With all the mess we are experiencing in the world today, it might be worthwhile to make fun of it all instead of simmering in our own misery. After all, satire is usually meant to be humorous; its greater purpose is to make constructive social criticism and draw attention to particular and wider issues that affect societies in our day and age.
For many years, people in marginalized communities have used satire to sift through the issues and social problems that affect their communities. And for good reason, they have succeeded in making fun of our era’s most disturbing political realities.
It’s advisable to be cautious about satire. It is, after all, “the art of risk.” When making a comment or a joke, you heavily rely on the audience to react; sometimes, you don’t know what their reaction would be. When satire concerns issues of race, and the audience is diverse and divided, it is imperative to be cautious, the issues could easily compound.
Black Satire and Expressive Culture
Although satire isn’t inherently unique to Blacks, it is also a characteristic of other cultures and communities, like Jews and people from the LGBTQ communities. Nevertheless, Black satire has done much to cement its role, one that is defined by cleverness and prophetic truth.
Many Black Americans used satire in their works. In recent years, it has surged among Black American writers across various media, extending a long-held tradition of laughter in the face of misery.
For example, Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, a novel released in 2015, and Jordan Peele’s Get Out, a horror-comedy film that emerged as a defining mode of Black expressive culture on the page and screen.
What is Humour Good For?
The novelist Paul Beatty writes that “humour is vengeance.” Many other writers concurred with that statement. For example, the literary critic Henry Lousie Gates argues that humour and satire’s inherent role is its encoded linguistic play that exposes the figurative difference between the literal and metaphorical, or the surface and the metaphorical.
Because of its two-fold meaning, satire is a double-voiced art. The author argues that it doesn’t just say one thing and mean another; it says one thing and means two. The 1920s and 1930s were the era of satire in the United States, and authors and literati like Sinclair Lewis and Dorothy Parker were pinnacles of satire. It wasn’t too long afterward that a younger generation of Black writers also joined in.
When making satirical remarks, the heart of it is about laughter at recognition. Nevertheless, the main message, truth, or pun intended, doesn’t always resonate. When that happens, the truth the audience takes away might contradict one another. Case in point; in 2005, Dave Chappelle, an American stand-up comedian and actor, walked away from a $50 million Comedy Central deal to renew his sketch program The Chapelle Show, the reason being that the wrong people were laughing at the wrong things.
Black satire is a form of art that involves speaking for the unrepresented, which is the main ethos of satire. Many Black artists and comedians remain undaunted by the risks of the audience laughing at the wrong things; after all, they know this is embedded in the genre’s core.
For many people in the Black community, humor gives a voice to the voiceless. As the novelist Paul Beatty writes in his anthology of Black humor, “Sometimes you laugh to keep from crying. Sometimes, you laugh to keep from shooting!”
David Messiha | Staff Writer