LAST SPRING, DURING the Broadway revival of “Appropriate” (2013), Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s sardonic drama about white family members returning to their ancestral plantation home in southeast Arkansas to bury their father, a rare moment of cross-racial candor transpired — not onstage but in the audience. In the third act, Bo, the middle-aged older brother played by Corey Stoll, unleashes a rant about the burdens of whiteness in 21st-century America. Even a passing acquaintance with the work of Jacobs-Jenkins, who’s a queer Black man, would condition theatergoers to understand the outburst as satirical exposure of a threadbare fallacy of racial innocence. “You want me to go back in time and spank my great-great-grandparents?” Bo says. “Or should I lynch myself? You people just need to say what it is you want me to do and move on! I didn’t enslave anybody! I didn’t lynch anybody!” The speech usually leaves audiences squirming. On this night, however, one person clapped.
“They were clapping in earnest,” says Jacobs-Jenkins, as if Bo were “someone who’s genuinely out here now just telling his story — you know, ‘Found his letters and read each one out loud!’” Before the playwright, actors and audience could fully register what was happening, a voice called out from the darkened auditorium: “Are you serious right now?” For Jacobs-Jenkins, 40, the whole thing was a delicious disruption. “Part of what the work is doing is exposing these fissures inside of a community — these feelings that we’re encouraged, as we are with most conversations about race in our country, to nurse in private.” At its best, Jacobs-Jenkins says, the theater can become a space to “risk learning something we didn’t anticipate” about one another.
Satire is the art of risk. It relies, after all, on an audience comprehending a meaning that runs counter to what the text reads, the screen shows or the comedian says. In this regard, it’s vulnerable to misinterpretation and to deliberate distortion. When that satire concerns race and when the audience is as diverse and as divided as the United States is today, those risks compound. Why hazard satire’s indirection when even the most straightforward language — the term “woke,” for instance, or the seemingly incontrovertible good of “equity” — is manipulated and weaponized against its original ends? Yet perhaps these are the conditions that demand satire most of all, meeting absurdity with absurdity.
I spoke with Jacobs-Jenkins, whose new political family drama “Purpose” is now on Broadway, 10 days before Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States, the same week that Trump gave a press conference at Mar-a-Lago in which he, among other things, called for renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” acquiring Greenland from Denmark and welcoming Canada as the 51st state. The way Jacobs-Jenkins sees it, “this is probably going to be one of the most difficult moments in recent memory to be an American, but it’s also going to be kind of the funniest — because come on! I think the question of this time will be: ‘Are you serious right now?’” The Black American satirical tradition, with its roots in the unfathomable dehumanization of slavery and the persistent pressures of racial discrimination, offers equipment by which all of us might better endure and even combat our lacerating realities.
Perhaps that’s why in recent years satire has surged among Black American writers across all media, extending a longstanding tradition of seeking out laughter to entertain, and to stave off despair. From Paul Beatty’s “The Sellout” (2015) to Kiley Reid’s “Come & Get It” (2024); Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” (2017) to Boots Riley’s “Sorry to Bother You” (2018); Donald Glover’s “Atlanta” (2016-22) to Juel Taylor’s “They Cloned Tyrone” (2023), satire has once again emerged as a defining mode of Black expressive culture, on the page and on the screen. The satirical impulse is, of course, not unique to Black Americans — deep tributaries of wry humor flow from Jewish Americans, L.G.B.T.Q. communities and other groups that the country has continually ostracized. However, the Black tradition has done much to establish the terms of a distinctly American satire, one defined as much by its cleverness as its prophetic truth.
The term “satire” derives from the Latin “satura,” a “mixed dish,” in reference to the blend of humor and social critique that characterized classical satirical theater and still defines the form today. Satire is protean, defying taxonomy, though most of it weaponizes irony to expose contradictions, lapses in logic and moral failings, holding them up to ridicule and public account. Satire isn’t simply comedy, but it often works through comic tools like caricature, parody and exaggeration. It’s a social art, both in its frequent attention to matters of collective interest and in the fact that it’s often experienced communally.
