1. Symposium I: Repression

The first of these symposia concerns the 1926 debate between W. E. B. Du Bois and Carl Van Vechten that occurred in the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis. In response to a questionnaire entitled “The Negro in Art: How Shall He Be Portrayed?,” Du Bois brought together leading intellectuals to discuss the parameters and the goals of the Black cultural movement that was then coming to be known as the “New Negro” or “Harlem Renaissance.” This debate considered what kinds of Black “portraiture” should be encouraged and what role Black artists had in responding to negative descriptions and uplifting the race. While Du Bois and Van Vechten disagreed on the social and artistic functions of the Black artist, they both found that comedy, with its exoticized or caricatural stereotypes inherited from minstrelsy, could be exploited to repressive ends and should, in turn, be repressed in favor of race pride, realism, and a concern for contemporary social issues.Footnote ¹⁴ These positions effectively sanctified Alain Locke’s promotion of the “New Negro” Movement as the Black complement to T. S. Eliot’s idea of “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” and reframed a number of pieces in his New Negro anthology that contemplated what Jessie Redmon Fauset called the paradoxical “gift of laughter.” Based on the idea that the Black artist be an artist first and a racialized person second, what became comedically acceptable for the “Talented Tenth” or Black bourgeois elite were neutral displays of technically proficient poetic irony that could be both conventional and subversive, such as one finds in Claude McKay’s early poetry and in Countee Cullen, as well as in comedies of manners.

In the Crisis forum itself, this tension appears with unusual clarity. Du Bois frames the question of “how” the Negro ought to be portrayed as a question of moral stewardship and political responsibility, insisting that art which traffics in buffoonery, vice, and grotesque caricature cannot be neutral in a world organized by white supremacy.Footnote ¹⁵ For him, the laughing Black person on the public stage remains inseparable from the history of minstrelsy and lynching photographs, so that even an apparently sophisticated comedy risks functioning as propaganda against the race. Van Vechten, by contrast, treats comedy as a domain of aesthetic experiment and insists on the artist’s right to depict Black life in all its variety, including its “low” or scandalous elements, so long as the portrayal is honest and formally accomplished.Footnote ¹⁶ Where Du Bois wants Black art to correct the white gaze and protect Black dignity, Van Vechten imagines that shock, irony, and even grotesquerie might pry open white audiences to new recognitions. The symposium thus stages less a minor disagreement over taste than a fundamental clash over the status of the comic: whether it is a dangerous residue of minstrel spectacle that must be carefully policed, or a risky but necessary mode for registering the complexity of modern Black life.

Although comedy was not the explicit topic of the debate, its specter nevertheless haunts the symposium. The eroticized, exoticized, or caricatural stereotypes that comedy had sedimented into the national imaginary return again and again as dangers to be managed or avoided. The question was not how comedy could be used productively—as “freedom” or as “propaganda”—but rather whether its inherited forms were too compromised by minstrelsy to be rehabilitated at all. Certainly the Black artist was “free” to use comedy, but many respondents agreed that the time had come to abandon the “buffoon” and the “villain” archetypes that had ossified as Black stereotypes, since these tended toward the caricatural and degrading rather than the representative. According to Locke’s standards, what was to be avoided was “the popular trend in portraying Negro characters in the underworld rather than seeking to paint the truth about themselves and their own social class.”Footnote ¹⁷ Humor was both suspect and symbolically overburdened, then, capable of subversion in principle yet structurally compromised by its own genealogy.

This tension between wound and salve shapes Jessie Redmon Fauset’s own theorization of Black comedy in her essay “The Gift of Laughter” for the New Negro anthology. There, Fauset recognizes “the sense of self-reflexive discomfort” spectators would feel during a minstrel performance, especially “the Negro auditor with the helplessness of the minority,” who remained “powerless to demand something better and truer.”Footnote ¹⁸ Like Bert Williams in blackface, the Black participant in minstrelsy was “sad with the sadness of hopeless frustration. The gift of laughter in his case had its source in a wounded heart and in bleeding sensibilities.”Footnote ¹⁹ Laughter, Fauset contends, is a gift that “has its rise […] in the very woes which beset us,” and comedy and tragedy appear to her as “sisters and twins”: “the capacity for one argues the capacity for the other.”Footnote ²⁰ Considering “the gift of laughter” in much the same way Du Bois conceived of double consciousness as a blessing and a curse, Fauset insists that “no genuinely thinking person, no really astute observer, looking at the Negro in modern American life, could find his condition even now a first aid to laughter. That condition may be variously deemed hopeless, remarkable, admirable, inspiring, depressing; it can never be dubbed merely amusing.”Footnote ²¹ Yet paradoxically this laughter is “our emotional salvation.” Fauset’s hope was that once the “childish adjuncts of the minstrel tradition” fell away, a richer comic spirit might emerge on the American stage, though her own work reveals how difficult it was to ensure that the “gift” of laughter would be heard as anything other than its stereotype.Footnote ²²

