A brief and Black history of stand-up comedy
Banned Histories of Race in America
Call and response. You’ve heard it in rap music. I say hey, you say ho. Hey… I hope you said it. Blues songs are famous for repeating the first line of each verse, building an entire composition around call and response. It doesn’t stop there. A preacher asking for an “amen”. A protestor asking what people want and when they want it. If you look close enough, you’ll begin to see just how much call and response is built into the Black American experience.
But call and response is much more than just performer dynamics. It is the audience getting a say over what’s happening onstage. Maybe you’ve heard about Black folks talking through movies. Maybe you’ve heard about Showtime at the Apollo or other notoriously critical Black audiences. If you’re going to attempt to hold our attention, expect to be held accountable if you can’t. That’s democracy. That’s freedom of speech.
A way Black public figures have been able to hold people’s attention throughout our history is through signifyin’. What’s that? Well, slavery meant self-censorship for our own good and so indirect language became necessary and wit became our most valuable tool. From this is born a style of communication called signifyin’. You can hear signifyin’ throughout Black American oral traditions. For example, toasts, a rhythmically told narrative in a rhyme scheme. It’s rap without a beat and it’s 100% signifyin’.
Another example of a signifyin’ Black American oral tradition is the dozens, a one-on-one insult game. The insults can be about anything from intelligence to appearance to family and it can be funny and light or it can be funny and brutal. How brutal? Well, the name comes from the fact that disfigured enslaved Black folks were sold by the dozen. The dozens can be played anywhere from the corner to the stage and they hit best when no one expects it. Like that time during the Neighborhood Awards when presentation for Best High School was interrupted by a spontaneous game of the dozens.
Black traditions have always confused white people. When they first saw the dozens, they didn’t understand it. They didn’t get why Black folks were hurting each other’s feelings. There was no understanding of The Black Experience and Black wit was thought to not exist. The idea of Black competitive wordsmithing was impossible to comprehend. I imagine it would be like witnessing a boxing match for the first time without knowing that the sport of boxing existed.
Now, knowing about call and response, signifyin’, toasts and the dozens it becomes very clear that these are the traditions behind stand-up comedy. When you hear Redd Foxx and Moms Mabley and LaWanda Page and Richard Pryor it’s unmistakable. So, it should be no surprise when I tell you that stand-up comedy was invented by a Black man.
His name was Charlie Case. Born in Lockport, NY in 1858, Case was a lawyer and a salesman before he came to Vaudeville. From there he was the first to drop the singing and dancing part and just tell jokes onstage by himself. Case also gets credit for creating common joke structures and a little thing called the punchline. These details are important because white scholars often try to credit white man Charles Farrar Browne with stand-up’s creation.
Born in 1834, Browne definitely pre-dated Case, but his performances weren’t stand-up so much as racist one-man shows. Primarily a writer and editor of Vanity Fair, Browne sold books by touring as a rural illiterate character named Artemus Ward. He’d get onstage and make fun of marginalized people, throw around the N-word, this kind of thing. After the Civil War, he threw and performed at a benefit for Varina Howell Davis, wife of imprisoned Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Naturally, Browne faced a lot of public criticism for that and if it were today, I’m sure he’d be complaining about people trying to cancel him.
Yes, white bigotry masquerading as comedy also has a long tradition. Maybe equally long is their defense of said bigotry when they get called out. Here’s a newspaper clip from 1958 asking “Are we killing laughter?” The writer whines that “racial jokes bring a deluge of enraged mail from sensitive ‘minority groups’!” As ever, free speech counts right up until a white man gets called racist.
Of course, there have been white comedians who were not bound to that theme. Lenny Bruce was known to skewer racists. George Carlin might’ve had more jokes about white people than Richard Pryor. But, even though there has objectively been no time in history offering greater access to offensive humor than this very moment, the groaning and moaning about comedic censorship is at an all-time high. Maybe that’s because there has never been a time when white self-victimization has been so lucrative.
This is not to say that this sensitive school of white comedians isn’t funny. Back in March, podcaster Joe Rogan opened The Comedy Mothership in Austin, TX. The idea was to create a comedy club that centers free speech for comedians. If you go to the club, your phone will be locked up, you will be searched for hidden phones and your face will be scanned. The scanning is in case you disobey the many “No Heckling” signs, at which point you will be made to leave and banned from ever returning, with the help of facial recognition software. Considering the history of stand-up comedy, that club itself may actually be the single greatest joke of all time.
But if you’re not satisfied by that joke, let me recommend a few stand-ups from that other tradition: