Flashback: On the Real Side...Laughing, Lying, and Signifying

Typical humor from comedian Dick Gregory in his hey day. He is just one of many comedians mentioned in Mel Watkins assessment in the history of Black Humor. On the Real Side takes it's readers on a voyage as early as the first African arrivals in the Colonies in the seventeenth century.

"The uninhibited display and heartiness of black's "cackling laughter" can be found throughout early American writings."

Watkins carries the reader through slavery allowing slices of diaries and journals commenting on observances of African rituals of dance and the playing of music, including lyrics of African American folk lyrics that are aggressive in it's ridicule of whites.

If I had my sweet way Graveyard's place my Bosman'd lay. I even hates to hear his name, Could kill him like an express train...

In the second chapter, entitled Minstrelsy, Watkins makes a profound point about black comedy revealing that blackness has been coupled with humor from the very beginning. By the 1840s the newest rage of American culture was the minstrel show which lived from the commercial exploitation of a black expressive form, a parody of African American song and dance.

This new found form of "entertainment" was often used as the soap box to ridicule black soldiers and his contiribution to the war effort or newly elected members of the House and Senate.

The one element that had not been reckoned on was the fact of the black minstrelsy to become a vehicle for the "emergence of America's first professional black musical and comic artists. Rudi Blesh in They All Played Ragtime..."The uncanny Negro turned his version of the burnt-cork divertisement into a subtle but devastating caricature of the white Ubermensch, ....insinuated his way onto the white stage."

Mel Watkins writes from pure fact no matter the harsh reality of stereotypical roles, including that of Butterfly McQueen, Stepin Fetchit, Mantan Moreland. Whoopi Goldberg, Watkins writes, has called Dudley Dickerson a "comic genius" and "master of physical comedy" - was seen in scores of frightened coon roles such as Ready, Willing and Unable (1941).

On the Real Side can serve as an extremely useful reference tool for African American history. Real Side sheds light on an underground tradition known only to blacks for the majority of American history, reason being mainstream America didn't wake up to black comedy until the late 60s-early 70s. Comedians from the 1940s and 50s such as Mums Mabley, Pig Meat Markham and Tim Moore were virtually unknown to mainstream U.S.A.