Fauset writes Comedy: American Style (1933) in the wake of this dispute and from within Du Bois’s institutional orbit at The Crisis, yet her novel also registers the temptations of Van Vechten’s position. If Du Bois warns that comic portraiture too easily slides into racist mockery, and Van Vechten wagers that the same repertoire can be aesthetically redeemed, Fauset accepts the basic suspicion of comedy’s public uses while importing a quieter, formally conservative comic sensibility into the domain of the Black bourgeois family. Her “comedy” of repression reads, in this sense, as a practical attempt to answer Du Bois’s question with a carefully managed, domesticated human comedy that aspires to respectability yet cannot quite suppress its own awareness of masquerade, performance, and farce.

Fauset’s Comedy: American Style is perhaps the most self-conscious example of an African American comedy of manners seeking to project an exemplary image of the “New Negro” from within the confines of conventional morality. Fauset’s fourth and final novel tells the tragic story of a family’s ruination after the matriarch denies her sept its heritage. It centers on Olivia Cary, a phenotypically white African American woman whose attempts to pass into whiteness are thwarted by her inability to circumvent class boundaries. Disinherited by a mother who does not believe that light skin is a marker of class, Olivia hopes that, if she herself cannot pass as white, her offspring can, but a son with the “tell-tale” color of his father destroys her plans, and the story devolves into a portrait of color prejudice, internalized racism, and racial self-hatred.Footnote ²³ Fauset’s “comedy” is anything but humorous, and Olivia is in many respects the antithesis of the New Negro race woman. But the novel’s sentimental exploration of racial masquerade on various social stages amounts to melodramatic farce, while its elaboration of the act of passing tends toward the theatrical. Divided into acts (The Plot, The Characters, Teresa’s Act, Oliver’s Act, Phebe’s Act, and Curtain), the novel stages the spectacle of the performative nature of race, class, and gender on a social stage, “much like a comedic parlor play designed for intimate viewing.”Footnote ²⁴ It is a “comedy” in the French sense of the term, a theatrical production and a social drama in the vein of Balzac’s Comédie humaine, the qualifier “American Style” signaling the tragic elements of racism and colorism that unfold in this novel structured as a play. It is this theatrical structure that lends the novel its satirical bite, as individual passing performances accumulate into a collective drama of multigenerational passing and social climbing that aim for, but fall short of, comedic resolution.

At the same time, Fauset’s “comedy” revises the old form of the comedy of manners in ways that enable her to map out the precarious status and social geography as well as the cosmopolitan nature of the Black middle class. First, she shifts the scene of the genre over to America, to Black America, to Philadelphia, and allows her domestic “comedy” to function also as a transatlantic drama with diasporic dimensions. Even if Fauset was cognizant of the traditional North–South axis of the genre of the African American migration narrative and its link to bohemia, Fauset is more concerned with the migration of the artist-intellectual to iconic centers of Black middle-class life and revising the symbolic geography of the comedy of manners. Second, Fauset modernizes the value systems that structured the comedy of manners as well as its social stakes. As Sabrina Fuchs Abrams argues, Fauset “invokes stereotypes of the New Woman, the New Negro, and the New Negro Woman to show at once their value and their limitations in defining Black female subjectivity,” offering a pointed satire on “the New Negro ideology’s obsession with black maternity as the keystone of racial uplift.”Footnote ²⁵ Fauset reminds her audience that the self-imposed “restraints” of women in the English comedy of manners echo in the work of the “refined colored woman” as well—that the contradictions that bind Black women are shared with women of other races too.Footnote ²⁶ Third, by exploring the performative nature of race, class, and gender at a time of conscientious Black modernism and high feminism, Fauset satirizes the “natural” basis of racial, social, and political orders and highlights the way masks aesthetic and social can serve as vehicles for progressive critiques of race, class, and gender. As her essay on “the gift of laughter” for the “New Negro” anthology makes clear, Fauset was aware of the paradoxical doubleness of African American comedy and had a vested interest in ironic laughter and subversive writing in African American literature and culture.Footnote ²⁷ As conservative as the reputation of the comedy of manners was during the 1920s, Fauset was perceptive enough to see in the form an opportunity to unmask a certain middle-class idea of bohemia in which the manners of self-control, moderation, and “good” marriages were but the symptoms of material ambition in a Black cultural landscape which was ever concerned with social hierarchy but which remained repressed by its own subscription to a sexual, classist rebellion co-signed by whites. The objective in Comedy was less to ironize repressive stereotypes than to point up and upbraid the stereotypical ironies present in the prevailing repressive social order.

