African American Women’s Humor, 1968- Present By Jessyka Nicole Finley A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in African American Studies in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Ula Y. Taylor Professor Brandi W. Catanese Professor Catherine M. Cole Spring 2013 Abstract Firespitters: Performance, Power, and Payoff in African American Women’s Humor, 1968- Present by Jessyka Nicole Finley Doctor of Philosophy in African American Studies University of California, Berkeley Professor Ula Y. Taylor, Chair This study considers the social, cultural, and political production of black women's humor, making the case that humor becomes more than merely a technique of entertainment. Instead, I argue that humor is a mode of literacy and site of self-authorship for African American women across a variety of discursive fields, including literature, sketch comedy, stand-up comedy, and electoral politics. Usually described as a “routine,” the professional stand-up comics of this study are in fact presenting new ways of thinking about race, class, sex, culture, and power. Using archival research, ethnographic interviews, participant observation, and close readings of performances, this dissertation engages several questions: how do black women use humor to express emotions like desire, anger, and contempt? What are the effects of black women's public performances on their own identities? What do their performances tell us about black culture? How do ideas about black womanhood and feminism factor into their dialogue? What personal, political, and economic opportunities does stand-up comedy offer African American comediennes? Finally, how do black women engage in practices of self-fashioning in and through stand-up comedy? A deeper understanding of the affective and political dimensions of black women comedians’ practices highlights stand-up comedy as a renegade space in which performers move literally and figuratively from outrageous comics to become audacious thinkers and potent social critics. 1 For Grandma. i Table of Contents Acknowledgments…………………………………………………...……….iii Chapter 1: Ghosts in the Machine: An Introduction………………………..1 Chapter 2: “Preach On Sister, Preach On!”: Artistic Expression, Politics, and Black Women's Comic Literacy in the 1970s………………………………………………..13 Chapter 3: “Unlearning Not to Speak”: Black Women Comics in the Post-Soul 80s ……………………………………………………………………………...40 Chapter 4: HARDCORE: Aesthetics of Abjection in Black Women's Stand-Up Comedy during the 1990s……………………………………………………………………66 Chapter 5: “By sassy, you mean black:” Power and Payoff in Contemporary Black Women’s Stand-up Comedy………………………………………………………......89 Chapter 6: From Becoming to Being: Stand-Up Comedy as Autoethnograpy ……………………………………………………………………….…….112 References: ……………………………………………………………….125 ii Acknowledgments Profound thanks to my family and friends. Without your love and support this project may have never started or finished. Mama, I appreciate all your kind and encouraging words and I promise to keep making you proud. A special shout out to my dissertation chair and mentor, Ula Taylor. Thank you for your ear, your guidance, and the time you’ve spent helping me become the scholar and person I want to be. Thank you to Brandi Catanese for encouraging me to push beyond my comfort zone and approach my work with curiosity and a spirit of fun! Catherine Cole, thank you so much for seeing the performer in me and providing a wonderful space for me to become one. I’d like to thank all of my students, especially those who took my summer class “African American Stand-up Comedy and the Performance of Resistance.” You all made me a better teacher and listener, and your questions and insights gave me new understanding about humor and comedy. I want to express my deepest gratitude to all the people who so graciously shared their stories with me in support of this dissertation. Thank you to the humorists whose voices, stories, and lives are so important to recognize and honor for now, and generations to come. Specifically, thank you Karinda Dobbins, Hope Flood, Kamane Malvo Marshall, Khristee Rich, Aisha Tyler, Paul Mooney, Luenell, Miss Laura Hayes, Vanessa Chambers, Niroma Johnson, Jennifer Weeks, Jane Galvin-Lewis, Thea Vidale, and Naomi Ekperigin. I would also like to thank Ayoka Chenzira and Debra Robinson for generously providing copies of their films. And a special thanks to Ms. Robinson for sharing her knowledge and wisdom about black women stand-up comedians. Michael Williams provided a wealth of knowledge about black comedy and I want to thank him for his profound insights, encouragement, and friendship. I’d like to thank the University of California-Berkeley for its financial and intellectual