Sass, p.16
Sass, page 16
Sykes wears a dark, three-piece leather suit, and her signature Afro brings together her butch presentation in her 2009 special, I’ma Be Me, taped in Washington, DC, right on the heels of Barack Obama’s historic presidential election. In one of her first jokes, she covertly criticizes the “sassy Black woman.” She begins, “Gotta get used to having a Black First Lady. . . . That’s why we had all those articles when they first got in office, like, ‘Who is the real Michelle Obama?’ ‘When will we see the real Michelle Obama?’ You know what they’re sayin’? When are we gon’ see this?” For a full twenty seconds, Sykes performs wild, finger-snapping, hip-swirling, talk-to-the-hand gestures, finally punctuated with a repeated exclamation, Maury Povich–style, “YOU NEED TO TAKE CARE OF YOUR BABY!”39 Several more seconds of “sassy” gestures ensue to the delight of the audience, who have been clapping and laughing throughout the bit. In a final motion, before exasperatedly shaking her head at the idea she has heretofore been performing, Sykes delivers a long, slow cut-eye, drawing intense applause. “Well, you’re not gonna see that from Michelle Obama,” she scoffs, “and we all don’t do that,” garnering even more applause. Sykes drags the universalized idea of the “sassy Black woman” represented in her exaggerated gestures and words and simultaneously punctuates her final utterance with a more subtle, slow roll of the eyes that enacts the discourse of sass that is such an important element of Black women’s humor—its audacious critique of power—“we all don’t do that.”
Michelle Obama as faux daytime talk show guest is an image of sassiness as an inherent quality to which all Black women can be reduced and summarily dismissed. It is this representation that draws Sykes’s ire, apparent in the words that her “sassy” Michelle Obama utters: it screams (literally and figuratively) Maury. Sykes invokes the iconography of Black women out of control as an entertainment commodity, the idea of sass that flourishes in the pop cultural imaginary. There is some irony in Sykes’s takedown of the archetypical “sassy Black woman.” The crowd is both amused at Sykes’s accurate rendition of it, evidenced in their copious laughter; yet they are also attuned to the political critique that is the center of her performance, as the longest and loudest applause comes with Sykes’s sincere if subtler cut-eye after she says, “And we all don’t do that.”
As the scene plays out, Sykes makes it clear that Michelle Obama (and Sykes herself) in fact does want to enact the discourse of sass. “I happen to know for a fact that during the campaign she had rods implanted in her neck,” Sykes continues to the delight of spectators; “she is incapable of doing that.” There are certain situations in which she strongly desires to claim her humanity, or as Mo’Nique colorfully put it, “cuss a motherfucker out.” Sykes continues, “You see, sometimes she wants to, but she can’t.” Like Sykes, Obama has something of substance to say, but she had better watch how she says it, how she enacts it with her body language, because “white people are looking at you,” as Obama’s live-in mother chides her at the end of the bit. Sykes’s deployment of cut-eye was an enactment of sass, or more to the point, a deviant practice of freedom, ambivalent to be sure given that what made her feel fleetingly free was a sense of liberation from the idea of the “sassy Black woman” trope.40 This ambivalence of contemporary Black women comics toward the idea of sass is clear given its propensity to objectify and silence Black women in the contemporary moment and its discursive ability to speak truth to power.
Armed with the discourse of sass, Sykes demonstrates that Black women, though kaleidoscopically connected by history41—subject to it, even—are not a monolith, especially a monolith created and maintained by the white racial imaginary. Since 2012, I have attended a handful of comedy festivals and conventions as an ethnographer and participant. These festivals share a central goal in giving Black women a platform to share their art and insights about the comedy industry in spaces that are safer and more open to seeing them as individuals. Centering Black masculine women comics is in service of that goal, showing that not all Black women comics are the same, but many times they pull on some of the same discursive tools to make their claims and do their comedic work.
