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Chapter Three: Minstrel
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chapter three Minstrel { 1 } It is useful at this stage to remind ourselves of the characteristics of laughter as understood by Mikhail Bakhtin: its universality, “its indissoluble and essential relation to freedom” and its “relation to the people’s unofficial truth” (Rabelais and His World 89, 90). The heyday of modernist culture in the 1920s was also the heyday of the silent film comedy, exemplified by the movies of Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Buster Keaton. Walter Benjamin offers the comment that Chaplin accomplished “in a more natural way” the same reaction in audiences that the Dadaists desired (250), but his examination of the rise of film and its relationship to the artistic enterprise does not offer an assessment of Chaplin’s comedic art, or of comedic art as such. His comment nevertheless remains an important one, if only because the linkage he draws between Dadaism and Chaplin’s work allows us to glimpse just how important the comedic is to the modernist enterprise. To consider the importance of the comedic to modernism is, in a sense, to reconsider the relationship of popular culture to modernist aesthetics, seeing the former in a filial rather than a competitive relationship to the latter. Doing so runs the risk of prompting a further reconsideration, a theme throughout this study: that is, once the relationship of popular culture to modernist aesthetics is repositioned, then the further question of the relationship between African American culture and modernism comes to the fore. That is because within African American culture the relationship between these two poles is not as clear-cut as some modernist criticism has postulated for the aesthetic creations of the majority culture. To raise the question of the comedic also allows for consideration of another question, that of the relationship between modernism and African American culture as such; and to consider this relationship is at the same time to ask questions about how modernism came to have its particular “modern” caste. How do we recognize a work as “modernist”? One way of answering this question is to resort to the categories of radical subjectivity, multiple perspective , discontinuity, and so on (Everdell 346–60). As much as these categories may explain, or be used as signs that point to modernism, there is 84 much they don’t explain. Once the question of the comedic is posed, for instance, it is possible to inquire into other sources of modernist consciousness , into the shared cultural history and consciousness of modern society, and not only into the art of Chaplin but into such sources of that art as American minstrelsy. One of the characteristics of late minstrelsy and early vaudeville, as African American artists performed it, was the use of humor as a means of conveying “unofficial truth.” To do so, the old minstrel stereotypes had to be transformed and imbued with a new agency, one that embodied a distinctly modern form of humor, emerging in the twentieth century, in which agency and self-consciousness combined with the parodic to produce a new kind of comic hero. To search for this comic hero of a new type involves a discussion about pairs, twins, doubleness, illusion, parody, minstrels, and tramps. It involves an inquiry into how this comedic type emerged in American comedy in the early years of the twentieth century in the work of the African American comedian Bert Williams. Williams first came to prominence, in 1898, as one half of a comedy team, Williams and Walker. His partner, George Walker, left the stage in 1908, after contracting tuberculosis, and died in 1911, one year after Williams joined the Ziegfeld Follies. Williams was the only African American star of this musical review, which also starred such comedians and singers as Eddie Cantor, W. C. Fields, and Sophie Tucker (Riis, Just before Jazz 43–47). This exploration also involves a look at some affinities between the characters in Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett, and certain characters and characteristics of American, and particularly African American, minstrelsy and vaudeville. Although I make no claims about influence and causality between African American vaudeville, on the one hand, and Vladimir, Estragon, Pozzo and Lucky, and The Boy, on the other, I am interested in seeking out affinities. In particular, I want to explore the question of familiarity : how is it that we recognize the characters in Godot so readily? At the same time, what is distinct about these comic clowns? Part of the answer has to do with the contributions Williams made...