support, along with the African American Museum in Philadelphia and the Institute of Museum and Library Services for its generous support of my research. Special shout out to Leslie Guy, a mentor and awesome cheerleader! Thank you Brittany Webb and Nicole Ivy for your support, encouragement, and the very necessary laughter. Lastly, thank you Toni Cook, my partner, my love, my favorite interlocutor. You’ve been here every day fielding questions, easing concerns, and pushing back on my hardheaded, sometimes unintelligible analysis. You’re the best. iii Chapter 1 Ghosts in the Machine: An Introduction “Certain absences are so stressed, so ornate, so planned, they call attention to themselves; arrest us with intentionality and purpose, like neighborhoods that are defined by the population held away from them.” – Toni Morrison, Unspeakable Things Unspoken (1988) “It’s as if there’s an elephant in the room, and it’s spraying out elephant diarrhea all over everyone, and no one’s mentioning it. It’s surreal. My impulse is always to call people’s attention to the situation. Uh, the elephant? Shitting on you?” – Paul Mooney, Black is the New White (2009) Ebony magazine rolled out “The Biggest, Baddest Comedy Issue Ever” in April 2011, for the first time dedicating an entire issue to the sacred (and profane) art form, which according to editor-in-chief Amy DuBois Barnett, has “always been a part of the Black experience, largely because it has allowed us to smile through some of the worst times.”1 Six feature-length articles laid out the significant contributors to the African American comic tradition. Acting as arbiter of the canon, Ebony magazine became “the boom of power announcing an ‘officially recognized set of texts.’”2 Forty-four black male comics grace “The Biggest, Baddest Comedy Issue Ever,” while a mere eight women garner mention; even then, the majority are subjected to perfunctory and lazy analysis contained in three sentences or less. In a salon-style interview, comedian Cedric the Entertainer tried to get at the gaping silence surrounding black women comics’, asking the group, “Can you name me one true Black example of, say, Carol Burnett or Roseanne?” Sheryl Underwood’s response, “Whoopi would probably be that one,”3 reminded me of Toni Morrison’s important work on the “willful oblivion”4 of black people in the American literary canon, the search for the “ghosts in the machine,” who have “shaped the choices, the language, the structure— the meaning of so much American literature.”5 Indeed, Underwood’s statement and the entire April 2011 issue of Ebony capture the insidiousness of black women’s critical erasure in the African American humor tradition. Additionally, it points to what Nancy Walker characterizes as the paradox of women and humor in American culture, the “invisibility of the tradition, not merely to the dominant culture, but to the women themselves.”6 The purpose of this dissertation is to explore the history, techniques, and efficacy of black women’s humor. The goal of such a task is not merely the suggestion that black women humorists “were there,” though that is a significant result of this study. Bearing in mind Peggy Phelan’s critique of “the ideology of visibility,”7 which is the idea that marginalized people can attain political power via more visibility, we will see that identifying and recognizing black 1 “Wit and Wisdom,” Ebony, Vol. LXVI, No. 6 (April 2011), 16. 2 Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, University of Michigan (1988), 123. 3 Ebony, Vol. LXVI, No. 6 (April 2011), 88, italics mine. 4 Morrison, “Unspeakable Things,” 136. 5 Ibid, 135-136. 6 Nancy Walker, A Very Serious Thing: Women’s Humor and American Culture (Minneapolis: University of MN Press, 1988), 122. 7 Peggy Phelan: Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 7. 1 women as co-creators of the African American humor tradition is in fact political. As Morrison reminds us, “canon building is empire building. Canon defense is national defense. Canon debate, whatever the terrain, nature, and range…is the clash of cultures. And all of the interests are vested.”8 More specifically, my aim is to identify and analyze black women’s humor as a mode of literacy facilitating personal, intellectual, and political expression in the public sphere. I begin by defining the terms and concepts germane to this study. I then discuss readings of black humor, including its roots in folk culture and function as a survivalist technique. Next, I locate black humor as a mode of literacy that is part of the ongoing struggle for literacy in the African American experience. To conclude, I review readings of gender and humor and lay out the methodology and structure of the dissertation.