Just Don’t Call Her a Dude
Sam Jay is an Emmy-nominated comedy writer and stand-up who has worked as a writer for Saturday Night Live since 2017. She is also a Black masculine-presenting lesbian, and in August 2020 her hour-long comedy special, 3 in the Morning, debuted on Netflix. The buzz of hair clippers opens the film with a close-up shot of the back and sides of Sam Jay’s head. A Black man appears, carving a part into her closely cropped hair. This mise-en-scène is the initial frame through which we interpret the comic; the barbershop backdrop evokes a Black masculine space and disposition, registering both her intimacy with Black cultural rituals and the affirmation of her masculine womanhood. About to go onstage after she gets sharp in the barber’s chair, Sam Jay presents a short behind-the-scenes look of a comic preparing for her moment, walking in a dingy, nondescript hallway toward the stage as a melancholy jazz tune plays. She wears a navy blue and yellow designer polo shirt, fitted jeans, and white sneakers. “Wow. This shit really hit me today,” she tells her audience in a voiceover. “I was walking to the venue, and you know, all the emotions, you know,” she continues as a silhouette of her girlfriend and her embracing appears. “This is my fucking special. I’m here. I’m doing the shit that I set out to do the whole fucking time.” The sadness in the trumpet belies the upbeat energy with which she mounts the stage. “Holy shit! What the fuck is up, Atlanta!? This shit is fucking amazing, man!”42
The comic is clearly conscious of her nonconformity with racialized gender norms, and she embraces this embodied difference. The deliberate acknowledgment and acceptance of one’s gender nonconformity at the beginning of stand-up sets is a common way Black masculine-presenting women frame themselves at the outset for their audiences, making sure spectators understand that their presentation of self is intentional, even if it goes against the grain. Indeed, Kara Keeling offers one of the most robust theories of Black butchness in The Witch’s Flight, especially her engagement with the 1996 film Set It Off and the way she works through the cinematic processes through which the character Cleo’s Black butchness inaugurates what she calls a “ghettocentric” Black gender common sense.
Especially compelling for Keeling is the representation of the character Cleo’s relationship with her girlfriend, a Black femme named Ursula, and the way the first encounter we have with the pair is when we see them kissing, a scene Keeling describes as having a kind of cinematic power to establish the terms through which Black lesbian sexuality is incorporated and marketed to audiences who are attuned to hegemonic ways of consuming and understanding gender common senses. “Sexy and alluring,” Keeling argues, “Ursula’s relationship to Cleo calls forth a ghettocentric common-sense version of masculinity and makes Cleo’s female masculinity recognizable according to ghettocentric masculinity’s contours.” Furthermore, “Like gangsta rap’s thug, Cleo possesses a fine lady.”43 In cinematic and other creative representations of Black lesbian sociality, representations of sexuality structure how Black gender norms and identities are made visible and function as currency in certain markets, and in these cases, Black butchness’s proximity to and relationship with Black femmeness is a crucial mode of rendering this visibility, especially the representation of sexuality between them. Keeling might read the opening scene of 3 in the Morning as a cinematic process through which Sam Jay’s butchness is rendered legible by way of the Black femme woman whom she embraces in the opening scene. Their butch-femme hug, she might argue, signifies the sexual relationship necessary, beyond Sam Jay’s apparent female masculinity, to frame and authorize the commonsense understanding of Black gender sociality.