Yet in Fauset’s “comedy” the established social order proves itself resilient. Olivia and her family are unable to pass as white, their class position diminishes one generation after another, and the female characters maintain a second-class status relative to their male counterparts. Much of the blame for this lies on the individual characters themselves, mainly women, rather than the structural biases that would aid and abet their disenfranchisement. Whereas contemporaries like Thurman and McKay wrote about characters who represent lifestyles that are subject to issues external to personality, Fauset writes about characters who create problems for themselves that become the basis of a social narrative. In Comedy, as in her other three novels, Fauset chooses not to focus on the “depressing conditions” that most Blacks lived in at the turn of the century.Footnote ²⁸ Like Du Bois, her mentor and collaborator at The Crisis, she chose to stress characters who were “trying for a life of reason and culture,” relying especially on light-complexioned, upper-middle-class, “Talented Tenth” Black women with taste and refinement who could escape repression by achieving social resolution through passing or marriage.Footnote ²⁹ Fauset’s comedy of manners revolves around the genre’s traditional marriage plot to challenge a social order that is ultimately revitalized by the younger generation.Footnote ³⁰ Yet, despite her expressed concern for the contemporary in the pages of The Crisis, Fauset’s approach to the comic nevertheless comes off as anachronistic, even Shakespearian. In other words, Fauset attempts to resolve a conventional novel in a conventional way, relying on a realism and a sentimentalism that Alain Locke himself qualified as “mid-Victorian.”Footnote ³¹

Fauset may, herself, have been the “midwife” of the Harlem Renaissance and an ideal representative of the New Negro race woman, an advocate for a new morality that would replace the cult of true womanhood which circumscribed women’s roles in the nineteenth century with challenges to conventional narratives of marriage and passing in 1920s Harlem. But in her fiction, Fauset draws comedies of repression that at once avoid stereotypes inherited from minstrelsy and popular culture and embrace others inherent to the bourgeois manners and values of the New Negro and the New Negro Woman. The irony of this brand of comedy is that it does not recognize its own tragic flaw: that Fauset’s idea of Blackness—indeed, that of New Negro culturists—depended on whiteness to thrive, adopting the bourgeois values that had long contributed to Black suppression, oppression, and repression, and unwittingly dressed itself up in the emperor’s new clothes. Even if the goal of Fauset’s characters is to attain a form of success which, from our contemporary perspective, one might be naively inclined to call “middle-class” and “genteel,” in the 1920s this was a daring, if not radical, act of social and cultural revision, tidied up, certainly, by adopted manners but aggrandized by the avoidance of repressive contemporary norms and narratives. What is ultimately ironized in Fauset is not so much the “middle-class” or social climbers or even race traitors, though there are certainly moments of this, as the possibility of achieving any kind of happy comedic ending when one is not of the “right” race, class, gender, or sexuality within the confines of the United States. What is funny is the folly that one should dream otherwise at all.

2. Symposium II: Rebellion

The second symposium also occurred in 1926 as a debate between Langston Hughes and George Schuyler in the pages of Nation magazine. This debate turned around the questions of whether race was biologically or socially constructed, why the Black artist needed to assume their Blackness at all, and the extent to which comedy could articulate the terms of social, cultural, and political rebellion. What emerged in Hughes’s “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” was a narrative about race, class, and gender and the act of reading within modernity, while Schuyler’s “The Negro-Art Hokum” advanced a more modernist narrative about reading race, class, and gender as social constructions, “surface effects,” or a structure of the imagination that amounts to laughable nonsense—in a word, “hokum.” These were partly exercises in learning how to read racial humor and how to read race humorously. Though Hughes and Schuyler disagreed about the nature of race and had significant political differences, each found that satire was an indispensable form of subversive activism and rebellion, and that even minstrelsy could be ironically mobilized to expose false pieties about race. Racism itself could serve, in Achille Mbembe’s conception, as an ironic “site of a rupture, of effervescence and effusion,” as a way of “substituting what is with something else, with another reality.”Footnote ³² For Hughes, this meant focusing on the comedy of everyday Black life, whereas for Schuyler, this meant abandoning “the concept of race as an adequate category on which to base an artistic and political movement.”Footnote ³³ This symposium showed that Du Bois did not so much fail to control the conversation on Black representation with his own debate as corroborate the initial dialectical positions within the artistic community of the Harlem Renaissance. While the first symposium pushed Black artists to assume control over their own artistic representation as well as the literary marketplace, the second symposium forced a still more difficult issue: How, indeed, might it be possible to relinquish, not merely the stereotypes of “Black” comedy, but the inherent comedy of race itself?

