Sass, p.3
Sass, page 3
Willett and Willett offer an alternative reading of the efficacy of feminist humor outside of the other major theories of humor, what they imagine as humor-as-catharsis-sharing that speaks truth. The “WAP” celebration of the end of the Trump administration provides some insight into how we might imagine the way Black women’s humor functions—how it can do the work of redressing, on the public stage, the kinds of marginalization to which they have historically been subjected. Indeed, as the crowd recited the raunchy, humorous lyrics—with each expression of desire, “I wanna gag, I wanna choke. I want you to touch that little dangly thing that swing in the back of my throat”; with each explicit utterance of sexual arousal, “Macaroni in a pot, that’s some wet ass pussy”; and each claim on pleasure, “Make it cream, make me scream,” the artists and chanters alike redistributed the pain of marginality and the trauma of sexual shame to audaciously reclaim sexual pleasure and power in the public sphere. We will see throughout this book the way Black women deploy explicitness through humor as an aesthetic mode that promotes self-care, moments of embodied ecstasy, and the subversion of gendered and racialized expectations and social orders. Black women’s humor many times turns to pleasure and the erotic to imagine what freedom feels like. The subversive practices of humor that emerge in Black women’s language and discourse enables frank discussions about Black women’s bodies that eschew fear, shame, and abjection, and the explicitness of “WAP” is an expression of embodied sass—it foregrounds desires and pleasures, to be sure—but the raunch-cum-humor of the lyrics and the crowd’s citation of them also indicate “their rage and their longing.”16
In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, Saidiya Hartman discusses how young Black women in the early twentieth century used their voices productively while they were incarcerated at Lowell Cottage at Bedford Hills Women’s Reformatory in upstate New York to register their dissent, their refusal to be quietly dehumanized and brutalized. “Songs and shouts were the instruments of struggle,” Hartman says of the Black women’s singular, cacophonous chorus. “Terms like ‘noise strike’ and ‘vocal outbreak’ described the soundscape of rebellion and refusal,” a limited means of redressing their conditions, to be sure, but these chants of revolt “made manifest the latent rebellion simmering beneath the surface of things.”17 The gathering outside the White House in 2020 most certainly was not only Black women engaged in a defiant “vocal outbreak,” but what was happening there was certainly Black noise that was amplifying and politicizing Black women’s aesthetics, humor, and desire for social and cultural transformation. “The collective, orchestrated fury of Black women can move the whole world,” Brittney Cooper notes.18 Building on that idea of a collective politic hewn of many voices, we might see the “WAP” moment as an expression of Black women’s rage as Black feminist world-making.
When Black women publicly, brazenly, and explicitly express their sexual desires and practices, they push back on normative discourses of respectability that demand a “good” Black woman be a “lady in the streets and freak in the sheets.” As Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion lay bare, one can be a “certified freak, seven days a week,” and still demand to be seen, heard, and respected as a human being and a political subject. The proof is in the pudding. Regardless of what critics may say about the artistry and reception of “WAP,” Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion have politically benefited themselves, and so have Black women more broadly, from the platform upon which “WAP” propelled them. Cardi B was invited by the last two Democratic presidential candidates in 2020, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, to the mainstream political conversation to discuss issues affecting people publicly and privately to whom they were campaigning. Megan Thee Stallion, in a powerfully moving and timely performance on Saturday Night Live, rebuked Daniel Cameron, Kentucky’s attorney general, for his handling of the case against the police officers who barged in Breonna Taylor’s apartment with a no-knock warrant and murdered her. Meg was particularly attuned to that specific case but also to the way it symbolized the failure of American institutions and individuals to protect Black women from violence and early death. Indeed, after the success of “WAP” and her own experience with domestic violence, she has become an outspoken advocate for Black women suffering violence and abuse.
