Black Culture: A Laughing Matter

Abstract

Black authenticity is a false concept created by early European thinkers to overpower African people. Later the New Negro intellectuals used this misconception to compete with whiteness. However, their connotations of black authenticity later become ineffective due to changes in the meaning, language, and context of racial discourse over time. Through comedy, Dave Chappelle deconstructs black authenticity by ridiculing its meaning through a performative socio-cultural criticism. I will draw on Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of laughter to show how “open seriousness” can be a tool for open radical space that reinvent ways of thinking. In this case, Bakhtin’s laughter is seen through the comedy of Chappelle, which I call racialized homeopathy. Through racialized homeopathy, I show that Chappelle uses the mask of imposed racial images on black bodies to ridicule the myopic thinking of black culture and open up dialogue for human fellowship