To Be Real: Truth and Racial Authenticity in African American Standup Comedy

To Be Real: Truth and Racial Authenticity in African American Standup Comedy examines Black standup comedy over the past decade as a stage for understanding why notions of racial authenticity--in essence, appeals to realness and real Blackness--emerge as a cultural imperative in African American culture. Ethnographic observations and interviews with Black comedians ground this telling, providing a narrative arc of key historical moments in the new millennium. Readers will understand how and why African American comics invoke realness to qualify nationalist 9/11 discourses and grapple with the racial entailments of the war, overcome a sense of racial despair in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, critique Michael Richards' [Kramer's] notorious rant at The Laugh Factory and subsequent attempts to censor their use of the n-word, and reconcile the politics of a real in their own and other Black folks' everyday lives.

Additionally, readers will hear through audience murmurs, hisses, and boos how beliefs about racial authenticity are intensely class-wrought and fraught. Moreover, they will appreciate how context remains ever critical to when and why African American comics and audiences lobby for and/or lampoon jokes that differentiate the real from the fake or Black folks from so-called niggahs. Context and racial vulnerability are critical to understanding how and why allusions to racial authenticity persist in the African American comedic and cultural imagination.