Along with Wallace Thurman, Rudolph Fisher, Richard Bruce Nugent, Zora Neale Hurston, and Eric Walrond, Hughes and Schuyler, despite their disagreements, saw in comedy an alternative to New Negro culturalism, and comprised a certain avant-garde of Harlem Renaissance comedy. Their method was double, turning their satire both outward toward the sociopolitical structures that maintained Black oppression and inward toward the cultural management and internecine conflicts of the Black artistic community. This is Harlem effectively making fun of itself, using Black comedy in both senses of the word not so much to make light of their condition but to shed light on it—not to embrace race pride but to expose racial poverty. In the face of “racial barriers” that, for Hughes as for Schuyler and other members of the comic avant-garde, the aesthetic idealism of the New Negro project seemed unlikely to dismantle, humor suddenly revealed the entrenched fixities of the color line as absurd artifice. The goal was to produce a humor that would be, as Claude McKay put it, “ebony hard.”Footnote ³⁴ Even if, looking back on this period, McKay would later admit that “the Negro radicals of those days were always hard on Negro comedy,” “[r]adical Negroes take this attitude because Negroes have traditionally been represented on the stage as a clowning race. But I felt that if Negroes can lift clowning to artistry, they can thumb their noses at superior people who rate them as a clowning race.”Footnote ³⁵ Such “clowning” would serve as both the means and the form of a comedic rebellion. For those who saw in Black/“Black”/black comedy “a form of counter-modern resistance,” it would be necessary, then, to translate what Houston A. Baker Jr., glossing Booker T. Washington and Du Bois, calls the “form of mastery” into a “mastery of form.”Footnote ³⁶ This would require not merely avoiding interracial stereotypes but reappropriating internalized racism with self-aware irony as a means to attack the very idea of racial superiority and expose racial essentialism as an artificial construct, a tool of economic and political oppression rather than an innate biological “fact” or cultural identity. It would also necessitate a concerted effort to transcend the intraracial debate over racial uplift and artistic freedom by contesting the idea that respectability ought to come before rebellion, that Black art had to be “serious” to be valuable, and that Black comedy must prioritize assimilation over autonomy.

The Nation exchange makes these stakes explicit. Hughes’s “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” responds to a young poet who wishes to be “a poet” rather than “a Negro poet,” a formulation Hughes reads as internalized racism and class aspiration.Footnote ³⁷ For Hughes, the “mountain” to be climbed is precisely the shame of Blackness and the desire to escape it by imitating white, middle-class taste. His essay champions the blues, jazz, cabaret humor, and the “low” vernacular as the genuine sources of a modern Black art that can face the comic and the tragic dimensions of Black life without flinching. Schuyler’s “Negro-Art Hokum,” by contrast, scoffs at the very premise that there is a distinctively “Negro” art at all, dismissing the category as a sentimental abstraction that ignores the determining force of class, region, and education.Footnote ³⁸ In his view, talk of racial essence is itself hokum, and the insistence on a special “Negro” art risks reproducing the very racial mystifications that sustain American capitalism. Where Hughes defends a proudly racialized aesthetic that takes its energy from everyday Black comedy and sorrow, Schuyler refuses the category of race as a meaningful aesthetic or political ground, finding the very concept comical. The symposium is therefore less a disagreement over style than a contest over whether “Black art” names a necessary horizon for rebellion or a trap laid by racial ideology.

Comedy lies at the center of this quarrel. Hughes hears in the blues laugh, the barroom anecdote, and the folk tall tale a vital resource for collective self-recognition, a way of transforming humiliation into shared wit and, potentially, into solidarity. Schuyler hears in many of the same materials evidence that “Negro art” is already implicated in a marketplace hungry for caricature and exoticism, a marketplace that rewards those who sell racial difference as entertainment. Yet despite diverging on whether “Negro art” names rebellion or trap, both shared a skepticism toward assimilationism and a contempt for the “Nordicized” Black bourgeoisie who wished, in Schuyler’s phrase, to become “lampblack Anglo-Saxons.” Their exchange anticipates the later comic avant-garde by concentrating the dilemma that haunts Harlem satire: whether the joke can be turned against the structures that demand it, or whether every public performance of racial humor risks shoring up the very categories it mocks and prolonging racial and racist ideology’s cultural half-life. From this quarrel over race’s ontological status, Schuyler’s satirical imagination takes flight: his novel Black No More (1931) will literalize the dilemma by imagining what happens when the joke of racial difference is taken to its logical conclusion and exhausted, yet refuses to dissolve into a simple solution.

