Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century United States

From the outset, Katelyn Hale Wood’s book on stand-up comedy, Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States, prioritizes Black feminist joy. Anchoring a lineage of Black feminist comedians to pioneer comedian Jackie “Moms” Mabley, Wood contends that Black feminist comedic performance and the laughter it elicits are necessary components to feminist, queer, and antiracist protest. Recent scholarship in African American comedy examines Black comedy that resolves or wards off residual traumas from slavery, but Wood situates Black feminist comedic labor within the nexus of community, truth telling, and joy. Cracking Up is a welcome shift toward a focused politics of joy that invites us to consider how Black comedians, and in particular Black women comedians, have always engendered spaces for community building and celebration, using stand-up comedy to “crack up” historically oppressive constructs. From Sojourner Truth to Wanda Sykes, Black feminist wit has always been a source of affective freedom. To that end, Cracking Up does not tokenize Black women comedians as a naturally gifted group within a white male-dominated space. Not merely a conjectural jaunt, the book aims to measure comedy’s efficacy as a modality of protest and coalition building.Wood frames her analysis by merging Black feminist theory and queer theory, thus acknowledging their intersectional histories of disrupting white supremacist narratives hidden under the guise of sociopolitical, linear progress. In doing so, Wood stresses how Black women, Black queer people, and their collective and individual labors have always been at the center of cultural protest. The term “queer,” in Wood’s study, signifies both an identity marker and a scaffolding—a frame through which to understand intersecting modes of power. Queerness, then, offers a rationale for uses of the body and performance that reject heteronormativity and heteropatriarchy. Blackness and queerness coexist as “ever-present” (un)doings that reject “crystallization” and operate as sites of “possibility” and “movement” (7).Making each chapter a case study, Wood uses the idiom “cracking up” as a methodology to tie together Black feminist comics: Mabley, Mo’Nique, Wanda Sykes, Sasheer Zamata, Sam Jay, Michelle Buteau, and Amanda Seales. Embracing the term’s varied meanings—to convulse in uncontrollable laughter, to break down, to break apart, to laugh out loud, to engage in “unruly” laughter—Wood posits that “cracking up” offers a useful way to apprehend Black feminist comedic disruptions to white hegemony . In doing so, Wood effectively abjures the historical white, anthropological approach that speaks for or over Black performers’ invention. Instead, Wood highlights their subjectivity and pronounces from the beginning that there are “unintentional, yet inherent limitations,” in being a “white, queer feminist . . . deeply invested in anti-racist scholarship” (21). Suspicious of white academic superiority or the white savior complex, Wood does not attempt to rescue Black women; instead, she celebrates Black women, their talent, and their work. As part of the book’s method, Wood brings herself into the study, which further enriches it. Both thematically and methodologically, Cracking Up considers the affective and critical interplay of comedian and audience—the dialogic nature of the joke and the laugh.Chapter 1 begins with Mabley. Wood argues that Mabley’s legacy is a comedic approach that disrupts power structures attempting to silence Black women and queer sexualities. Aiming to “crack up” the archive, the chapter highlights historiographical deficiencies evident in the lack of documentation surrounding Mabley’s career. The archive fails to account for Mabley’s offstage life as a lesbian, which disregards the risk Mabley faced daily. The archive, she maintains, elides the virtuosity and unique skill with which Mabley crafted her queer performance practices and so conflating Mabley and “Moms” is a mistake.Chapter 2 shifts from Mabley to Mo’Nique. Tying Mabley’s prison performance album Live at Sing Sing Prison to Mo’Nique’s prison performance album I Coulda Been Your Cellmate! recorded at Ohio Reformatory for Women, the chapter argues that Mo’Nique “cracks up” the carceral state, thereby securing affective—albeit ephemeral—moments of freedom. Unlike “Moms,” who donned the persona of the elderly matriarch, Mo’Nique positions herself as a sister to her audience of female inmates. The book’s aim—to measure comedy’s efficacy in coalition building through feminist work—emerges at its best in this chapter. Mo’Nique’s successful and not-so-successful efforts to engender community hinge on her varied posturing as pseudoauthoritarian, lecturer, and surrogate sister rebel. As “spect-actors”—a term Wood borrows from performance artist Augusto Boal to reference the audience’s agency—the women in the audience just as easily jeer at as cheer for her (71). Here, Wood demonstrates Mo’Nique’s comedic skill but also sees the audience, humanizing the women in the audience in a way that the state disallows.Chapter 3 turns to Sykes’s comedy, which, Wood argues, aims to “crack up” time, history, and US citizenship. Wood shows how Sykes’s comedy in her performances at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and in her two comedy specials (I’ma Be Me and What Happened, Ms. Sykes?) challenge the idea of linear progress and positivist neoliberal narratives while shaping performances around Black queer citizenship. Wood contextualizes Sykes’s comedy within the Obama era and explores how her comedy wrestles with the mythos of the American dream, discredits postracial ideology, and resists linear narratives that prioritize capitalist relationships to power and access. Drawing on the work of the queer theorist Michelle M. Wright and the decolonial theorist Roderick A. Ferguson, Wood emphasizes Black queer citizenship and the notion of Black queer time and situates Sykes in direct lineage with “Moms” Mabley, arguing that both Mabley’s and Sykes’s comedy reject the linearity that erases Black queer existence. In Wood’s analysis, Black queer subjects operate as if on a pendulum, suspicious of and resistant to so-called sociopolitical progress while taking strides toward a joyful life.Chapter 4 signals a “renaissance” in stand-up by ushering in a collective of Black women who stand at its forefront: Amanda Seales, Sam Jay, Michelle Buteau, and Sasheer Zamata (114). Contextualizing this new cohort of Black feminist stand-up comedians within the #MeToo movement, the swirl of the 2016 presidential election, and the visible white supremacist reaction to Trump’s appointment, Wood argues that it continues Mabley’s legacy by speaking truth to power. Without apology, these comedians forgo respectability politics or the desire to “find common ground” with audiences who might have historically contributed to anti-Black, antiqueer, and antitrans thought (110). Instead, they use their comedic expertise to hold white people accountable for their complicity in white heteropatriarchy.Scholars looking to laugh and learn will enjoy Cracking Up. It curates a community of Black feminist stand-up comedians and activists and draws attention to key disruptors of white supremacist thought. Both visually and thematically, Mabley is a presence across the text, from the pixilated image of Mabley on the cover of the book to the final screen grab of Wanda Sykes’s impersonation of Mabley from a 2019 episode of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Wood honors Mabley while telling a more complex story about Black women in stand-up comedy. Through laughter and pleasure, Wood asserts that “the black feminist comic demands more. Nothing short of pure freedom will do” (50). Wood’s book cracks us up, bringing us together and pushing us to toward a more hopeful and joyful future.