Overview

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.

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9780190870089

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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.

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