Abstract
This chapter examines the ways that contemporary African American comedians examine race, “blackness”, and “whiteness” by parodying the passing-for-white narrative genre. Dave Chappelle and Neal Brennan (“The Niggar Family”, 2004, Chappelle’s Show) and Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele (“Das Negroes”, 2012, Key & Peele) parody passing in order to offer readings of race and racial identity as performative and culturally constructed while also confronting the realities of racism and persistent inequality in a supposedly “post-race” era. This chapter offers a focused and detailed close reading of these sketches, placing them within a broader history of African American comedy and performance (including “passing” skits by Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor) and reading them alongside contemporary theoretical ideas about “signifyin(g)” (Henry Louis Gates Jr.) and post-blackness (Touré).
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
As F. James Davis summarises, the “one-drop rule” in the Southern states decreed that a “single drop of ‘black blood’ makes a person black” and this was reinforced by “hypo-descent” rules in which “racially mixed persons are assigned the status of the subordinate group” (2001, 5).
- 3.
- 4.
The comic potential of passing has not escaped writers who engage with the genre. For instance, in her canonical novella Passing (1929), Nella Larsen ([1929] 2002, 55–56) includes a scene where a white man makes a racist joke in front of a group of women who unbeknownst to him are all passing-for-white. The women descend into hysterical laughter both at the misunderstanding and as a kind of Freudian “relief” response to the horror of the situation. For a useful introduction to “Relief Theory” see Morreall (1983, 20–37). For a close reading of these scenes see Ahmed (1999, 87–88).
- 5.
As Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2018), explains “[m]ost [American] whites assert they ‘don’t see any color, just people’ […] that, like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., they aspire to live in a society where ‘people are judged by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin” and yet “most whites insist that minorities (especially blacks) are the ones responsible for whatever ‘race problem’ we have in this country”, and for “crying ‘racism’” in response to very real and persistent racial and social inequalities (2018, 1). Also please note that the episode of Key & Peele in question has a team of writers attached to it, but I will be referring to Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele as the primary creators of meaning throughout this chapter given their dual roles as both writers and performers.
- 6.
Brown vs. Board of Education (1954, 1955) overturned the “separate but equal” justification for segregation previously legitimised through Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896); the Civil Rights Act (1964) outlawed discrimination on the basis of sex, race, colour, religion, and nationality; the Voting Rights Act (1965) banned racial discrimination in voting practices; and Loving vs. Virginia made laws prohibiting interracial marriage unconstitutional. For a useful timeline of civil rights legislation and events see Dierenfield (2013, xv–xxi). In the 2000 United States Census, individuals were permitted to “tick” and lay claim to more than one race or ethnic category for the first time in history (Davis 2001, 197–8; Elam 2011, 96).
- 7.
For instance, in his introduction to ‘Race’, Writing and Difference, Gates describes race as “a dangerous trope”, noting that “when we speak of ‘the white race,’ or ‘the black race,’ ‘the Jewish race,’ or ‘the Aryan race,’ we speak in biological misnomers and, more generally, in metaphors” (1986, 4), and as Anthony Appiah explains, “we are nowhere near finding referents for [race]. The truth is that there are no races […]” (1986, 35). Morrison writes that, “[r]ace has become metaphorical – a way of referring to and disguising forces, events, classes, and expressions of social decay and economic division far more threatening to the body politic than biological ‘race’ ever was” (1993, 63).
- 8.
For more on African American humour see Dickson-Carr (2001), Beatty (2006), and Carpio (2013). For more on Chappelle’s work see Wisniewski (2009) and McAllister (2011, 201–248). Scholars of passing have explored several of Chappelle’s sketches including “The Racial Draft”. See Elam (2011, 160–203), and Dawkins (2012, 138–9).
- 9.
- 10.
For excellent work on reading and textuality in passing narratives, see Moynihan (2010).
- 11.
Their use of black and white and observation of binary oppositions signifies on what Juda Bennett describes as a “‘chiaroscuro’ or ‘manichean’ style that depicts the world primarily in ‘black’ and ‘white,’ with particular attention to skin and eye color” which is a key feature of the passing genre (1998, 48).
- 12.
- 13.
For more information on the “brute” stereotype, see Bogle (2016, 7–14).
- 14.
Chappelle’s grandfather was ostensibly white. See Touré (2011, 61).
- 15.
Chappelle references these criticisms anecdotally in the introduction to the sketch, but elaborates on this in an interview with CBS news—see Leung (2004, n.p.).
- 16.
For more on Chappelle’s views on the “n-word” see Asim (2007, 210–11); for popular coverage on Madonna, see Passantino (2014, n.p.). For an especially useful unpacking of why it might be acceptable for African Americans to re-appropriate and “signify” on the “n-word” when it is not for white Americans, see Ta-Nehisi Coates’s recent explanation (Random House 2017).
- 17.
For more on whiteface see McAllister (2011).
- 18.
For other Key and Peele sketches in which the pair experiment with racial performativity, see their “Soul Food” (2012) sketch where two middle-class black men try to “out-black” each other based on what food they order in a black café and outside of this show, see Epic Rap Battles of History (2013), where Key plays Mahatma Gandhi and blacks up as Michael Jordan and Peele raps as Martin Luther King Jr. and Muhammad Ali.
- 19.
The term is usually attributed to Thelma Golden, the curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem and visual artist Glenn Ligon who used the phrase in the catalogue accompanying the “Freestyle” exhibition in 2001. For more see Copeland (2010, 78–81).
- 20.
See also Trey Ellis’s discussion of “cultural mulattoes” in “The New Black Aesthetic” (1989).
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Bradbury, J. (2018). Parodying Racial Passing in Chappelle’s Show and Key & Peele. In: Davies, H., Ilott, S. (eds) Comedy and the Politics of Representation. Palgrave Studies in Comedy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90506-8_5
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