by Chantal
This Saturday is the season premiere of Saturday Night Live, and I’m not sure what to feel. I have a strange relationship with SNL, for reasons I will come to, but I do think that watching it is a good way to get used to certain inevitable feelings that arise when you’re watching comedy, specifically live comedy. Because alot of SNL isn’t funny. There will be stretches of 10, 15, 20 minutes where, in a group of viewers, no one laughs at all, where a room just sits, waiting for real laughter to break through all that control. And in those moments, aspects of individual personalities reveal themselves. Someone in the room will give a fake titter after a long lack, to try and ease the room. Someone in the room will say, with authority, “That’s funny” without laughing, because comedy is like sadness: you can have the feeling without the tears. Someone in the room will try to anticipate the laughter of others because they just don’t get it but fear their non-laughter would somehow turn against them. Someone in the room will laugh at everything, because it’s just one of those nights. And someone on the floor will laugh at something completely different because they are really, really high and just noticed that the two people onscreen do not get along in real life. I could isolate reactions all day, it’s part of what my brain does, and it’s one of my own reactions to social situations.
But this is part of the problem with SNL for me. I never really lose that ‘reaction isolator’ part of my brain when watching it, because for the most part, it’s not consistently funny enough to turn that off. So if it’s like stand-up at all, it’s like a Five Buck Yucks kind of deal, where you pay a flat fee to see several different comedians who you’ve usually never heard of. And some of ‘em are really, really bad. (When you see a comedian actually say, “That’s one of those jokes you’ll get later on,” it produces this sympathy-disgust beast that teaches me so much about myself for a second because I’m like “I am not gonna laugh until you are funnier I am not gonna laugh until you are funnier I am not gonna laugh” and it may not be an ethical reaction but it also really may be.) Other sketches though, are such straight-up game-changers that it makes comedy feel purposive, essential, and political if for no other reason than the fact that giggles can be hard to come by. Maybe this is what certain viewers felt when they watched Eddie Murphy sing “Kill the White People” on SNL in the early eighties.
The black militance trope is a little dated now. But when I was in college, my best friend Avril and I watched this video repeatedly for 90 minutes and never stopped laughing. I think we used to do this alot with other things, I think we liked to laugh together loudly. Other than the important prerequisite, “Do you know people very, very well?” being able to laugh together and make each other laugh and being able to count on your laughter and have you know that you can count on mine–it’s what seals a lifelong friendship for me. This is why my Birdsong friendships are so important, because yall are crazy and hilarious. I can’t speak for Avril, but I think that my laughter also had something to do with imagining white people watching it and how it might make them feel. I’m sure I have a revenge issue that’s bad for me.
Oh, but I ramble.
It makes me feel strange that some of the most potent racial satire to come out of SNL in the past few years comes from Andy Samberg. Not because I think that white comics shouldn’t talk about race or anything simple like that. I’ll say that it challenges me, and anyone who wants to write about race and comedy. It challenges me because it says that race comedy, and race relations, are different now. This is not the eighties and nineties, where we were the only ones even doing racial comedy and it was based mostly around identifying the differences between black and white Americans. Alot of white folk who grew up in the nineties are simply more racially aware and I don’t know if it’s because of the era they’ve grown up in, if they want to disidentify with their families, if it’s erotic, if they had a brown nannymaid when they grew up, if Toni Morrison saved their life in high school or if they are just really wonderful or some combination. But in any case, the pool of people who see and are interested in racial difference is growing, and increasingly, white folk are branding themselves as both the object of critique and the instrument of its transmission. Stuff White People Like begat White Whine and White People Problems and countless others, I’m sure. White comics seem to know who the proper targets should be, and among the most relevant targets for our discussion is bad white people.
I love the Ras Trent skit, it’s hilarious and Necessary. But it also wants to let me know certain things. It wants to let me know that Andy Samberg is not any kind of enemy. It wants to let me know that we are on the same side that he is an ally, and that he knows, maybe even better than me, how silly white college kids are. When I see these things I think, ‘There goes that defense mechanism I learned in elementary school and thought only belonged to me and other people of color. I thought it was one of our things, and now you’re doing it, so now, I gotta go reformulate some aspects of my identity right quick.’ It’s also apart of a larger history of what we could call…”normative adaptations”?? Academics am I right? Like, when a middle-class white person would make fun of “trailer trash” just to kind of let you know that that’s where the real racism is. In magic, we call that diversion.