Schuyler’s Black No More is, in this respect, particularly elucidating of the stakes of satirical rebellion and cynical comedy. Even as it looks forward to an Afrofuturist moment where race is erased through a progressive skin-whitening fad that takes Harlem, the US, and eventually the world by storm, the novel remains concerned with the ways in which the contemporary terms of race-realism would be carried out in an all-“white” future. Black No More, in certain ways like Du Bois’s Dark Princess (1928), is a eugenic fantasy that takes the principle of the “Talented Tenth” to an extreme, where Blacks dyed white have interbred with whites so much that neither Black nor white exists, both relegated to second-class status behind the triumph of an “emerging eugenic breed.”Footnote ³⁹ In its investigation into the problem of colorism and the irony of “examining shades of skin color” when “the blacks were whiter than the whites,” the novel exaggerates a predicament voiced by Hughes himself in his story “Who’s Passing for Who?”: “We didn’t say a thing. We just stood there on the corner in Harlem dumbfounded—not knowing now which way we’d been fooled. Were they really white—passing for colored? Or colored—passing for white? Whatever race they were, they had had too much fun at our expense.”Footnote ⁴⁰ The novel thus turns around a central irony. By turning the nation’s chromatic demographics into a monochrome white, Black No More Inc. might actually put an end to the “Negro problem” through a kind of social albinism and then interbreeding and thereby allow Americans to focus on what unites rather than divides them. But ethnic distinctions based on cultural differences remain and these differences result in further conflict, and the more general problem of diversity-as-difference remains an issue of irresolvable tension. Schuyler’s cynical satire leans full force into enlightened false consciousness, imagining the ways in which superficial changes to one’s appearance or identity do not amount to true, experiential knowledge of being an identity other than one’s own. In opting for whiteness, those Blacks who were blessed and burdened with “double consciousness” have tricked themselves into believing that whiteness is enlightenment, that economic prosperity is a solution to the race problem, and that white supremacy, or sociopolitical hegemony of any kind, is worthwhile.

Schuyler’s satire argues that Black comedy involves telling a joke about Blackness that is at heart a joke about whiteness, that the true subject of Black satire is white power and supremacy. Fascinated with intragroup classism and racism, Schuyler reveals the extent to which mockery of the myth of race, or the value of whiteness, had reified the concept into a lived reality and transformed the class politics of racial consciousness into the race politics of class consciousness, confirming that the real conflict that both whites and Blacks had to invest their energy into was class struggle, their mutual, if unequal, oppression by the bourgeoisie. Schuyler warns that racial identity politics was susceptible to succumbing to internecine conflicts that would uphold social differences and eventually the capitalist production wheel that reproduced and reified those differences. At the heart of this satire is the notion, advanced by Michael North, that both the white desire for color-blindness as a non-confrontational form of maintaining white supremacy, and the Black desire to recognize race as a way to identify disparities of treatment, shared a mutual desire for unity.Footnote ⁴¹ The solution Schuyler proffers to this predicament is to abandon the question of race altogether in favor of class consciousness and intergroup solidarity on the foundation of class. Having a socialized or planned economy that would equitably redistribute property for the well-being and dignity of all could serve as a solution to the ironic battles over ownership and leadership that are too often fought among true allies.

Despite its critique of a New Negro aesthetic based on narratives of bodily and racial difference, and its vision of a raceless American future united over labor, the novel is nevertheless undermined by its predictable, ham-fisted ending. In the final chapter, the white Democratic politician Arthur Snobbcraft and his statistician collaborator Samuel Buggerie, both believers in white supremacy and racial purity, find out that Snobbcraft, like 50 million other “white” Americans, has Black ancestry, sparking angry mobs that force the men to flee the country via plane. When they are forced to crash land in Mississippi, they darken their faces with shoe polish to avoid recognition, only to be caught by the white residents of Happy Hill, who intend to lynch them because they are “Black.” When the mob realizes the two men are white, the lynch party halts, but as soon as the mob recognizes Snobbcraft and recalls his Black ancestry they lynch the two men anyway. The death of these “Virginia aristocrats” ultimately confirms the religious fervor of populism that has been overshadowed by skin-deep concerns for the racial purity of whiteness, no longer a sign of a so-called indigenous claim to the natural rights of sovereignty, supremacy, and salvation.Footnote ⁴² This ending suggests that when the power-possessing instigators of racial hatred and proponents of white supremacy are killed off, Christian religious institutions in the U.S. will justify social supremacy in their place on other, new terms, namely the ironic, unitarian principle of “love.”

