African American Humor, Irony, and Satire African American Humor, Irony, and Satire Ishmael Reed, Satirically Speaking Edited by Dana A. Williams CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PUBLISHING African American Humor, Irony, and Satire: Ishmael Reed, Satirically Speaking, edited by Dana A. Williams This book first published 2007 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2007 by Dana A. Williams and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN 1-84718-214-3; ISBN 13: 9781847182142 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION.....................................................................................................1 Dana A. Williams CHAPTER ONE......................................................................................................7 THE MESSENGER MAGAZINE AND ITS ICONOCLASTIC DESCENDANTS: OR, ALL THE THINGS YOU COULD BE BY NOW IF GEORGE SCHUYLER WERE YOUR LITERARY FATHER Darryl Dickson-Carr CHAPTER TWO....................................................................................................26 OF RACIALISTS AND ARISTOCRATS: GEORGE S. SCHUYLER’S BLACK NO MORE AND NORDICISM André Hoyrd CHAPTER THREE.................................................................................................36 ISHMAEL REED AND THE DISCOURSE OF WONDERFUL Eleanor W. Traylor CHAPTER FOUR...................................................................................................48 ISHMAEL REED REPAIRS “THE [AFRICAN] DIASPORA’S DIRECT LINE TO Olódùmarè”: YORUBA LANGUAGE AND MYTHOLOGY IN JAPANESE BY SPRING Pierre-Damien Mvuyekure CHAPTER FIVE....................................................................................................62 THE ART OF WAR: ISHMAEL REED AND FRANK CHIN AND THE U.S. BLACK- ASIAN ALLIANCE OF MULTICULTURAL SATIRE Christopher A. Shinn CHAPTER SIX......................................................................................................84 THE NOVELS OF ISHMAEL REED: A LIFETIME OF DISSENT Reginald Martin vi Table of Contents CHAPTER SEVEN.................................................................................................94 “YOU MUST BE ABLE TO LAUGH AT YOURSELF:” READING RACIAL CARICATURE IN THE WORK OF ARCHIBALD MOTLEY, JR. Phoebe Wolfskill CHAPTER EIGHT................................................................................................103 WHAT THE MAN TRYIN’ TO LAY ON YOU IS PORKITIS: THE LITERARY CONNECTIONS OF RICHARD PRYOR IN BERKELEY, 1969-1971 Brian Flota CHAPTER NINE.................................................................................................118 DAVE CHAPPELLE, WHITEFACE MINSTRELSY, AND “IRRESPONSIBLE” SATIRE Marvin McAllister CHAPTER TEN...................................................................................................131 HUEY AND RILEY IN THE BOONDOCKS: SOMETIMES I FEEL LIKE A WOMANLESS CHILD Jennifer A. Jordan BIBLIOGRAPHY................................................................................................ 144 LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS....................................................................................158 INTRODUCTION “I LOVE MYSELF WHEN I’M LAUGHING, AND THEN AGAIN WHEN I’M LOOKING MEAN AND IMPRESSIVE”: HUMOR, IRONY, AND SATIRE IN AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND POPULAR CULTURE DANA A. WILLIAMS Each year for the past thirteen years, the Department of English at Howard University has held a national conference that has come to be known affectionately around the African American literary community as Heart’s Day. Free and open to the public, this conference commemorates the legacy of Howard University professor Sterling A. Brown by honoring a national artist who has made a significant contribution to African American letters. Sterling A. Brown was a professor and scholar extraordinaire, among his many accomplishments. During his tenure at Howard, he inaugurated the first and thus ground-breaking formal study of African American literature in the Academy, in a course then known as English 102. Thus, the artists honored at Heart’s Day speak to the tradition of African Americans making seminal contributions to American and world cultures in general and American and world literatures in particular. In years past, honorees have included Toni Morrison, James Baldwin (posthumously), Paul Robeson (posthumously), Chinua Achebe, Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Paule Marshall, Haki Madhubuti, Maya Angelou, and Black Women in the Academy. In 2006, the department chose as its honoree Ishmael Reed. Once we determined the general theme for the conference—“Humor, Irony, and Satire”—Reed emerged as an obvious choice. Appropriately, the evolution of the theme was both humorous and ironic in its own way. Emerging from a discipline (English) that, at times, can be unabashedly elitist and from a department that is equally, unabashedly progressive (at least for those who have, first, been dutifully trained classically) would be a conference that would 2 Introduction encourage formal scholarly interaction between literature and popular culture. Satire, of course, offered us the perfect medium to pursue this end. In our call for papers we asked scholars to consider humor, irony, and satire broadly, and the breadth of that consideration is reflected in the essays that follow. As fate would have it, in the months between the initial planning stages of the conference and its actualization, a number of events occurred that made the conference and the corresponding presentations