As I see it, Sam Jay explodes the idea of Black butchness being coherent based only on the butch-femme sexual schema, as it reaches into a more affective register early in the routine. As they embrace one another, Sam Jay does not possess her partner but leans on her as she is feeling “all the emotions.” Perhaps Black butchness needs Black femmeness and commonsense Black gender codes to cohere at certain points in a comedy routine, but this relationship serves a different purpose than in fictionalized accounts that rely on ghettocentric tropes to produce the intended narratives. Sam Jay and other Black butch comics discussed here do this by noting specific aspects of failure they experience, and many times, that feeling of failure is activated in relationship to Black femmeness and invocations of hegemonic (Black) gender common sense. Indeed, as we will see later in this chapter, Black gender common sense (of which Black femmeness is a constitutive element) haunts and harasses Sam Jay, trying to delegitimize her womanhood via her masculinity and render it more proximate to traditional commonsense masculinity. The jokes make it clear that Black butch women do not want to approximate “real” men but want something different. In Sam Jay’s stand-up special in particular, it becomes clear that it is not Black femmeness that authorizes and makes visible Black female masculinity or Black butchness as legible; the Black butch’s proximity to violence and her expression of the dialectic of her failure and the fantasy of liberation her butch body invokes makes her butchness cohere. Apparent failure and simultaneous embrace of womanhood are the modes of affectivity that hold together Black butch subjectivity, and this dialectic is often expressed as a form of butch sass in contemporary stand-up comedy.
At the Females in Comedy Association Convention in 2012, the audience had the opportunity to ask a panel of several professional comics about building a successful career. One of the comics rattled off a few bits of advice about naming practices. “Nobody really makes it with nicknames,” she said. Following up on physical appearance, the comic went on, almost scolding, “Let’s glam it up, people. You dress like a star, you get treated like one. . . . You can’t wear jeans and T-shirts. You aren’t Dane Cook.” This exchange about dress and public performance (and success) showed stand-up comedy to be a sociocultural institution that produces a Black gender common sense. This kind of disciplinary advice within the FICA was understandable, given the benchmarks of performance (always compared with white men as the standard) are always higher for Black women. This panel of Black women comics was speaking to a mostly Black audience of aspiring comedians, but I got bristly when I heard this advice. If this was true, Sam Jay was doomed to fail (and so was I). The prefatory moments in the beginning of Black masculine women’s stand-up are significant for the way they convey butch body politics and the way they make use of their body—both the surface corporeality in their stage personae and the stories they tell about themselves as masculine women—to produce positive meaning about the varied experiences and instantiations of Black masculine womanhood. In other words, Black masculine women comics’ unapologetic presentation of self as both masculine and womanly is seriously of consequence—it is a personally and politically charged means through which they speak back to authority and enact their humanity.
Stand-up comic Shep Kelly embraces the “butch” moniker, sometimes donning self-designed “Butch Lives Matter” apparel while she performs. I first met Kelly at the FICA Convention in 2012 in Los Angeles. In 2019, I attended the Black Girl Giggles Comedy Festival, an event Kelly cofounded, and I got a chance to watch her host and perform at LGBTQ+ night at a bar/nightclub called Hi-Ho Lounge in New Orleans’s Marigny neighborhood. For now, I want to focus on a portion of an online performance Kelly did during the COVID pandemic because in it, she enacts sass in a somewhat unconventional way that demonstrates its complexity.
Kelly is introduced at the “Cosmic Comedy: A Celebration of Life” online event by her friend and comedian Onika McClain.44 “She gon’ make y’all laugh, she gon’ make y’all think. Don’t call her a dude. Just don’t call her a dude. Because I be defending her all the time! And she be like, ‘Bitch, I got this, relax.’” McClain’s opening caveat immediately sets Kelly’s masculinity up as a focal point and site of vulnerability. It also frames her as a woman who can handle her business and is adept at defending herself against those who would misgender or mistreat her. The screen toggles to Kelly, and with a smile on her face and in her voice she begins her set. “I’m tryna give people some time to take this in.” She gestures toward herself, smiling. Kelly’s opening stance, “take this in,” offers a pathway toward that elsewhere that Hartman invokes in her figuration of the free state, a moment to imagine butch as the norm; one must “take this in” as a fantasy because that state of freedom, in this moment of expression, is so far from the reality Kelly presents before her audience.