FOR JACOBS-JENKINS AND many others, the most resounding contemporary satirical voice is the American writer Percival Everett. As the author of 24 novels and several volumes of poetry and collections of short stories, Everett has long enjoyed a reputation as an experimental writer willing to confront the darkest chapters of American history. His 2021 novel, “The Trees,” is a murder mystery that transpires in the shadow of the unresolved legacy of the 1955 lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till. The result is unsettling by design: “I make fun of stuff because it’s so ridiculous,” he says. “ ‘The Trees’ is about lynching. But I don’t think that’s funny. As someone who comes from a population who’s threatened by it, the only way we survive it is by looking at the absurdity of it. If we didn’t, we would be scared all the time.” Everett, 68, recalls thinking after the first election of Trump, in 2016, that satire — indeed, comedy as a whole — might be dead. “How do you parody something that’s already a parody?” he asks. Rather than relinquishing his approach, however, he simply redirected it: “Humor gives us an advantage [as writers],” Everett says. “If you can get someone laughing, … the reader relaxes. Once someone relaxes, you can do other, more nefarious things to them — like make them think.”
Last year, Everett published “James,” his reimagining of the American classic “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” told through the voice of Mark Twain’s enslaved Black character Jim. In the strictest sense, “James” employs parody and pastiche, drawing broadly from Twain’s plot and characters but endowing its first-person narrator with the wit and eloquence that his original creator denied him. Generous readers of Twain’s novel, like the writer Ralph Ellison, who bemoaned that “Twain’s bitter satire was taken for comedy,” forgive “Huck Finn” its many abuses — the 219 instances of the N-word; the indulgent last third of the book (which Ernest Hemingway advised readers to skip), which gives itself over to Jim’s gratuitous confinement and petty torture, masterminded by a sadistic Tom Sawyer and a complicit Huck. Everett retains the best of Twain’s story — especially the freewheeling adventures of Huck and Jim on the Mississippi — and layers over them a sophisticated satirical register in which Jim, now James, claims agency.
The second chapter begins with James leading an unconventional elocution lesson for a group of Black children, instructing them on how best to fracture rather than to refine their English pronunciation. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” James tells the children. One of his keen pupils offers up an axiom: “Never address any subject directly when talking to another slave,” she says. When encountering a kitchen fire, for instance, instead of warning directly, you might instead exclaim, “Lawdy, missum! Looky dere,” so as not to show up your white mistress. “What do we call that?” James asks his pupils. Together they respond, “Signifying.”
“Humor is vengeance,” the novelist Paul Beatty writes.
Signifying, a form of semantic indirection, is neatly suited to satire. As the literary critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. defines it, signifying is encoded linguistic play that exposes “the figurative difference between the literal and the metaphorical, between surface and latent meaning.” Signifying, like the broad category of satire, is a double-voiced art; it doesn’t so much say one thing and mean another as it says one thing and means two. An abiding practice that stretches back through the Black oral tradition — in the playful and profane narrative poems called the toasts, in the games of verbal jousting called the dozens and in sermons and songs — signifying testifies to the centrality of satire as a resource for Black Americans, both artists and everyday people.
THE FIRST BLACK American satirists were enslaved, lampooning the rituals and manners of those who called themselves masters. Cakewalks, emulations of white high society’s formal promenade dances, were ostensibly performed for the benefit of plantation owners, though in fact they were exquisite parody — exposing white pretensions through Black virtuosity. Traces of this same sensibility are apparent in 19th-century folk lyrics that white listeners often mistook for songs of mirth. Such subtle comic subversions sat beside more overt expressions that centered persuasion over amusement. David Walker’s “Appeal” (1829), a groundbreaking antislavery pamphlet that made the case for abolition decades before Harriet Beecher Stowe’s stilted and stoic novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (1852), calls out the hypocrisy of a South Carolina newspaper that had the temerity to label the Turks “the most barbarous people in the world” for their treatment of the Greeks while advertising a slave auction directly below. “I declare,” Walker writes, “it is really so amusing to hear the Southerners and Westerners of this country talk about barbarity, that it is positively, enough to make a man smile.”
The Black smile would be cast as caricature starting in the early decades of the 19th century with the advent of blackface minstrelsy, a practice in which white male performers would “black up” their faces using burned cork, painting on rictus grins of livid red. The songs, skits and comic routines of the minstrel stage served as cruel inversions of Black linguistic fluency and imaginative expression. Satire had no place in minstrelsy because the joke was invariably one-note: punching down at those excluded from the promise of American freedom. In the aftermath of the Civil War, some newly liberated Black performers would take the minstrel stage themselves, introducing a satirical sophistication winking from behind the black mask. This practice extended into the 20th century, most notably with the comic actor Bert Williams, who along with his co-star George Walker created “In Dahomey: A Negro Musical Comedy” (1903), the first full-length musical written and performed by Black artists to appear on Broadway.
