Cultural Critique

Early on in my research for this article on race and comedy, I came upon a novel by Jessie Redmon Fauset titled Comedy: American Style (1933). Fauset, a prominent yet understudied writer and editor active during the Harlem Renaissance, tells the tragic story of Olivia, her family, and their relationship to the shifting nature of the color line through the prism of "passing" and social class. Critics debate the effectiveness of Fauset's treatment of these issues, but for me it is the title that is most provocative. Because, you see, Comedy: American Style is not funny at all. Cherene Sherrard-Johnson puts it plainly in her introduction to the latest print edition, calling the novel "anything but humorous" and explaining the title by suggesting that Fauset may have had a "Shakespearean understanding of comedy as a form in which the conflict revolves around marriages plots" (xvi). A plausible explanation, but this doesn't change the simple fact that the book is not funny. It is not even trying to be. What was Fauset suggesting about the relationship between comedy and race?

With that title, Fauset asks the reader to think about a tragic passing narrative filled with familial tension, estrangement, and even suicide as a kind of "American" comedy. Though laughs are hard to come by, there are elements of the novel that gesture toward the comic: the passing narrative as a kind of misdirection or misidentification so popular in stage comedies; characters who are often single-minded and flat in their representation of particular ideas or traits; and most bluntly, the moment when the narrator conveys the thoughts of a character who has explained the phenomenon of passing as "a sense of perpetrating a huge joke" (70).¹ For Fauset, then, race is not simply a topic for comedy but comic unto itself on the level of form. Race is a kind of "American style" of comedy at its core. [End Page 104]

The goal of this article is to take Fauset's provocation seriously and to begin to think about the relationship between comedy and race on the level of form.² To do this work, I take Fauset's insight out of the world of literature and her novel and into the realm of popular culture where the intersections of comedy and race have been a fertile source of creativity and consternation. I propose the term "the comedy of race" to explain how comedy is of race, how the very architecture of comedy and what makes us laugh can help us better understand how race itself works with, and independent of, comedy. Comedy stages the mechanics of racialization. By invoking comedy, I do not seek to pin it down to a single kind of manifestation.³ I am more interested in comedy as a mode that suffuses a range of genres, cultural production, and the everyday forms of relationality that constitute quotidian experience. Instead of trying to define lines where comedy might begin and end, this essay concerns itself with the signifying strategies comedy and race hold in common.⁴ Ultimately, I argue that race and comedy share formal qualities for producing meaning in the world—excess, ambiguity, and repetition—to advance two objectives. First, I explain the challenges that these formal similarities between comedy and race have posed to race and ethnic studies and how and why that has limited scholarly investigation. To understand form in this context is to better grasp why race and comedy have been such a provocative and often explosive pairing. Second, I aim to begin to imagine the critical possibilities that arise when the comic structure of race becomes the analytical emphasis.

In addition to formal considerations, the critical productivity of pairing race and comedy together is enhanced by how deeply they imbue quotidian life on their own and when they intersect to produce racial comedy. Race and comedy inform how we imagine, and relate to, ourselves and others. From on-demand streaming entertainment and satirical news shows to our lives online mediated by memes, viral videos, and Twitter ripostes, comedy is what "people increasingly come to expect in the kinds...