To Be Real : Truth and Racial Authenticity in African American Standup Comedy

During watershed moments of crisis or incessant hope, African Americans'' varied stances around racial authenticity often bespeak a need to define who and whose they are, if only to contend with the enduring significance of race. In To Be Real: Truth and Racial Authenticity in African American Standup Comedy, Lanita Jacobs analyzes a decade of Black standup comedy to understand "realness" and "real Blackness" as a cultural imperative in African American culture. By consciously valuing a "real"--as opposed to strict notions of "the real" (which too often essentialize, objectify, and exclude)--this book reveals why authenticity matters to African Americans.

To Be Real: Truth and Racial Authenticity in African American Standup Comedy examines Black standup comedy over the past decade as a stage for understanding why notions of racial authenticity--in essence, appeals to "realness" and "real Blackness"--emerge as a cultural imperative in African American culture. Ethnographic observations and interviews with Black comedians ground this telling, providing a narrative arc of key historical moments in the new millennium. Readers will understand how and why African American comics invoke "realness" to qualify nationalist 9/11 discourses and grapple with the racial entailments of the war, overcome a sense of racial despair in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, critique Michael Richards'' ["Kramer''s"] notorious rant at The Laugh Factory and subsequent attempts to censor their use of the n-word, and reconcile the politics of a "real" in their own and other Black folks'' everyday lives. Additionally, readers will hear through audience murmurs, hisses, and boos how beliefs about racial authenticity are intensely class-wrought and fraught. Moreover, they will appreciate how context remains ever critical to when and why African American comics and audiences lobby for and/or lampoon jokes that differentiate the "real" from the "fake" or "Black folks" from so-called "niggahs." Context and racial vulnerability are critical to understanding how and why allusions to "racial authenticity" persist in the African American comedic and cultural imagination.