The 1920s and ’30s were a golden age of American satire, from the acerbic columns of H.L. Mencken to the writings of Sinclair Lewis and Dorothy Parker. It’s no surprise, then, that Black authors also joined in. Writing in 1925 of the “younger generation” of Black writers, the architect of the Harlem Renaissance Alain Locke observed that “reason and realism have cured us of sentimentality: Instead of the wail and appeal, there is challenge and indictment.”
Responding to Locke’s call, Langston Hughes explored what he lovingly labeled “the low-down folks, the so-called common element.” His series of stories from the perspective of Jesse B. Semple offered Hughes a means of satirizing both the absurdities of Jim Crow racism and the vanities of Harlem’s Black bourgeoisie. Similarly, Hughes’s friend and sometime collaborator Zora Neale Hurston explored the comic life of everyday people in her fiction and plays, as well as in her research as a social anthropologist, such as in her folklore collection “Mules and Men” (1935). And the novelist Wallace Thurman exercised an eviscerating irony in his satirical critique of the Renaissance’s own literary elite in his novel “Infants of the Spring” (1932), a roman à clef that targets everyone from Hughes and Hurston to Countee Cullen and Thurman himself.
The greatest satirical practitioner of the Harlem Renaissance, however, was the journalist and writer George S. Schuyler. His 1931 novel, “Black No More,” is a work of sci-fi comedy with a startling premise: A Black inventor has devised a process that makes Black people’s skin paper white. Schuyler turns his gaze not only on the savage inequalities of an American racial caste system but also on the Black leaders whom he believes have enriched themselves and gained their fame by exploiting that very system in the name of racial uplift. Schuyler and other Black writers found the courage to find fault not just without but within.
“At the heart of satire, isn’t it about laughter at recognition?” asks the playwright Lynn Nottage. Her forthcoming works include two operas, “This House” and “The Highlands,” with librettos co-written with her 27-year-old daughter, Ruby Aiyo Gerber. Though both make space for laughter, Nottage’s satire primarily shows up in a pair of earlier plays, “By the Way, Meet Vera Stark” (2011) and “Fabulation, or The Re-education of Undine” (2004), which have enjoyed frequent revivals around the country. Separated by centuries from the satire of the enslaved, Nottage’s plays nonetheless share certain bedrock strategies with the early Black tradition. Foremost among them is an understanding of satire as a coded language for communicating intraracial truths, including self-critique. Nottage, 60, recalls debuting “Fabulation,” a rags-to-riches-to-rags tale of a snooty Black New York publicist who loses it all and is forced to return to her long-abandoned childhood home, at the Off Broadway institution Playwrights Horizons. In a tiny upstairs theater, the uproariously funny play was greeted with near silence. “We thought, ‘Oh, dear. What’s happening?’” she says. As the audience filed out, she noticed that it was almost entirely white: “We realized that we needed a critical mass of Black people who understood all the nuances of the work and who felt like they had permission to laugh at some of the things that were a little more barbed and pointed.” The experience underscored for Nottage the challenge — and opportunity — of writing for a diverse audience. “You realize,” she adds, “that there’s some truth under everything that resonates.”
What happens, though, when the truths audiences take away contradict one another? Call it wrong laughter. In 2005, Dave Chappelle walked away from a $50 million Comedy Central deal to renew his hit sketch program “The Chappelle Show.” What prompted him to leave, he once explained, was that the wrong people were laughing at the wrong things. To put it plainly, white audiences were laughing at the surface level rather than the satirical intention of his skits. His breakout characters and bits — viral before virality was even a thing, from his “I’m Rick James, bitch!” catchphrase to his Tyrone Biggums crackhead character — were intended to upend certain cultural scripts and racial stereotypes that, in the minds of some white viewers, they ended up instead reinforcing.
TODAY’S BLACK SATIRISTS, however, remain undaunted by the risks of wrong laughter, knowing that it’s embedded in the very structure of the genre. “I feel freer watching him,” the writer Danzy Senna says of Chappelle. “That’s what I want for my readers, that they feel freer when they’re reading me.” Last year Senna, 54, who’s married to Everett, published her fourth novel, “Colored Television,” which several reviewers confidently categorized as a Hollywood satire. Senna is less certain: “I’m always like, ‘Am I writing satire?’ I don’t know.” Though “Colored Television” includes at least one character — a Black film producer — who reads like a satirical type, the novel as a whole is more humanizing. Even if Senna doesn’t consider herself a satirist in any strict sense, she prizes her worldview as a birthright from her late father, Carl Senna, a prominent Black book editor (her mother is the writer Fanny Howe) and a bequest to her and her husband’s two teenage sons. “My kids are Gen Z, and I feel like they’re all irony,” she says. Everett recalls instilling that in their sons as a protection against a world that looks at Black and brown boys as a threat. “I have to tell them, ‘You be careful,’” he says. “But if that’s all they hear, they’ll walk through the world scared to death and angry.”
