[For this year’s installment of my annual April Fool’s Day series, I wanted to AmericanStudy some 19th century humorists. I’d love to hear your humorous responses and nominations in comments. No really, I’m serious!]
On the fine line
between satire and stereotypes.
First and
foremost, it’d be April Foolish of me not to link to this
piece by my dad Stephen Railton, part of his award-winning website Mark Twain in His Times,
on Mark Twain and Bret Harte’s play Ah Sin,
a Play in Four Acts (1877). Dad has far more in-depth knowledge of the
play than I, and a great deal to say in that piece about the play’s complex
relationship to the era’s anti-Chinese prejudices (on which I focused a good bit
of my
third book and am continuing to think about
in my
current project), as well as both the two authors’ public roles and
reputations as prominent humorists and the often razor-sharp line between the satirical
and the stereotypical (or, to quote one of the funniest works of
all time, between clever and stupid) when it comes to humorous engagements
with social issues.
That line is a
seemingly eternal element within humor, and one not limited to ethnic or racial
comedy. Take Amy Schumer’s sketches
about gender, sexuality, and rape—is she
satirizing our culture’s problems with those issues, or using stereotypes to
gain laughs and ratings (or, as always, some combination of the two, one
dependent in no small measure on the knowledge and perspective an audience
member brings with her or him)? But at the same time, ethnic and racial
humorists seem particularly prone to walking the fine line between satire and
stereotype, and to prompting passionate debate about where on that spectrum
they fall. From Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy to Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle,
and up to contemporary works like Key
& Peele and Black-ish,
African American humorists have been at the center of many of those debates in
the late 20th and early 21st centuries. But the same
questions apply to any and all cultures and identities, and Asian American
comics and performers such as Margaret Cho
and Ken Jeong have faced the same responses
and critiques.
Of course, Ah Sin represents another side to the
issue—a satirical yet stereotypical work about Asian American identities
created by two white artists, if ones who (as my Dad’s piece notes) were
already on the record in support of Chinese Americans (especially relative to
their very xenophobic moment). Yet while there’s no doubt that outsiders to a
culture or community have to tread the line even more carefully if they choose
to create humorous works about that group (and have to recognize that they’re
opening themselves up to justified critiques in the process, regardless of
their specific choices and work), I would argue not only that they have the
right to do so, but that doing so represents an important part of humor’s role
in a society and culture. Indeed, no other artistic genre can highlight in the
same ways the absurdities and myths that surround us—and humorous works can do
so whether they satirize those elements, deploy them as stereotypes, or, as is
so often the case and was for Twain and Harte’s play, do both at the same time.
March Recap this
weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other humorists you’d highlight?
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