The idea that Black women are mired in “controlling images” has gained so much currency in Black feminist discourse that it has become almost obligatory to theorize representations and practices of Black women in popular culture through that discursive lens. Patricia Hill Collins makes the case that “the mass media has generated class-specific images of Black women that help justify and shape the new racism of desegregated, colorblind America.”19 Collins suggests that representations of the “Black bitch,” who is “loud, pushy, confrontational, aggressive,” is “designed to defeminize and demonize Black women.”20 Melissa Harris-Perry locates the trope of “the angry Black woman” as a controlling image, a representation that “holds Black women responsible for power they do not possess, power that is, in fact, being utilized in very real ways by members of social groups who can claim emotional innocence as they hide behind, and persecute, the ‘Black Bitches’ of our cultural imaginations.”21 The “angry Black woman” and the “Black bitch” are indeed permutations of the “sassy Black woman” who has become an essentialized stereotype, but they lack the ability to lodge the kind of critique of power that is the hallmark of Black women’s sass as an agentive, contextualized, subversive cultural practice. This project offers a Black feminist reading of Black women’s humor in the spirit of the Black radical tradition, a reading that centers Black women’s sass as an expression that interrogates how a history of violence and disempowerment undergirds Black women’s expressions of humor and humanity but moves toward joy, pleasure, and even ecstasy.
No Problem with Sass: Representations of the “Sassy Black Woman”
Sass is not a concept around which there is consensus among contemporary Black women comics, and in deed, they understand its efficacy differently. Some comedians like Naomi Ekperigin see sass as a confining stereotype.
JF: Let’s talk about Black women comedians. Would you say that you are outside of the mainstream?
NE: Yes, and I don’t know why. Um, I think I am because . . . I don’t think I can be easily pegged. And that’s not to say that I’m so amazing. I can give you both. I’m aware of what you expect to see.
JF: Which is?
NE: Sassy. Which is my least favorite word ever. But I love it ’cause sometimes they’ll say, “She’s funny, she’s sassy!” And then they’ll say my name, and I’ll be like, “By sassy he meant Black.”22
It was this frustrated comment Ekperigin made in 2011 that left me with one of the biggest questions this book seeks to answer: How might we codify the particularity of Black women’s humor without being essentialist? It is important to remember that depending on the audience, Black women’s humor may not always have the intended outcomes of laughter and rebellion. DoVeanna Fulton points out one of the biggest hurdles Black women comics face: in the wide circulation through various media of stereotypically degrading images of Black women, countless opportunities emerge for misinterpretation of cultural and historical knowledge.23 For any comic, but especially Black women comics, cultivating a community of laughter is the most difficult part of stand-up comedy. Skillfully using personal experience, especially the inversion of marginality from a burden to an asset, can, however, be entertaining, empowering, healing, and, for lack of a better term, sticky. That is, Black women’s humor creates a unique cultural product with affective power both familiar and off-putting as Sara Ahmed notes, “in which emotions align some bodies with others, as well as stick different figures together, by the way they move us.”24 Yet, the fact remains that for a variety of reasons—not least the legacy of chattel slavery’s cultural and social impact, or neoliberal imperatives that value certain narratives of Black womanhood over others—Black women comics have a difficult time succeeding as professional stand-ups.
I met comedian Karinda Dobbins at a comedy show at the Layover Bar in downtown Oakland, California, in the summer of 2010 and had the chance to watch her perform live in several venues, from comedy clubs to hole-in-the-wall bars to the LGBT community center in San Francisco during Pride Week. Dobbins describes her comic style as “witty, thought-provoking social commentary,” and she has opened shows for W. Kamau Bell, Trevor Noah, Gina Yashere, and Dave Chappelle.25 Dobbins takes on a range of social and political issues that specifically affect her. “I think I have a different voice than a lot of comedians I’ve heard. I have a very unique perspective. I’m Black. I’m a woman. I’m gay. And I work in corporate America. It’s a very unique set of circumstances.”26 Given the particular obstacles Black women comics face in attaining professional success, Dobbins must constantly engage with how the stories she tells onstage butt up against historical ideas about what Black womanhood means and what Black women can and should talk about on the comedy stage: “It’s tougher [for Black women comics to succeed] because from our perspective a lot of things aren’t funny if you don’t know the history of Black women. . . . There’s a difference between laughing at it and getting it. And that’s one of the hurdles we face. And secondly, it’s just really hard to make our experiences funny without making them trivial. There’s a fine line between me telling you this is my reality and having you laugh at it and not trivialize it.”27 It is possible to theorize the particularity of Black women’s humor. Contested as it is, sass is a discourse genre that is foundational to Black women’s humor, a conceptualization that changes the very nature of sass as an object of study.