Racial awareness has become another part of the self-consciousness package for many Americans. And while the legislative and affective implications of this can only mean good things for everyone involved, I wonder how it will alter the motivations and aims of cultural production by people of color. For comedians like Dick Gregory, Moms Mabley, Richard Pryor and on through to Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock, exposing white myopia was a driving force of the work; these artists inherited and refined a set of strategies and critical tools that allowed for potent diagnosis of contemporary racial issues. Their work enacted, in public, what so many people of color had learned to be true in private, while very young. I fear that certain kinds of outsider critique will lose their force, now that whites “see racism too,” on and off the stage. It also makes me excited to see what new kinds of outsiders will emerge, what the next generation of comics will have to say about identity, what their specific struggles will be.
I think of Kenan alot. Remember Kenan Thompson, from Kenan & Kel? Do you? Do you? And I think, what’s up with Kenan? Should I be disappointed in him, or does he not get any good material, or is he really, really uncomfortable around these people?
My friend Josh Orr told me that Hannibal Buress, a Chicago comedian, was recently tapped to move to New York and write for SNL, after an appearance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. I got so excited. Because subversive whiteness is rad. I need curveballs, you need curveballs. But I’m jonesin’. If I can’t have an In Living Color or House of Buggin’ substitute because that was the nineties and Fox was a new network with nothing to lose, then I want subversive blackness on Saturday nights. I want racially relevant comedy that’s not just another white person at a party saying racist things. I want racial comedy where the brown folks aren’t just the noble accessories to a white woman’s ignorance. I want to see awkward race relations between people of color. I want to see no mention of race at all too, I want to see brown folk being awkward and sarcastic and zany. I want to see SNL take its favorite formula of “Take A Definitive Personality Trait Of Our Time And Exaggerate It For 7 Minutes At A Dinner Party” and have it play itself around a non-white character. I want Maya Rudolph back. Maybe SNL will find more comedians of color and this will spread to the other networks and it will all be okay and they can broaden the range of comedy they present and it will be so relevant and new that I’ll never complain again.
If not, I guess we’ll always have a vision of what interracial comedy can be when we watch Marsha Warfield (of Night Court fame), Sandra Bernhard, Robin Williams, Paul Mooney, Tim Reid, Edie McClurg and others roasting Richard Pryor, on the Richard Pryor Show.
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October 13, 2009 at 11:49 AM |
What do you make of the fact that so much of the racial comedy coming out of the 90s and 00s that was performed by black people was written by white people? I can’t speak to stand-ups but when you look at the writing staff for the Chris Rock Show and Chappelle show, you had white guys writing half of the material, and by all accounts they were writing just as much of the race stuff as the minority writers (and the black the writers weren’t stuck only writing about race, which is often overlooked when we think about great minority comedians; and I’ll leave the Jewish aspect alone for now). Is it possible that only recently people like Louis CK (though he’s half Mexican, his race stuff is mostly about blacks) and Brennan have started to get known as performers, but that their contribution to the discussion has been in the background all along?
October 14, 2009 at 2:43 PM |
Thank you for all the holes you just poked in my argument. First, I’m really bad at making historical arguments but maybe in the nineties, black shows were the only place where white writers who wanted to talk and think about race could do so? Second, I’ll say that I’m most interested in the strange response I have when I see or hear a white person make fun of white people, and I don’t get that response when I see a black person making fun of white people through a joke or skit that may have been co-written or fully written by a white person. So in that way I’m more into thinking about the feeling I get when the former happens. Third, I think that while white people making fun of themselves and satirizing race relations in comedy is nothing new, the way this manifests itself in everyday social relations feels new, to me, and this is one of the ways I can see whiteness changing. And I was trying to see the stuff that’s happening in comedy as related somehow to the stuff that’s happening at parties and in social situations. What that relationship is is tricky and I don’t quite know how it works.
But I get the feeling that my white friends are aware of themselves as white in a way that I never knew white people to be before and I also think, without the supporting sociological data, that white awareness of whiteness itself is increasing throughout metropolitan centers in America and throughout young people and not just in my friend group. So now I suspect that there exists even more White Shame and White Guilt and White Disidentification than there was 50 years ago for alot of reasons and that it will only increase and among those reasons are skits like the Ras Trent one and the proliferation of all those white-weary websites but of course we have to think of the Ras Trent skit and the white-weary websites as both symptoms of and contributors to the increase in all those feelings now available to white people, if they want to enter into them. And in comedy it’s a way to get laughs and put a kind of racial awareness on display. But in everyday social situations this mockery may be a defensive strategy, a way to disallow people of color from ever accusing you of being racially insensitive, because how can they accuse you of something you’ve already exposed? And part of that strategy is a reaction to having angry brown friends like me who have gotten on your case or rolled their eyes around you or audibly sighed, but I’m interested in the other part of the strategy that may actually be a reaction to the weird race-based feelings you used to have but don’t have anymore and so it’s a way to distance yourself from vestigial racism, from that which still remains.