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Conclusion A Soul Baby Talks Back In her compelling 1989 essay “Negotiating between Tenses: Witnessing Slavery after Freedom—Dessa Rose,” Deborah McDowell concludes by broaching the ways in which Sherley Anne Williams’s novel Dessa Rose addresses and incorporates laughter as an emotional release for its female slave protagonist : “We laughed so we wouldn’t cry.” More forcefully, Williams uses black laughter as a sign of freedom and autonomy: “I told myself this [laughter] was good, that it showed slavery didn’t have no hold on us no more.” McDowell is careful to insist that these passages are not a sign that slavery is a joke, “an institution to be laughed at, laughed about, laughed over” (159). Instead, laughter is deployed here in a manner that is consonant with contemporary scholarship on the slave experience, particularly those forms that emphasize “particular acts of agency within an oppressive and degrading system” (160). Recently, a provocative soul-baby response to this historiographic and literary situation has emerged, using a different approach to the comedic possibilities for representing slavery. While the neo-slave books and films explored in this book and elsewhere share a certain reverence for slavery, the work of a new black vernacular intellectual not only laughs at slavery but does so all the way to the bank. Dave Chappelle produces comedy that treads the fine line between pain and pleasure. As he told a Time writer, “Some things are so painful that they seem as if they’re not funny, but it’s not like people will never laugh at them. A lot of times the humor doesn’t come from pain exactly; it comes from things that make you anxious or afraid. It just helps you put them in perspective if you laugh at them” (Chappelle and Farley, “That’s What I Call Funny” n.p.). A stand-up comedian with a lucrative sketch show on Comedy 194 Conclusion Central in 2003 and 2004, Chappelle is the most recent in the history of black comedians who addressed slavery, however briefly, in their work (a few of the most well known being Garrett Morris and Richard Pryor in the 1970s and Eddie Murphy in the 1980s). And though slavery is not a joke, scholars suggest that it is a source for much of African American humor. “American slavery provides the backdrop of tragedy against which African Americans developed their distinct form of humor, in which the material of tragedy was converted into comedy, including the absurd. This often included selfdeprecation , as the slaves themselves were often the subjects of their comic tales” (Gordon, “Humor” n.p.). In what follows, I explore the methods Chappelle uses to deploy and provoke laugher as a technique for critical engagement with slavery, its representation , and its legacy. Curiously, the two sketches I analyze here—a parody of the Roots anniversary DVD and “The Time Haters”—are presented on Chappelle’s Show as errors. The high jinks from Chappelle’s version of Roots falls under the rubric of “bloopers,” a popular subgenre of television production where fumbled dialogue, missed cues, and other mistakes caught on film are repackaged and sold as a separate product. “The Time Haters,” a follow-up to the “Player Haters’ Ball” sketch, is part of an episode devoted to shows that Chappelle says were unfit for his regular program. Chappelle claims that these proposed sketches failed to meet his comedic standard. The scenes might have been unduly offensive, as in the sketch of a boot camp for juvenile delinquents hosted by Nelson Mandela, or the skit could not be brought to a successful resolution, as in the sketch of an alternate reality where everyone, from the DMV to the KKK, is gay. Ironically, as with most bloopers or outtakes, these “errors” do indeed reach their intended audience (in a gesture of cinematic economy where nothing is wasted, many film credits are riddled with these abbreviated failed scenes). I am intrigued by the accidental quality of these sketches—or, to be more precise, the ways in which these sketches are presented as accidents or errors. I believe that it is there that the liminal space, between comedy and critical analysis, starts to accommodate the complex work of traumatic acknowledgment and address in the popular sphere. Unlike the sacred responses to slavery’s initial traumatic disruption of black life and the lingering effects of that institution on the contemporary scene, Chappelle’s response is less reverential. This approach contrasts greatly to popular theories...

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