Like many products of the Harlem Renaissance, Schuyler’s satiric novel is imaginative and provocative, but ultimately comes across as an idea given flesh and bone, dyed porcelain white, and mawkishly dressed up for a salon dinner after Sunday service—a kind of poorly behaved comedy of manners, as it were. Schuyler’s novel harnesses the satirical energy of the Harlem Renaissance which tended toward thought experiments before literary explorations of form and style. Schuyler maintained his satirical jabs in his “Shafts and Darts” column for the Messenger magazine, where Schuyler was “merciless about everyone,” using the satiric mask of comedy to gain the critical distance necessary to articulate a self-canceling skepticism. These columns, as Darryl Dickson-Carr observes, “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.”Footnote ⁴³ Due to how Schuyler could indicate how “horror could become humorous and all the ways humorous could be horrifying,” he emerges, in Jeffrey Furguson’s estimation, as the godfather of Black/“Black”/black humor, a writer whose “sharp recognition of the ludicrous and outlandish in American race relations” made the black absurd into one of modernity’s most incisive critical forms.Footnote ⁴⁴ Paradoxically, the more novels like Schuyler’s Black No More, Thurman’s Infants of the Spring, Fisher’s The Walls of Jericho, and McKay’s Banjo entertained the possibility that comedy and satire might provide an avenue to a “race blind” future, the more they found, as the titular Banjo puts it, that the “weak and comic side of race life can’t further race advancement.”Footnote ⁴⁵ The main issue here exists in comedy’s method: the subversive practice of what Banjo calls “tellin’ jokes” can be used to defuse incriminating stereotypes and noxious ideologies, but it is also the vehicle for diffusing them and perpetuating their reproduction in the public sphere. The more Black comedy seemed to release the chains off Black bodies the tighter they became.

3. Symposium III: Revision

The third symposium was held between Ralph Ellison and Stanley Edgar Hyman in the Spring 1958 issue of Partisan Review. Ellison’s “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke” and Hyman’s “Negro Literature and Folk Tradition” constituted “The Negro Writer in America: An Exchange,” an extension of a decade-long conversation between the two friends on race, folklore, and ritual. Even if this “rather contrived debate,” as Hyman qualified it, lies outside of what most scholars agree to be the period of the Harlem Renaissance, its timing serves as a sort of cultural punchline to the first two symposia, offering a revisionary alternative to the ideological impasses of the previous debates.Footnote ⁴⁶ This third symposium considered the question of the “origin” of what Hyman called “the ‘darky’ entertainer” or “trickster” archetype, its ritual role in African American literature and American popular culture, and its effect on race relations in the United States. While Hyman thought that “the ‘darky’ entertainer” was an invention of Black folklore rather than a white supremacist fantasy derived from minstrelsy, Ellison argued that “this black-faced figure of white fun is for Negroes a symbol of everything they rejected in the white man’s thinking about race, in themselves and in their own group.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Yet Ellison, “more interested in structure and function than in origin,” suggested that it was not necessary to abandon altogether these white, rather than Black, archetypes but, rather, to “change the joke and slip the yoke,” to turn racial crossover inside out.Footnote ⁴⁸ Ellison’s “Change the Joke” is more than simply a rebuttal to Hyman’s concepts of the nature of ritual racial performance; it is an attempt, as Bryan Crable suggests, to “outline a ritual approach to white supremacy” and recast the American social comedy so that the trickster figure could be played out on both sides of the color line.Footnote ⁴⁹

Ellison and Hyman’s exchange thus returns, from a postwar vantage, to the very questions that had animated the unresolved Du Bois–Van Vechten and Hughes–Schuyler debates: whether racial masquerade originates in Black expressive traditions or in white fantasies of Blackness, whether comic types can be reclaimed or must be discarded, and whether laughter offers liberation or deepens the yoke. Hyman approaches the “darky entertainer” as a figure rooted in Black folk rituals, arguing that the trickster emerges from a long genealogy of Black performance that whites later deform for their own purposes. Ellison pushes back, insisting that for Black observers the blackface clown is first experienced as a white projection, a mask that condenses everything oppressive and hostile in white thinking about race. Where Hyman stresses historical origin and continuity, Ellison shifts the focus to structure and function, to what the mask does in the present and how it circulates in a culture saturated with racial fantasy. The symposium thus replays the Renaissance quarrels in a new key: Hyman’s emphasis on folklore and continuity recalls aspects of Hughes’s investment in vernacular tradition, while Ellison’s suspicion of the mask’s origins and his desire to revise its use carry forward Schuyler’s skepticism and Du Bois’s concern with propaganda, even as he refuses their respective solutions.

