The Funny, Preppy Black Guy
(on race, comedy, and a way forward)
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I wrote the first draft of this in 2008. I stumbled upon it while in the midst of a hard drive purge this week. With so much about race in the news — Selma, Ferguson — I thought it important to revisit and share. Sadly, I haven’t talked to Jordan in years, despite spending quality time together in college.
My college friend Jordan Carlos has become, by all measures, a successful comedian and comedy writer. I remember seeing him in shows with imProvidence, and hearing him on the graveyard slot at WBRU. Jordan was a funny guy in college, and the same has held true for him since. A quick googling of his name tells me that he’s made an impression on the national comedy scene. I mean, he’s been on the Daily Show. That’s pretty significant.
Jordan’s bread and butter as a stand-up comic is race, specifically his being an upper-middle class black man living and working in a white man’s world. This sort of comedy, a genre that seems to hit big with white audiences, depends on deep-set unspoken stereotypes. But Jordan’s shtick is a bit more suburban than Eddie Murphy, Richard Pryor, Dave Chapelle, or Chris Rock. Because Jordan is the first to admit to crowds that he does not “act black,” he gains a certain leverage to be able to point out incongruities in stereotypes of black/white relations in America. The fact that mostly white audiences are perfectly aware of these oft-unspoken stereotypes, and the fact that they are spoken out loud, into a microphone, and by a person of color, somehow has made it all safe to laugh at. To an extent, Jordan depends on those deep-set, unspoken stereotypes to be there, because without them his jokes are not funny.
I am Jordan’s target demographic, and that’s not just because we hung out at the midnight snack bar in college. Coming out of college, the very seat of privilege, I was set up for an adult life where jokes about black people acting white were going to be funny. I do find Jordan’s comedy funny, but my path after college took a different turn. Since college, I’ve spent much of my professional time working with and in the service of inner city youth, first as a science teacher in Boston and San Francisco, and then as the Director of several education nonprofits that serve under-resourced, low income, and largely black and hispanic youth. Having grown up in the suburbs and having lived and worked in the hood, I have some understanding of the two cultures Jordan pits against each other in his comedy, and embodies simultaneously.
There is at least a grain of truth behind every joke.
In college, Jordan, one of the few black faces on campus, was often the first to voice the incongruity of it all, and he did it with humor, poise, and good intention. But at some level, I can’t imagine that so many years of racial juxtaposition hasn’t taken its toll. In January of 2007, Jordan’s writing took a turn towards serious. He published a piece in the Washington Post, revealing a more somber perspective on his profession and alleged success. He wrote:
“On stage, being who I am allows me to go places my white counterparts can’t. I get to joke about how, being black, people think I’m gay because my clothes fit — and the audience just eats this up because it’s so true. I’ve found my niche, an identity and happiness in my work. Being black is part of my job. Joking about how black I’m not is also part of my job.”
Here, now, is something not so funny: being black in a white world is not as funny as Jordan has made it out to be for all us white folks in the audience. And moreover, the black entertainer that plays to mostly white audiences and is casted and produced by whites might just be a disguised version of the cultural inequities I have tried to work out of my students’ heads for so long.
This is most assuredly not funny.
Here’s a conundrum:
As a white person, and a friend, can I give myself permission to laugh at Jordan’s jokes?
Before, being a preppy black guy was funny. Now, being a preppy black comic is potentially a vehicle for social polemic. As a teacher I had a job where people listened to me (well, most of the time anyway) and I felt an obligation to use that influence to further socially just causes. Beneath the jokes, I think and hope that Jordan is positioning himself in similar ways. It is, of course, is a tricky thing for a black man to be critical of and simultaneously identify with the culture of power, one that I (and any other white person) can’t empathize with. But it is vital. Whites have no way of empathizing with this. It’s inspiring to see a friend of mine grapple with questions of race, racial identity, and race relations, and assuring to see it being done with a degree of skill and poise that leaves people laughing instead of arguing.
When I think about the students that I’ve had, many of whom are poor and black, I find myself wishing that the spotlight that Jordan throws onto racial stereotypes didn’t reveal such a disparity between him and them. When the white world thinks about young people of color, stories like Jordan’s represent success. I’m not sure that it’s so…um…black and white in reality, and I’m guessing that a black person who succeeds in a white world would be the first to acknowledge this. Now that Jordan is receiving more and more attention for his comedy, the stakes are a bit higher, and how the general public reacts to his brand of humor are taking on more significance.
A lot of comics use self-deprecation as their primary tool.
It’s much safer than picking on the guy in the front row. But in this case, though, self-deprecation serves a higher purpose than just laughs, it’s meant to hold a mirror up to those that have bought into our society’s racial stereotypes. Black comics have been doing this for years, but Jordan is doing someting really interesting. Instead of throwing blackness into caricature, Jordan does it for whiteness. What makes it funny is that he’s not white. While I find his jokes funny, or at least understand why they are supposed to be funny, I’m not sure my students would.
The Washington Post editorial that Jordan wrote put his professional career in a much different light than what predominantly white audiences had seen when he takes the stage: he basically said that just because you know better doesn’t make it permissible.
That Jordan has given himself a moment to pause and consider this, and then write about it to a national audience, is commendable. Not just commendable, important. Not just important, vital. Vital. Someone has to say something, and if people are willing to listen to Jordan and laugh, I hope they are willing to listen to him tell them the tragedy of why it’s so funny. I wonder if my students would do either.
Where is this all going?
At some point, if the message really is to stick, things have to stop being funny. That endeavor represents an enormous occupational hazard for Jordan, but one I support fully and one I’ve made a point of taking up in my work. There is, after all, at least a grain of truth behind every joke. My hope is that one day Jordan will get up and do his shtick and have nobody in the audience laugh. Not because he isn’t funny anymore, but because the underlying message in his jokes will have been, at last, successfully delivered.
