Rolling – Blackness and Mediated Comedy

Since slavery, African and African American humor has baffled, intrigued, angered, and entertained the masses.Rolling centers Blackness in comedy, especially on television, and observing that it is often relegated to biopics, slave narratives, and the comedic. But like W. E. B. DuBois's ideas about double consciousness and Racquel Gates's extension of his theories, we know that Blackness resonates for Black viewers in ways often entirely different than for white viewers. Contributors to this volume cover a range of cases representing African American humor across film, television, digital media, and stand-up as Black comic personas try to work within, outside, and around culture, tilling for content. Essays engage with the complex industrial interplay of Blackness, white audiences, and comedy; satire and humor on media platforms; and the production of Blackness within comedy through personal stories and interviews of Black production crew and writers for television comedy.Rolling illuminates the inner workings of Blackness and comedy in media discourse.

"Rolling offers a rigorous and absorbing exploration of the spaces where blackness, comedy, and media converge. Meticulously researched and wide ranging in scope, the essays assembled by Dr. Alfred Martin present an in-depth look at the myriad ways that Black humor has operated as a site of catharsis, social commentary, and resistance within popular media. Rolling is more than a study of Black humor and media: it is a celebration of one of the most enduring forms of Black culture."—Racquel Gates, author of Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture "Alfred L. Martin, Jr. has constructed the most comprehensive collection of Blackness and humor to date. Black humor evokes deep feeling, bodily movement, and a cackling laughter from the Black interiority. Through its series of cultural, industrial, and political examinations, Rolling requires its readers to confront these emotions and to revisit and reframe theories of comedy that have historically privileged whiteness and heteropatriarchy. Readers of this text are prompted to ask themselves, what does it mean to laugh Black?"—Adrien Sebro, author of Scratchin' and Survivin': Hustle Economics and the Black Sitcoms of Tandem Productions

Alfred L. Martin, Jr. is Associate Professor of Cinematic Arts at the University of Miami. He is author of The Generic Closet: Black Gayness and the Black-Cast Sitcom (IUP).