seem all the more timely. In April 2005, comedian Dave Chappelle, creator of the highly successful “Chappelle Show,” left the United States and headed to South Africa where, after two weeks of rampant rumors about his whereabouts and his state of mind, he told Time Magazine’s Christopher John Farley that he had fled the U.S. and his $50 million contract with Comedy Central in order to “check his intentions.” In November of the same year, Aaron McGruder’s award-winning comic strip, The Boondocks, extended its reach from print to television when it premiered as an animated comedy series on the Cartoon Network’s late-night sister network, Adult Swim. And one month later, in December, Richard Pryor, easily one of the greatest modern day comedians, died. Only a few days after Pryor’s death, two members of the conference planning committee separately expressed wishes that a paper on Pryor would emerge, and, of course, one did. Much to our delight, a McGruder paper and a Chappelle paper would also be presented, thus facilitating our commitment to providing critical assessments of smartly contentious popular culture icons and literary satirists. By all accounts, it seemed that Heart’s Day 2006 would elude being a Dunbar-esque sport for the gods of humor. That good fortune continued through the evening gala event, which saw Haki Madhubuti, Amiri Baraka, Rome Neal, Kalamu ya Salaam, and Jerry Ward among others pay tribute to Reed and his satirical genius. Yet, the significance of this collection rests not in our escape of folly and vice or even in our smartness in paying tribute to the indefatigable Reed. Rather, this collection gains its primary significance in the more seminal ways of Sterling Brown. As Darryl Dickson-Carr, who contributes an essay to this collection, notes in African American Satire, very little scholarship exists specifically on satirists in African American literature. While Mel Watkins’s On the Real Side, as Dickson-Carr argues, offers an exhaustive history of African American humor as it relates to African American culture, it is limited in its assessment of humor, irony, and satire in literature specifically. Thus, this collection seeks not only to build on the strength of both Dickson-Carr and Watkins’s texts but to assert a position of its own by including essays on both literature and popular culture. Secondarily, this collection is especially useful for the obvious reasons—it adds to the body of scholarship on the traditional and non-traditional texts examined here; the lens of humor, irony, and satire as a way of reading texts is Humor, Irony and Satire in African American Literature and Popular Culture 3 especially useful in highlighting the complexity of African American life and culture; and the essays collected here reveal crucial but not so obvious connections between African American and other world cultures. Its lone limitation, as I see it, is its perpetuation of the gender limitations that characterize the traditions of satire. Though we were able to achieve some semblance of gender balance among presenters and contributors, each essay focuses on a male-authored text, and only Jennifer A. Jordan’s essay on The Boondocks offers a gender-specific critique. This limitation, however, makes the collection no less useful. It simply reminds us of the work that is yet to be done on women who work in the traditions of humor, irony, and satire. The arrangement of the essays follows a kind of loose logical chronology, beginning with examinations of George Schuyler’s work as a satirist. The essays on Reed, then, center the text, and the final essays examine the comedic genius of three contemporary popular culture artists. As one of the leading authorities on African American literary satire, Dickson-Carr brings to the collection his body of knowledge in “The Messenger Magazine and Its Iconoclastic Descendants: Or, All the Things You Could Be by Now If George Schuyler Were Your Literary Father,” where he suggests that literary scholars should perhaps reconsider much of Schuyler’s work, especially the satirical jabs of his “Shafts and Darts” column for the Messenger magazine. First examining the evolution of Messenger as magazine to highlight its natural fit for Schuyler and his ideologies, Dickson-Carr then argues that Schuyler’s columns provide not only the best and most incisive criticism of the New Negro to be found among his contemporaries, but they also help push African American politics and literature into modernity both through repeated calls for rationalism and simply by their very existence. In the sense that it investigates an under-examined aspect of Schuyler’s best known work, André Hoyrd’s “Of Racialists and Aristocrats: George S. Schuyler’s Black No More and Nordicism” answers Dickson-Carr’s call for scholars to reconsider Schuyler’s work. Hoyrd argues that focusing on the scientific racism that dominated the era and by examining select writings of Madison Grant as its leading Nordic practitioner, “readers not only can observe the intertextuality of Black No More but also better understand its Happy Hill lynching episode” and the novel’s critique of Grant’s worship of the Nordic male body, his scorn of womanhood, and Grant himself through the characters of Snobbcraft and Dr. Buggerie. Eleanor W. Traylor’s “Ishmael Reed and the Discourse of Wonderful” (the keynote address) opens the examination of Reed by identifying the ways his novels (and those of his contemporaries) rebuild the novel as city, moving it from the periphery to the center to ensure that “serious re-negotiations could and