“Humor is vengeance,” the novelist Paul Beatty writes in his introduction to his anthology of Black humor, “Hokum” (2006). “Sometimes you laugh to keep from crying. Sometimes you laugh to keep from shooting.” Below the surface of satire is often a well of anger, what the novelist and satirical master Ishmael Reed terms “comic aggression.” Why write satires, though, when you can take to the streets? Senna — who as a child attended protests with her mother and was involved in activism for South African divestment in high school; and who last spring joined demonstrations for Palestine in Downtown Los Angeles — draws a bright line between political speech and her own art. “The language of those protests is always completely antithetical to anything that would interest me to write,” she says. “It’s not satire; it’s a very purposeful kind of shouting slogans with a mob of people.”
Still, speaking for the unrepresented is part of satire’s ethos. Despite attempts by those in power to co-opt it, satire remains an outsider’s art — or perhaps the art of an inside-outsider: someone who has certain access and insight into the people and the organizations they’re targeting. “Our political system is all so unserious,” says the comic writer and performer Ziwe, 33, who grew up in Massachusetts as the daughter of Nigerian immigrants and interned after college at both The Onion and “The Colbert Report.” “I can’t live and move through that as myself. I have to be separated because then I can judge, and that allows me to make something that has teeth.” She honed her craft through Instagram Lives, followed by a Showtime series, on which she refined an awkward, blunt and often flat persona. Her satire usually stems from silence, which induces her guests — from the disgraced former congressman George Santos to the convicted con artist Anna Delvey — to expose their own vices and vanities.
Satire is, in part, the art of tone, and tone is notoriously difficult to convey in any medium, much less the written word. Expressed in song, however, satire benefits from the shadings of voice, melody and chord phrasings. On her song “Denial Is a River” (2024), the 26-year-old rapper Doechii literalizes satire’s double-voicedness by bifurcating her own, rapping in her normal voice and speaking back to herself — exhorting, cajoling, correcting — as a pitched-up sonic superego. On the surface, the song sounds playful and comic; Doechii raps with swagger about her newfound success, even as her other voice won’t let her brush away her past traumas. The song became her first Billboard-charting hit, a feat she commemorated in a post this past January on the social network X: “My first solo entry is a satire about one of the lowest points in my life and has no hook,” she wrote.
“As an artist, I feel the vulnerability of being in this moment,” says the playwright Nottage. “The question becomes, ‘How far can you push the boundaries?’” One thinks of Richard Pryor’s 1976 album “Bicentennial Nigger,” which concludes with the searing title track, recorded live at the Comedy Store in Hollywood. His voice closely miked, he plays both to the intimate crowd at the club and to the wider audience that would hear the album at home. “A lot of people think I’m trying to offend whites and be nasty to them, but I’m not,” Pryor told The Los Angeles Times that year. “I’m looking for truth and trying to be funny at the same time.”
“You all know how Black humor started. It started in slave ships,” Pryor says, beginning a 15-second distillation of 400 years of Black comedy. “Cat was on his way over here rowing. Then dude said, ‘What you laughing about, man?’ He say, ‘Yesterday I was a king.’” It’s a potent punch line, though not a laugh line. In Pryor’s typical manner, he conjures a character from this tragic conceit: a 200-year-old Black minstrel performer with “stars and stripes on his forehead.” In the two-minute monologue that follows, recited while a military band plays “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Pryor’s character recounts Black America’s journey from the Middle Passage to the present day. “I’m just so happy. I don’t know what to do,” he exclaims. “I don’t know what to do if I don’t get 200 more years of this. Lord have mercy. Yessiree,” he says, punctuating each line with a grotesque guffaw. You can hear the audience laughing too — nervously, a laughter of incomplete release. Pryor’s character is relentless, his testimony careening toward conclusion as the song resolves. “I don’t know where my own mama is now,” he says. “She up yonder in that big white folks house in the sky. Y’all probably done forgot about it.” A pause for breath, and then in the last words of the album, Pryor rips off the satirical mask and speaks in his own solemn voice: “But I ain’t never gon’ forget it.”
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