Kelly’s skin is a deep, chocolate brown, and she wears a closely cropped fade. Her countenance is very masculine, and it is this masculinity that we as spectators are given time to “take in.” She continues, “’Cause I know it’s still people watching like, ‘Well, where she at? I don’t see her nowhere. This is crazy. Onika said it’s gon’ be a girl. I mean, I seen butch bitches before, but not like this!’” Kelly has set herself apart, especially in her adamant framing of herself as a “butch bitch” and the demand that the audience let her embodiment sink in. This is a critical moment in her set that has only just begun. Kelly does a version of Black womanhood that chafes against norms of femininity; she appropriates and owns two epithets that have historically defeminized and dehumanized Black women, the “butch bitch,” and she asks the audience to engage with both the idea and the materiality of her version of Black womanhood.
“I know I look extra strong in the face. And this quarantine ain’t helping. It’s all good. I’m just a woman with a deep voice. That’s all there is to it. . . . Now the thing is, people be picking at me. They be like, ‘You can’t be no woman ’cause you got a deep voice.’” Kelly’s voice does not sound particularly deep to me, but I interpret her invocation of her “deep voice” as a metaphor for her general female masculinity and the way it interpolates her into the public sphere. It is a background signifier of her butchness that brings her corporeal masculinity to the fore, forcing a confrontation. Kelly’s entire set is a metonymic expression of the purpose of Avilez’s Black Queer Freedom; it is “a consideration of how life gets lived and how desire gets expressed within the context of serial, encircling injury.”45 It illuminates Kelly as the fantasy-bound subject whose liberation through humor is produced through its dialectic relation to queer failure. As Tina Takemoto argues, this epistemological register “can engage the psychic and emotional dimensions of loss, failure, disappointment, and shame that accompany LGBTQ+ existence as well as the utopian potentialities of failure as a mode of resistance, intervention, speculation, and queer world making.”46 Kelly continues, “I be like, ‘First of all, God blessed me with this voice. And I’mma use this voice to the best of my ability.’” Kelly’s interjection is an enactment of butch sass, a moment where she lays claim to her humanity—her voice and the will to use it despite bullying that threatens to silence her or force her to conform to norms to be heard.
Kelly simultaneously embraces her masculinity and affirms her womanhood. Not only does she have something to say with her voice, but crucially her “deep voice,” the masculinity emanating from her womanly body, is also saying something, producing meaning in that act of making itself known. “I never pay a bill, ever. Bill collectors call my house, I be like, [deeper voice] ‘She ain’t here.’” The punch line unmasks the discursive power of masculinity, and the humor here lies in Kelly’s appropriation of that power while simultaneously announcing and embracing her womanhood.
Comedian D. Lo speaks with a heavy Baltimore accent, and I watched her perform at the LGBTQ+ show at Black Girl Giggles in New Orleans. She wore long locs and a white button-down shirt with black slacks. The room was cozy and warm, and as she got onstage, she opened with, “It’s hot as shit down here. I got all kinds of titty sweat down here,” setting up her first laugh. “I’m all the way gay . . . if you couldn’t tell. [Laughter.]” D. Lo located her female body and its masculine presentation as the centerpiece of her set. Her female masculinity structured her experience in the world materially and metaphysically, and this feature of her life was the dominant theme of her jokes. Her masculinity and her womanhood are equally important, evidenced in her reference to her “titty sweat” at the beginning of her set, indexing her womanhood, and the fact that she is “all the way gay,” signaling her butchness. “And then I’m a nonthreatening old bitch. I’m from the suburbs,” she quipped. “I’m not fighting nobody! Don’t let none of this fool you! I’m hiding behind her, OK!?” D. Lo’s invocation of hiding from danger gestured toward the ongoing conditions of her Black queer subjectivity, that “what is often at stake for . . . unconventional gender expression [is] a beatdown,”47 as Avilez puts it. The audience let out an enormous laugh, indicating their attunement with the comic, especially with how she put the discourse of gender in the spotlight.
