YouTube’s ‘Ask a Slave’: Latest in ‘slave humor’ trend?
ESSAY - 'Ask a Slave' is just the most recent successful attempt to tap into the violence of slavery from 150 years ago to highlight the challenges of today...
A history of slave humor
Consider the 1991 In Living Color sketch, Timbuk the Last Runaway Slave. Timbuk (played by Damon Wayans) suddenly finds himself in modern times and he quickly realizes that while the clothes are nicer and the hunting dogs aren’t as big, things haven’t changed that much for the black man in America in 150 years.
Slavery is also the backdrop to critique modern culture in the Chappelle’s Show, Roots Out-Takes sketch from 2003. Chappelle illuminates in these routines how the commodification of black culture has gone so over the top that even the once sacrosanct Roots mini-series can be re-packaged as a bloopers DVD in a late night infomercial.
Or more recently Key and Peele’s Auction Block sketch in 2012 on Comedy Central. The two leads play slaves on an auction block — but hilarity ensues when the black man’s desire to show that he can “stand up to the man” comes into conflict with everybody’s need to be chosen, even if the work ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Flawed slave humor narratives
Mind you, not all slave humor works as well as it does in Ask a Slave, on In Living Color, or on Chappelle’s Show.
Slavery was dehumanizing, rife with sexual violence and brutality, and steeped in white supremacy. If attempts at slavery-based laughs ignore the brutality of slavery, or worse regurgitates it without criticism, the joke falls flat and people get pissed off.
That’s why The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer crashed and burned so hard in 1998. The UPN show starred Chi McBride as a displaced black nobleman serving as a house slave for Lincoln during the Civil War.
Diaries was a lame attempt at merging Benson and the U.K.’s Black Adder, and it failed because slavery as an experience was either watered down or merely used for jokes, not as a backdrop for criticism or subversion.
“Slave humor” requires engaging and attacking the subject matter and its modern vestiges, not making light of it or playing with its tropes. That’s why the offensive Harriet Tubman Sex Tape from Russell Simmons sent people through the roof.
Vestiges of oppression explored through slavery
Yet, Harriet Tubman: The Sexiest Abolitionist by Second City Comedy group executed the exact same joke of playing on Tubman’s alleged sexual wiles used to manipulate a white slave master. It was extremely funny, and nobody complained.
It’s not a coincidence that Lizzie Mae’s first answers deal directly with the sexual abuse and work hours of slaves. Azie Mara Dungey did not avoid the real issues of slavery when she created this character. There’s no such thing as “too soon” when making jokes about the systematic sexual assault of an entire race of people.
Slavery-themed humor, and any humor that explores the denial of human indignity, will always have a role in African-American culture as long as vestiges of physical, mental and financial oppression exist.
Ask a Slave is just the most recent successful attempt to tap into the violence of slavery from 150 years ago to highlight the challenges blacks face today.
Dr. Jason Johnson is a professor of Political Science at Hiram College in Ohio and an analyst for MSNBC and Al Jazeera. He can be reached at @Drjasonjohnson on Twitter and at www.drjasonjohnson.com.