What the belated, even anachronistic, third symposium contributes to this genealogy of twentieth-century Black humor in the United States is less a solution than a reorientation, a way of understanding why the Harlem debates circled so persistently around comedy’s ambivalent power. For Ellison, the joke and the injury remain bound together, and the point is not to adjudicate origins but to make that entanglement visible, to wrest some agency from a form whose history is inseparable from degradation. Ellison’s revision suggests that the task is not to discover whether the joke originates in Black subversion or white domination but to recognize that joke and injury remain bound together in any culture organized by racial hierarchy. Ellison, indeed the third symposium, thus demonstrates that the work of the Harlem Renaissance was neither finished nor a failure but ongoing, a project more properly styled a “Black Renaissance” in which revision becomes the form that cynicism takes when it refuses either naïve hope or complete despair but sociocultural reproach.

This symposium turned, in other words, around what Henry James called the “secret” “joke” at the center of American identity—the sense of a lack of culture, history, and prestige vis-à-vis Europe, and the corollary use of masked role-playing to overcome this insecurity by orchestrating social hierarchies of its own.Footnote ⁵⁰ In Ellison’s retelling, the joke blackface played on Black Americans—reducing them to a primitive existence devoid of tradition—ultimately reflected back onto all Americans. Minstrelsy, he suggested, placed Black people in the same marginalized position that the United States itself occupied in relation to Europe. “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke” reimagines masquerade not as a mechanism for reinforcing racial divisions, but as a tool for fostering shared identity, shifting it “from a joke played on Black Americans to one they could share with immigrants, natives, Yankees, and pioneers alike.”Footnote ⁵¹ Since, in Jamesian terms, the joke at the center of American identity lay in replacing a fixed sense of place with fluid assumptions of roles, the masquerade should not merely grant whites an illusion of freedom while trapping Black individuals in minstrelsy. Instead, Ellison argued, the “joke” must disrupt hierarchical expectations for all, turning America into “a land of masking jokers,” a “United States of Jokeocracy,” where “the ‘darky’ act makes brothers of us all.”Footnote ⁵²

Since white Americans adopt this “anti-tragic approach to experience” and avoid reckoning with the country’s history of repressing Black achievement as well as Black subjugation, what Ellison proposes is a practice of what he calls in Invisible Man “buggy jiving.”Footnote ⁵³ “Buggy jiving,” as Heard defines it, is “a particular form of joking discourse that aims to enact social change by bringing into view the incongruity between appearance and reality, especially with regard to the idea of race in America.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Ellison contends that “Americans need this highly charged comic process sometimes even when it means putting up with offensive stereotypes,” for “in the process of laughing at the comic dupe, a human identification is made—something perhaps more important […] than eliminating the offending comic image or its perpetrator.”Footnote ⁵⁵ “Buggy jiving” is a revisionary method of progressively freeing Blacks from racial stereotype without making all the Blackness go away. Ellison believes that in “buggy jiving” there remained the capacity for tolerance, if only the terms of this social comedy could be revised. Comic performance did not have to be limited to either staid New Negro culturalism or renegade Black radicalism but could be used to unsettle illusions and bring into the frame of popular culture what had previously been left out: Black humanity. What distinguishes this practice from that of Claude McKay’s “tellin’ jokes” is where this takes place. Ellison wished for the private, insular, almost sectarian practice of “tellin’ jokes” to go public, to take Black laughter out of the “laughing barrels” and turn it into a rippling, subversive comic art deflating self and others mutually (think stand-up).