Black feminist scholar Brittney Cooper has discovered her superpower of “eloquent rage,” which she chronicles in her eponymous 2018 book. “Eloquent rage” feels like a reimagination of sass, shorn of the negative connotations that have congealed it into the figure of the “sassy Black woman.” For Cooper, this figure is a representational trope, like the Madea character in Tyler Perry’s films, who “put[s] white folks at ease.”28 Sass, Cooper argues, is a form of expression to which Black women turn “when rage is too risky. . . . When it comes to Black women, sometimes Americans don’t recognize that sass is simply a more palatable form of rage. Americans adore sassy Black women. You know, those caricatures of finger-waving, eye-rolling Black women at whom everyone loves to laugh.”29 A “sassy Black judge” would be much easier to cast in a film role than “a character who is a charismatic drug dealer with a penchant for parliamentary procedure and aspirations of quitting drug dealing and becoming a legitimate businessman,” echoes media scholar Kristen Warner. As Warner sees it, the “‘sassy Black judge’ is easily digestible because within the description lies recognizable iconography.”30 Indeed, “sassy” is an iconic marker that has come to characterize representations of Black womanhood in popular culture—including film, television, advertisements, and Internet memes.
Tyler Perry’s character Madea and Warner’s “sassy Black judge” inhabit the legacy of the “baad bitches and sassy supermamas” popularized by Blaxploitation films in characters like Christy Love and Cleopatra Jones, tough women “who show no fear, take on powerful whites and men, and according to the genre’s expectation, win.”31 These kinds of characters project a “fantasy of power” as Stephane Dunn puts it, in which the heroines use sass, style, sexuality, and grit to claim personal victory rather than real liberation. The “sassy Black woman” hinges on these fantasy spectacles, which are merely projections of power. My theory of Black women’s sass as a genre of discourse complicates the idea that all sass is an ossified spectacle meant to entertain and placate white people into believing the lie that Black women are physically strong but politically impotent. Using sass to exact revenge, whether in an extreme or subtle way, can be both personal and about a broader kind of political liberation at the same time—like Cooper remarked on the great Serena Williams, “Her shots are clear and expressive. Her wins are exultant. Her victories belong to all of us, even though she’s the one who does all the work.”32 When a Black woman enacts sass, it may seem like a personal enactment, which it inherently is, yet if the victories belong to us all, I am drawn to the idea that sass can be about a collective kind of liberation.
There is a note of radicalism embedded in Cooper’s notion of eloquent rage in its articulation of an embodied politics of anger, which is a productive source for personal and social transformation, in the Lordeian sense. “Rage is a kind of refusal,” Cooper argues, “to be made a fool of, to be silenced, to be shamed, or to stand for anybody’s bullshit. It is a refusal of the lie that Black women’s anger in the face of routine, everyday injustice is not legitimate.”33 Eloquent rage might look like the “I-refuse-to-be-bothered-ness” of Michelle Obama’s casual, everyday, not-for-public ponytail at the inauguration of Donald Trump in January 2017.34 To be sure, Cooper’s eloquent rage foregrounds the affective, interior dimensions of Black women talking back to authority, a crucial element of the enactments of sass. However, she seems to dismiss sass only as a strategy of caricatured figures of toothless derision based on gestures and the cultural knowledge commonly attributed to Black women that circulates globally.
