University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses March 2017 Texts and Subtexts in Performing Blackness: Vernacular Masking in Key and Peele as a Lens for Viewing Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Musical Comedy Spencer Kuchle University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2 Part of the African American Studies Commons, Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority Commons, Performance Studies Commons, and the Television Commons Recommended Citation Kuchle, Spencer, "Texts and Subtexts in Performing Blackness: Vernacular Masking in Key and Peele as a Lens for Viewing Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Musical Comedy" (2017). Doctoral Dissertations. 886. https://doi.org/10.7275/9399331.0 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/886 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations and Theses at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Texts and Subtexts in Performing Blackness: Vernacular Masking in Key and Peele as a Lens for Viewing Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Musical Comedy A Dissertation Presented by SPENCER JAMISON PASQUERELLA KUCHLE Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY February 2017 W.E.B. Department of Afro-American Studies © Copyright by Spencer Jamison Pasquerella Kuchle 2017 All Rights Reserved Texts and Subtexts in Performing Blackness: Vernacular Masking in Key and Peele as a Lens for Viewing Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Musical Comedy A Dissertation Presented By SPENCER JAMISON PASQUERELLA KUCHLE Approved as to style and content by: ___________________________________ Steven C. Tracy, Chair ___________________________________ John H. Bracey, Member ___________________________________ Lisa Green, Member ____________________________________ James Smethurst, Member ____________________________________________ Amilcar Shabazz, Department Head W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies DEDICATION For my family, who first taught me the language of laughter. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I was privileged to be raised in a household in Woodstock, Connecticut with parents who demonstrated a deep and abiding commitment to fostering racial and social justice through work redressing racial inequities within the criminal justice and health care systems and in the environment. Through their dedication to nonviolent social change, I came to meet leaders from the civil rights movement, who inspired me to see the world from new perspectives. At the same time, I was introduced to the power of performance, through mentors Cheryl Foster, Tony Estrella, and Judith Swift, who encouraged me to intern as a high school student at the Gamm Theater in Pawtucket, Rhode Island—mostly for dark comedies like Martin McDonagh’s “The Lonesome West.” I came to understand the capacity of comedic performance to create a shared experience among audience members from vastly different backgrounds, eliminating the distance imposed by race, class, and gender and reinforcing Victor Borge’s quip that “Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.” However, it was as an undergraduate at Hampshire College, studying with professors Christopher Tinson, McKinley Melton, Amy Jordan, Falguni Sheth, Jill Lewis, and Mount Holyoke professor John Grayson, that I became passionate about black literature, culture, politics and history. They were all that one could hope for as mentors, role models, and public intellectuals, inspiring me, through their excellence in teaching v and research, to pursue graduate studies focused on how representations of blackness in the form of the black body can be read as text and performance. Each of my professors and fellow graduate students in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst has challenged me to excel as a scholar, and I am truly grateful to have had the opportunity to learn from them. In addition, my appointment as an Experiential Training in Historic Information Resources (ETHIR) Fellow during the 2013-2014 academic year enabled me to significantly expand my scholarship in African-American Studies. The experience I garnered in digital humanities and archival research through Special Collections in the UMass Libraries was invaluable. I am also profoundly grateful for the dissertation fellowship I received from the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas–Austin to explore minstrelsy as a performance strategy. In analyzing the personal narratives, letters, postcards, reviews, playbills, and ephemera related to nineteenth-century minstrel shows, I interrogated the supposed “moral purpose” minstrelsy served of bolstering a disillusioned public during a time of post-Reconstruction national turmoil. My pursuit of both fellowships resulted from projects undertaken in Britt Rusertt’s classes, and I appreciate her unyielding encouragement and support. Dr. Lisa Green, from the Department of Linguistics, graciously accommodated vi my plea to study African American Vernacular English with her despite an extraordinarily full schedule. It made a world of difference in shaping my thinking and framing my study of Paul Laurence Dunbar and contemporary black comedy. In the same way, Professors Tracy, Smethurst and Bracey have informed my world-view through their insights into the black aesthetic. Professor Tracy, in particular, has shown me how to engage in humanities practice in the classroom and beyond. Finally, I want to thank my parents, Lynn Pasquerella and John Kuchle, and my twin brother, Pierce, who have served as a sounding board throughout the process of writing this dissertation, been champions whenever self-doubt crept in, and laughed alongside me while watching Key & Peele or listening to the lyrics of Dunbar’s comedy. vii ABSTRACT TEXTS AND SUBTEXTS IN PERFORMING BLACKNESS: VERNACULAR MASKING IN KEY AND PEELE AS A LENS FOR VIEWING PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR’S MUSICAL COMEDY FEBRUARY 2017 SPENCER JAMISON PASQUERELLA KUCHLE, B.A., HAMPSHIRE COLLEGE M.A., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Steven C. Tracy When Kegan Michel Key and Jordan Peele’s sketch-comedy show Key & Peele took Comedy Central by storm in 2012, the perceived need by the comedians to “adjust their blackness” to gain social recognition became a recurring theme. Throughout their comedic performances, language becomes a proxy for identity, and Key and Peele’s parodic employment of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and linguistic variation serves to challenge notions of black authenticity, while emphasizing the absurdity of racial essentialism. viii An embodiment of Jonathan Rossing’s concept of emancipatory racial humor, Key and Peele’s comedy creates nonthreatening spaces that facilitate the contestation of cultural authority by interrogating how social categories are constructed via linguistic practices, revealing the interconnectedness among the ontology of the black body, epistemic authority, and linguistic authenticity. This dissertation examines the adoption of identity tropes by Key and Peele through their use of AAVE in relation to Paul Laurence Dunbar’s dialect musical comedy and the poet’s struggle to represent black subjectivity and folk culture without lapsing into minstrelsy. Particular attention is paid to how Dunbar responded to the political dynamic of subordination and resistance that defined linguistic conflict at the end of the nineteenth century and the inability of his critics to recognize the subversive and resistive nature of much of his work. Exploring the dialect comedy of Dunbar alongside Key and Peele in the context of controversies surrounding linguistic minstrelsy in mediatized performances of AAVE from Amos ‘n’ Andy to The Boondocks, I conclude that far from lapsing into minstrelsy, Dunbar’s dialect musical comedy catalyzed resistive ideologies, resulting in the emergence of a new black modernism. Like Key and Peele, Dunbar engages in meta- parody by placing himself in the performance, deliberately showcasing the richness and complexity of AAVE as a medium for conveying social commentary in which the ix audience comes to appreciate the intellect of the person telling the joke. The knowing and strategic inauthenticity in their performances invites audience interpretation of a deeper message, positioning Dunbar, along with Key and Peele, as tricksters who employ sophisticated vernacular masking to contest racial stereotypes, even as they enact them. x TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………………………………v ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………viii INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………1 CHAPTER I. DUNBAR AS SPECULAR BORDER INTELLECTUAL AND RUPTURED SUBJECT..................................................................................................................…21 Tricksters and Tradition: Conflicting Social Forces in Dunbar’s World......…21 The Black Authorial Subject on the Border..................................................…26 Dunbar’s Dialect as a Medium for Satirical Humor......................................…30 Dialect as Cultural Capital: James Weldon Johnson Dunbar and Sterling Brown…………………………………………………………………………47 II. “JES LAK WHITE FO’KS”: