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Confessions of an African American Minstrel 105 esties, amusing always, but truculent and tricky; and the sunny sweetness which we all know in negro character is not there. . . . In spite of such lapses, however, we recognize in Mr. Harrigan’s work the spring of a true American comedy, the beginning of things which may be great things. We have more than intimated its limitations; let us say that whatever its limitations, it is never, so far as we have seen it, indecent. . . . At any rate, loving reality as we do, we cannot do less than cordially welcome reality as we find it in Mr. Harrigan’s comedies. Consciously or unconsciously, he is part of the great tendency toward the faithful representation of life which is now animating fiction. Confessions of an African American Minstrel By the 1880s, African American performers were becoming prominent as singers, dancers and comedians in minstrelsy. In 1896, Bert Williams and George Walker blacked up as ‘‘The Two Real Coons.’’ Williams’s success in all-black musicals, notably In Dahomey (1903), and his song ‘‘Nobody’’ (1906), established his reputation and made him a well-paid star of the prestigious Ziegfeld Follies after 1910. Williams was always conscious of his mixed-race, British-Caribbean origins and sensitive to prejudice. But as a thoughtful and consummate artiste, he explained to a prominent monthly magazine that the segregation that separated the races gave him the opportunity to articulate the views of the forgotten man, unknown to most Americans , through the medium of the minstrel fool. Bert Williams, ‘‘The Comic Side of Trouble,’’ American Magazine 85 (January 1918):, 33–34, 58–60. One of the funniest sights in the world is a man whose hat has been knocked in or ruined by being blown off—provided, of course, it is the other fellow’s hat! All the jokes in the world are based on a few elemental ideas, and this is one of them. The sight of other people in trouble is nearly always funny. This is human nature. . . . The man with the real sense of humor is the man who can put himself in the spectator’s place and laugh at his own misfortunes. That is what I am called upon to do every day. Nearly all of my comic songs have been based on the idea that I am getting the worst of it. I am the ‘‘Jonah Man,’’ the man who, even if it rained soup, would be found with a fork in his hand and no spoon in sight, the man whose fighting relatives come to visit him and whose head is always dented by the furniture they throw at each other. There are endless variations of this idea, fortunately; but if you sift them, you will find the principle of human nature at the bottom of them all. . . . It was not until I was able to see myself as another person that my sense of humor developed. For I do not believe there is any such thing as innate humor. It has to be MINSTRELSY 106 developed by hard work and study, just as every other human quality. I have studied it all my life, unconsciously during my floundering years, and consciously as soon as I began to get next to myself. It is a study that I shall never get to the end of, and a work that never stops, except when I am asleep. There are no union hours to it and no letup . It is only by being constantly on the lookout for fresh material, funny incidents, funny speeches, funny traits in human nature that a comedian can hope to keep step with his public. I find material by knocking around in out of the way places and just listening. For among the American colored men and negroes there is the greatest source of simple amusement you can find anywhere in the world. . . . But Americans for the most part know little about the unconscious humor of the colored people and negroes, because they do not come in contact with them. . . . Many of the best lines I have used came to me by that sort of eavesdropping. For, as I have pointed out, eavesdropping on human nature is one of the most important parts of a comedian’s work. . . . People ask me if I would not give anything to be white. I answer, in the words of the song, most emphatically, ‘‘No.’’ How do I know what I might be if I were...

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