Black Women’s Humor in the Cultural Marketplace: An Excerpt from “Sass”
Black women comedians are more visible than ever, performing around the world in physical venues like comedy clubs and festivals, along with appearing in films, streaming specials, and online videos. Across these mediums, humor—and particularly sass—functions as a tool for Black women to articulate and redress cultural, social, and political marginalization.
The following is an excerpt from Sass: Black Women’s Humor and Humanity by J Finley, which is the first book in our new MF! Momentary Futures in Black Studies series. Sass is now available wherever books are sold.
Nuanced and creative . . . . an enlightening and rigorous examination of sass as a means of asserting one’s power in an oppressive world. It’s an insightful study of the politics of humor.
Publishers Weekly
Black women’s humor functions simultaneously as a legacy and facet of African American culture more generally and as something truly its own. It forces consideration of the roots of the expressive practices of which Black women on the variety stage at the fin de siècle availed themselves and of the ways slavery and domination—and Black women’s creative ingenuity within those conditions—framed those practices. Hartman has described the subterranean practices of the enslaved as deeply constrained “when the force of repression is virtually without limit, when terror resides within the limits of the socially tolerable.” It was in these crushing conditions that Black women’s sass originated as a tool to assert one’s humanity, yet it has become a hallmark of their humor, a signification of the inversion of power relations in which the genre of discourse was developed. It signals Black women’s will to redress that history in the limited sense Hartman proffers, “action aimed at relieving the pained body through alternative configurations of the self and the redemption of the body as human flesh, not a beast of burden.” The tragicomic imbrication of pain and pleasure has come to define how Black women’s sass gets expressed. In Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern, Jayna Brown examines the performative labor of Black actresses portraying the character Topsy (as opposed to white minstrel performers in blackface) at the turn of the twentieth century. Her study reveals a pivotal moment when the distinctiveness of Black women’s humor, with sass as its underlying feature, can be discerned in popular culture. The vaudeville stage was the first place where Black women made significant inroads as professional entertainers and was a site where they expressed themselves authentically to the extent possible, whether their humor was meant to be consumed by white or by Black audiences.
Black women’s vernacular performances, especially those that took place on urban variety stages at the turn of the twentieth century, “mark[ed] a crucial moment in the development of modern identities and pleasures,” Brown argues. “They were key sites at which Black female urban presence was articulated and expressed, and they were important nodal points in the circulation of expressive forms.” Brown beautifully captures how Black women’s humor during this period was saturated with the kind of sass I have outlined—with its primal scene firmly seeded in slavery. “The very act of making money through the beauty, grace, and comedy of their bodies’ talents reframed what could be produced by physical effort, by sweat, and disciplined tenacity,” Brown contends, and moreover, Black women’s labor in stage productions of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin seems to have propelled Black women’s humor into public culture. For better or worse, this period was significant in laying the foundation for how we think about the development and consumption of Black women’s humor as a distinctly American artistic form.
Black women’s sass originated as a tool to assert one’s humanity, yet it has become a hallmark of their humor, a signification of the inversion of power relations in which the genre of discourse was developed.
One of the most profound insights we gain from Brown’s analysis of Black women’s expressive culture at the turn of the twentieth century is our un derstanding of how Black women performers—from singers and dancers to actresses and musicians—used humor as a subversive tactic to undermine authority on the variety stage. By the 1840s, blackface minstrelsy had become America’s favorite pastime. White actors used burnt cork to blacken their faces and exaggerated stereotypical features associated with Blackness; large red lips and bugged-out eyes were the hallmark features that played up this (mis) representation of Blackness, cementing the image of Black people as strange, funny, folksy, and ignorant. The image of the shucking-and-jiving, laughing Black person that began circulating in the nineteenth century became a main stay of American popular culture.
Many Black minstrelsy troupes became popular, and even though their performances of degrading stereotypes were often as bad as those of white minstrels, Black comics had become part of the fabric of American popular culture. Performing on the minstrel stages and emerging vaudeville circuits gave hundreds if not thousands of African Americans new opportunities for traveling and economic mobility that had been denied them during slavery, making comedy and musical performance a viable career option for Black people in the late nineteenth century. The international obsession with stage productions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Brown argues, opened the door for Black women to enter blackface minstrelsy, introducing Black women’s humor into the public sphere.
After the turn of the twentieth century, the character Topsy was portrayed by Black women instead of white women in blackface, and as Brown per suasively argues, “Black women’s performances of Topsy carried different meanings than white women’s versions.” In “The Story of Topsy” in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Topsy is introduced on an auction block, purchased by a white man, Augustine St. Clare, for his cousin, the character Miss Ophelia. Topsy is “ignorant and care-free . . . joyful and mischievous,” a frightening sight to Miss Ophelia at first glance. “The Blackest little pickaninny girl [St. Clare] had ever seen,” Topsy “was eight or nine years old, and, besides being very Black, had round shining eyes, glittering as glass beads, and wooly hair braided into little tails, which stuck out in every direction. She was dressed in a filthy, ragged garment and was quite the most woebegone little darkey ever seen.” Topsy is a naughty child, harshly punished for her ongoing refusal to behave. According to Brown, Topsy is a figure of low farce, “associated with gruesome violence, which she survives and which she is seemingly inured to.” Topsy’s imperviousness to pain is rendered in the scarification of her back from repeated whippings (because she refused to be disciplined), and Brown goes on to cite Topsy’s darkly comic (if unintentional on Stowe’s part) mockery of a beating she endured from Miss Ophelia: “Law, Miss Feely whip! Wouldn’t kill a skeeter, her whippin’s. Oughter see how old mas’r made the flesh fly; old mas’r know’d how!” The performance of naked insolence by Black actresses, in the face of the unmitigated power to brutalize Topsy, suggests that Black actresses, “with a sly grin,” were pulling on the one expressive resource they had at their disposal—sass.
J Finley is associate professor of Africana studies at Pomona College.