Race Comedy And The Blerd Frontier

I love race comedy.

And a big reason for it is because I’ve never quite understood bigotry and racism.

I mean, I know them. I’ve been the target of them. I’ve likely been a perpetrator and victim of them, even at the same time, in the same breath. The idea of race beginning in the early stages of colonialism and slavery, the roots of bigotry in fear of the unknown and primal safety in similar-looking people – I get all of that.

But many times, more often than not, I find racism and bigotry funny. The idea that you believe XYZ-people are lesser than you (bigotry) and to enact lawful inequality (racism) is just so unfathomably wrong to me that it becomes funny. I have to laugh at that kind of evil.

Part of my particular blerdiness is that I am a comedy nerd. And so I love race comedy.

Now, that’s different from race jokes. It’s a higher game.

Simple race jokes throw a stereotype out there and that’s that. That’s the “black people do this and white people do that” kind of jokes. Or the “white people say racist things but it’s not racist because we know they’re not racist” jokes from the likes of Sarah Silverman, Daniel Tosh … or the shit Amy Schumer suddenly began tossing to a dying Patrice O’Neal at Charlie Sheen’s Comedy Central roast.

The higher game of race comedy, in this modern age, goes to Dave Chappelle, who could make biting, flip-the-script stuff such as blind, black white supremacist Clayton Bigsby, then ruefully exclaim “This racism is killing me inside!” during the “Niggar Family” sketch.

That sketch had hologram quality; all the jokes were shining, but not all of them detectable from one point of view. It was enough that he was playing on use of the dreaded N-word, but even deeper were the flips in majority-minority power relationships and how the codes of our different cultures can bring out something you had no idea was there.

That’s where race can be tricky, and race comedy even trickier. Lucky for us, there’s a new addition to the race comedy ranks, and its name is Key & Peele.

MADtv alums Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele pull back the layers of race and bigotry to find silliness underneath. In a recent sktch taking place during World War II-era Germany, an SS officer (played by Modern Family’s Ty Burrell – so weird) stops at a house while “hunting for Negroes” to find Key and Peele in ridiculous whiteface – it’s just white shoe polish slathered on their faces.

But the Nazi doesn’t suspect they’re black by just looking at them. Instead, he uses increasingly ridiculous stereotypes of blacks to test the black men in whiteface, such as foisting beets on them and brandishing cat toys.

To me, that’s what bigotry does. It holds out cat toys and claims the heads of an entire people come only in half-sizes.

And I know that finding bigotry and racism funny is not right. I know that, in 2012, I occupy a space in history two generations removed from the last great civil rights struggles of black Americans. That racism – that serious, pervasive, lawful and unlawful, in-your-face racism – is something I’ve seen only in an increasingly small group of history books and movies. (And, sadly, to increasingly minimized degrees; have you read/seen The Help?)

I know that if I grew up in a time of lynchings and fire hoses, I may not find racism so funny. I’ll never be my father, who was a little bit younger than Emmett Till when he was murdered for allegedly whistling at a white woman on the street.

That distance has left a space for my blerdy self to laugh when Key & Peele does a sketch of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, and devolve it from reverent black history theater to Tyler Perry-style buffoonery; which one panders to its audience? Only in a time such as now, so removed from those struggles, could a pair of black nerds look at such civil rights atrocity and laugh, or make slavery jokes off the cuff.

They’re dropping the fear, which I never understood. Especially fear of this black nerd from the white gaze, and fear of this blerd from within the community as not black enough. Key and Peele joke about how they can’t be scary rappers. (Key: “What am I going to rap about? My master’s degree in fine arts?!?”)

But then I think about how often I’ve had white people ask me to smile. Or I’d hear a nice-guy version of “you’re one of the good ones.” Or my mother would tell me about how, when she’d tell white people I was going to Harvard, she got the affirmative action shuffle. Someone thinks you got over on affirmative action, but they don’t want to sound racist to your face, so the smile a litle to broadly and just say “that’s great” over and over.

There’s no need to be scary as a rapper, I guess. Key & Peele had Obama win a rap battle by saying into the microphone, “I’m the leader of the free world.”

So maybe I’m better off if I just give the lead white character some sage advice that will transform his life. Or I lay hands on him, and his troubles melt away. When I hear liberals’ disappointment in our Black Nerd in Chief, I hear someone who felt their Magical Negro shorted them a wish or two.

At least Key & Peele, in their totally blerd selves, made a pair of dueling Magical Negroes fight Dragon Ball Z-style.