In Cooper’s reading, sass is what Black women turn to when rage is too risky, because sass is theorized as a palatable alternative expressive resource to rage. In the examples Cooper offers, from her own experience as a cultural critic to Michelle Obama and Cooper’s own mother, seem to embrace the work of sass while rejecting the term itself. “So in this book,” Cooper declares, “I am doing what Black women do best. I’m calling America out on her bullshit about racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, and a bunch of other stuff.”35 Cooper is doing the important work of calling out and speaking back to structures of domination, and I believe Cooper is enacting sass, which we can a see in the intentions, aesthetics, and stylistic choices the author makes in the book and in its reception.
Departing from Cooper, though, I do not believe we have a “problem with sass,” as her opening chapter’s title suggests, or that sass needs a new palatable name. Sass is not the problem. Sass does, however, need a new critical lens and a new understanding of how it functions as a powerful resource in Black women’s expressive tool kits. Much of the scholarship on Black women’s sass focuses on it as a verbal language practice, overlooking not only its gestural components but also the broader constellation of discursive elements in which it produces humorous affect and, at times, transformative meaning. Drawing on performance theory and contemporary Black feminist thought, I theorize sass as a genre of discourse—embodied practices allowing us to move beyond seeing sass as text to something more dynamic and contingent. Sass is something Black women do or perform in specific situations to assert a sense of autonomy, a performative tool that in its primal scene operates as an affirmation of one’s humanity. Building on the articulation of the righteous anger that is at the heart of Cooper’s notion of “eloquent rage,” the discourse of sass enunciates Black women’s inner lives within conditions of constraint toward an affective politics of pleasure and joy in the pursuit of human connection. Used in humorous contexts, sass can be a subversive tool like irony and satire with which one can defiantly, even if figuratively, assert authority and superiority over those considered to be in a higher position. To put it differently, Sass is most concerned about what Black women can do with sass, especially with how it functions as an index of Black women’s humor and humanity.
Genre theory reframes texts as dynamic interactions. I think it is fair and appropriate to think of representations like stereotypes, for example, as texts in that they are static, not contingent on a particular moment, but seemingly flattened into objecthood. My theory of Black women’s sass holds that it is not simply a representational matrix of tired stereotypes. For Black women, sass is agentive. It has come to encompass expressions that are purposefully deployed within specific cultural and social contexts, and it is used as an instrument of appraisal and most importantly as a strategic tool for asserting one’s humanity. Sass is also a response—it comprises seemingly innocuous yet distinctive gestures and communicative styles as reactions to pressures to “stay in one’s place.” Enactments of sass are not always about humor, but if one is literate in its generic conventions and historical functions and understands the social conditions from which it springs in the moment of its expression, it is highly possible that it will be humorous. Creating humor is not always the intention of sass, but its uptake does always have the potential to produce laughter in those who recognize the fundamental subversion of power that sass always intends to express.
Anger and Eros: Or, the Politics of Black Women’s Sass
Why am I getting so theoretical about Black women’s sass? It is not simple, is the simple answer. To treat sass seriously is a political act that does much more than impart an intellectual heft to a practice historically held in such low esteem. I have watched hundreds of live comedy acts since I began this work, and it seems like everyone, as if by requirement, has a “sassy Black woman” joke in their repertoire, even bits that are supposedly trying to be progressive and celebrate Black women. Every July, Montreal plays host to the biggest comedy festival in the world, Just for Laughs, where hundreds of comics from around the world bring all manner of comedy to dozens of stages around the city. In 2016, I headed to one of the late-night shows that caught my eye at the MainLine Club, a show called “Urban Dictionary” hosted by comedian James Davis. Davis has been the host of the Netflix series Hood Adjacent since 2017 and opened the show by explaining “hood adjacent comedy” as “knowing the dude that got shot but didn’t get invited to his retaliation meeting.” The host had some tight jokes exploring a few different words in the online Urban Dictionary: curve, Netflix and chill, glowed-up, and staywoke.
