"And You Know This, Man!": Love, Humor, and Masculinity in Friday

Black film directors in the early 1990s created visual representations of black urban experiences in predominantly impoverished areas described as hood films" The 1995 film Friday (dir. F. Gary Gray) used humor and laughter help to change the tenor of hood films from the early 1990s. This article explores the use of humor and vulnerability in the construction of black masculinities in Friday to argue that the subtle emotional labor throughout the film provides nuance to the gangsta rap iconography by depicting black life in the hood beyond the sites of grief and anger—two emotions that largely encapsulated the representations of black men in rap and film in the gangsta rap era of the early '90s. The film indirectly centers the emotional lives of black men oscillating between joy, love, and fear as the necessary affective range of self-care and survival in the hood.