But the primary obstacle to “buggy jiving” was less the “joking” and the “jiving” than Black laughter itself. In “An Extravagance of Laughter,” Ellison studies “the Blackness of Negro laughter” and hilariously recounts the legend of the “laughing barrels.” Laughing barrels were supposedly literal barrels filled with water and strategically placed throughout American towns so that if Blacks found the need to laugh in public, they could go dunk their heads to contain the noise and thereby spare whites from the perceived threat. Drawing on Du Bois’s idea of doubleness and clairvoyance, Ellison highlights the irony of the laughing barrel, suggesting that “when a Negro had his head thrust into a laughing barrel, he became endowed with a strange form of extrasensory perspective—or second sight,” an inversion of mastery.Footnote ⁵⁶ By amplifying the “schizophrenic” or “buggy” aspects of Du Bois’s concept and framing it within a distinctly comic structure, Ellison reveals how the dual nature of Black consciousness operates both as a source of humor and as a powerful instrument of political subversion. Less than a threat and more than just public entertainment, Black laughter would, Ellison hoped, suffuse the public sphere and humanize the Black subject, helping to create what could be called a “comedic commons.” This comedic commons would reveal what Mbembe refers to as the foundation for an alternative genealogy of human rights, for which the path forward is clear: “on the basis of a critique of the past, we must create a future that is inseparable from the notions of justice, dignity, and the in-common” based on “an ambiguous mode of existence, a manner of groping along the back of things and playing out the comedy before oneself and others.”Footnote ⁵⁷ This Black laughter would provide, too, an alternative to physical and political violence; and if comic activism could not provide social justice in itself it could at least operate as a site of resistance. The ultimate end of such “extravagant laughter” would not be purblind “passiveness” but “maximum consciousness,” the act of becoming “observers of ourselves while acting.”Footnote ⁵⁸

What Ellison illustrates, in other words, is not a “Negro problem” but an American one, and by encouraging Black laughter to increase its visibility, he realizes, as Alain Locke argues, that “we cannot be undone without America’s undoing.”Footnote ⁵⁹ The risk involved, however, was that there was no guarantee that this ostensibly temporary reification of Blackness would not simply lead back to reaffirm double consciousness and by extension cynical reason, or the complacency of enlightened false consciousness, and encourage an endless deferral of resolution, a different but related kind of black or gallows humor. And yet to lead one there might have been precisely the point—to return white and Black audiences alike to the scene of the suppression of Black laughter, to argue that it cannot be justifiably or humanely repeated.

Thus, while the first symposium approached comedy with relative conservatism, the second admired its mutinous eccentricity, and the third, not without reservations, affirmed its revisionary potential. Comedy, the Harlem Renaissance and its afterlives shows us, can be used variously to maintain the status quo, to rebel against it, or to remodel and repurpose it, in each case advancing a mode of skeptical thinking that perpetuated a culture of doubt to varying ends. Altogether, this Black/“Black”/black comedy functioned to expose the contradictions of colorism and classism surrounding the Black community from the outside and defining it from the inside, and to divulge the class politics of racial consciousness, the race politics of class consciousness, and the identity politics of racialized consciousnesses in the United States. In the quest to overcome binary oppositions and create a more composite image of America, many Harlem Renaissance authors relied on comedy to deconstruct rigid ideological fixities, unmasking the discrepancy between creed and practice, word and deed. But what they encountered in exposing America’s central fault line were irreconcilable differences that could not be resolved by laughter alone, and in this it is fundamentally cynical. They turned to humor when they were out of humor and used the repertoires of comedy to standardize the affect of insecurity. What sets Harlem Renaissance comedy apart from its peers is an insistence on the absence of comedy’s traditional happy ending and an improvisational embrace of the deferral of resolution, a formal technique it shares with jazz.

These debates over comedic strategy are refractions of larger questions about the nature of the Harlem Renaissance itself—a movement which was, finally, more realist than experimental, more contemporary than modernistic, aesthetically hampered but politically charged by its focus on the now before the new. There is no doubt that Harlem Renaissance writers’ ability to conjugate the question of social justice into the present tense was a virtuous, forward-thinking accomplishment, or that Harlem Renaissance satire was in effect modernist in its ironic critique of metaphysical assumptions about race, class, gender, and sexuality. Yet the fractured, inconsistent, and uncoordinated nature of this cultural and artistic confederation is perhaps the most modernistic thing about it, if we may even speak of the Harlem, or Black, Renaissance as a singularity:—not the variously rebellious or repressive content of its art practices, but the aggregated form of its community, that diaspora in miniature, that splintered, decentered, self-opposed assemblage of socio-political differences which do more to illustrate the ensemble of social relations in the early twentieth century than any one single piece of art or experiment could manage. What Walter Benjamin called the “shattered articulation” of laughter is but the emblem of this.Footnote ⁶⁰ Through their various comedies the writers I address here go further as an atomic whole than many of their more encyclopedic contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic in demonstrating that the contradictions of capital, the relativity of morality, and the practice of paradox were fundamental to their time, and that recognizing this—and knowing how to laugh at it, if only to affirm it so as to move beyond it once and for all—is also a key to reading modernity at large. There is good reason to believe, then, that the revitalization and revision of comedic repertoires by African Americans in the first half of the twentieth century helped to turn popular discourse into a model of discourse itself, which ultimately sought to replace the genre of comedy with the genre of the human.