APF Reporter Vol.2 #4 Index Home Black Humor from Slavery to Stepin Fetchit Mel Watkins Story in .rtf The Public Humor Perhaps the most apt way to describe the public humor of black Americans prior to the mid-1930's is to say that it was nearly always masked. Not only in the literal sense of grotesque, corked on blackface facades used in the minstrel shows that took the United States by storm in the early 1800's, but also figuratively and psychologically. As an old blues tune put it: Got one mind for white folks to see, he don't know, he don't know my mind. The humor displayed by blacks to those outside of their own ranks was of necessity oblique, sometimes double-edged, and usually at least superficially, self-deprecatory. Slavery, of course, was the primary factor in molding these characteristics. Although bondage and oppression are hardly favorable circumstances for the development of a comic tradition, it was precisely from that situation that both the indigenous and public style of black humor arose. Its form, from the beginning, combined cultural elements common to the numerous traditional African societies from which the slaves had been taken and the new language, social institutions and behavioral patterns of ante-bellum America, to which blacks had to adjust. "Childlike" Prancing Eighteenth and nineteenth century writings from English and American sources attest to the vigor and enthusiasm of the slaves' revelry as they danced, chanted and fiddled at various plantation gatherings. Almost immediately these functions caught the fancy of slave owners and the visitors who traveled through the South. The high-spirits, good humor and "childlike" prancing of the slaves were a source of great amusement to most whites and, as early as 1795, one traveler commented that the "blacks are the great humorists of the nation." | |
|
