"How you durrin?": Chuck Knipp, Shirley Q. Liquor, and Contemporary Blackface

Figure 1.

F. Charles "Chuck" Knipp, a.k.a. Shirley Q. Liquor, applies blackface makeup at Fusion Nightclub, Louisville, Kentucky, on 6 May 2007. (Photo by John Gress)

In American Humor: A Study of the National Character (1931), cultural historian Constance Rourke proposed three main comic types as central to the formation of the American character: the Yankee, the backwoodsman, and the blackface minstrel. In her groundbreaking work, Rourke described the efflorescence of these types in 19th-century popular performance (and their subsequent iterations in the literary work of men such as Mark Twain, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman) as part of her career-long argument that "humor has been a fashioning instrument in America, creating fresh bonds, a new unity, the semblance of a society, and the rounded completion of an American type" ([1931] 2004:232). The rough comedy of popular stages, where caricature reigned, was, Rourke argued, the site where Americans jostled, joked, and jousted their way to an identity and a culture.¹

While Rourke's writing, in American Humor and elsewhere, is elegant and persuasive, her suggestion that blackface minstrelsy might draw a culture together instead of drive it further apart might strike us today as wrongheaded. Contemporary scholars interested in blackface in the United States, including Eric Lott (1993), Dale Cockrell (1997), W.T. Lhamon (2000), and John Strausbaugh (2006), find some historical truth in Rourke's position, suggesting that while antebellum blackface minstrelsy, though never beyond racism, was also often celebratory, insubordinate, even insurgent, as the form crept into the 20th century it mutated and ossified into something more simplistically and more damningly racist. Right now, contra Rourke, blackface in the popular culture of the United States does anything but create "fresh bonds" or a "semblance of a society." It is incendiary and provocative. As a performative trope, it is taboo. "Virtually all other forms of ethnic or identity jokes, while often frowned on," Strausbaugh asserts, "are permissible" (2006:9). But black makeup on a white face is always an act of racial violence.

Or is it? There's something undeniably compelling about Rourke's assertion that American culture is founded on comedy, on theatrical self-creation, and in particular on what Eric Lott has termed the "love and theft" inherent in the physical masquerade and verbal ventriloquism of blackface minstrelsy. It's no accident that New York Review Books' 2004 reissue of American Humor (with an introductory essay by Greil Marcus) emphasizes the importance of blackface in her work: the cover image is a close-up of Robert Colescott's 1975 painting George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: A Page from American History (fig. 2).

In saturated and intense colors, Colescott reworks Emanuel Leutze's well-known George Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851), a heroic and bombastic painting depicting an idealized version of Washington's 25 December 1776 surprise attack on Trenton, New Jersey. In Colescott's version, Carver, in a comically ill-fitting version of Washington's uniform, takes his place at the bow of a rowboat filled not with scrappy Revolutionary War soldiers but rather with broad-grinning blackfaced caricatures from 19th-century American popular culture. Minstrelized men drink whiskey, catch catfish, strum banjos. They wear rags (or are they stage costumes?); Rastus, pulling the oar, wears his pristinely white cooking togs, straight off the Cream of Wheat box. One full-bodied and big-bosomed woman, in Mammy's headscarf and red gingham, sits on the edge of the boat with her back turned toward the viewer. Her dress is hiked up to her waist, exposing her stockings and her bare ass. We cannot see her face, but just barely the side of her head; what, exactly, is she putting in her mouth? The central figure in the painting, hugging the flag as his eyes roll back in his head, seems to know.

In her analysis of the comic grotesque in contemporary slavery iconography, Glenda R. Carpio suggests that Colescott's painting "underscores both the distortions that racial stereotypes embody and the potent roles they play in...