Who Is Black Comedy For?

A new book, Geoff Bennett’s Black Out Loud: The Revolutionary History of Black Comedy From Vaudeville to ’90s Sitcoms, frames the history of Black comedy in the U.S. as one of ceaseless progress. But Kam Collins argues in his Atlantic review that the book, while praiseworthy, mistakenly equates “progress” with broad mainstream acceptance, which dulls comedy’s sharpest edges in favor of palatability. It’s a provocative rebuttal and a strong counterargument: Black comedy’s revolutionary potential is strongest when it ignores the other eyes upon it—or, as Collins puts it, “Black comedy that primarily serves Black audiences[.]”

Where [Bennett] errs, however, is in holding up the era of crossover appeal as the apex of Black comic achievement. To dwell on ’90s network sitcoms—on Black television playing on white networks in general—is to gauge the progress of Black comedy in terms that are not always those of Black comedians themselves. We can see the success of shows such as In Living Color and Family Matters as proof that the American experiment, with its promises of integration and acceptance, has finally worked. Or we can acknowledge that the promise has always been contingent: You can tell jokes about race, but …