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In this chapter, the author returns to whiteface minstrelsy, the more improvisational, free-form mode of whiting up. He places black stand-up comics such as Jackie “Moms” Mabley, Dick Gregory, Richard Pryor, and Dave Chappelle in conversation with black performance artists/actors like Whoopi Goldberg, Anna Deavere Smith, and Sarah Jones to explore the perception and performance of cultural difference. Despite the low-brow connotations of stand-up and the highbrow patina of performance art, there is a shared emphasis on theatricality and self-reflexivity circulating among these solo artists. The fictional characters improvised by Pryor were just as compelling as the studied, mimicry-based re-creations of Smith and Jones. In the 1970s, as Pryor perfected his comedic voice, critics defined his work as “a new type of realistic theater” or “theater of the routine” because Pryor staged ordinary white and black folks in everyday situations. Although Pryor and Smith never shared the same artistic process or venues, they were both committed to fostering dialogues between multiracial publics in fully integrated spaces.

By most accounts, as Paul Schrader’s first film as director, Blue Collar was a tension-filled production with the three leading actors coming to blows on multiple occasions. This chapter, will explore the performance styles of Harvey Keitel, Yaphet Kotto, and Richard Pryor with particular focus paid to the latter’s identity as a stand-up comic and movie star during the mid- to late- 1970s. Through casting Pryor, Schrader does not fundamentally alter this comic persona but rather captures a dramatic variation of it, employing it as a defying signifier against the midcentury “realist” acting styles of Keitel and Kotto, who both trained on the New York stage. Through a fostering and challenging of Pryor’s persona and style, Schrader produces a tension between his performers that feels acutely aware of the comedian’s “territorialized” black identity as well as his ability to challenge racial boundaries through his humor. The contrasting styles of Keitel, Kotto, and Pryor provide a dramatic tension attuned to the complicated racial conflicts found in the more integrated work spaces of the 1970s.

This chapter examines the work of Richard Pryor and his comic successors, who build on his work while taking it in dynamic and unprecedented directions. In particular, this chapter focuses its attention on comedy albums that combine the live stand-up of the comics with recorded bits that reinforce critiques in other forms. So, Pryor’s Bicentennial Nigger uses skits to help reject the romanticized narrative of the United States at the bicentennial. One of the most immediate successors to Pryor was Whoopi Goldberg, whose Direct from Broadway pulls from the template that Moms Mabley constructed by directly confronting the oppression that sits at the intersection of race and gender. However, Goldberg expands on Pryor’s work not through the inclusion of a female voice but by transforming the exploration of black life into a female-centric critique of white, Western, supremacist, patriarchal hegemony. This chapter argues that Chris Rock most effectively realizes Pryor’s legacy of comic rage. Rock’s work, from Bring the Pain (1996) to Never Scared (2004), engages directly with the historical moment of post–civil rights America and is most clearly represented in Rock’s infusion of hip-hop into the structure and style of mainstream stand-up comedy.

This chapter frames the history of punk rock within the broader historical context of Peoria, Illinois, a conservative, mid-sized city in the American Midwest. The chapter touches on the city’s history as the whiskey capital of the world, a staple of the American vaudeville circuit, the world headquarters of Caterpillar, Inc., and a popular American test market. Before punk rock bands such as Fugazi and the Jesus Lizard passed through the city, its complicated history already included ties to figures as varied as Richard Pryor, Ronald Reagan, Charles Manson, and George Wallace.

As each art form turned confessional, the first artists to attempt it had unusual amounts of social privilege—e.g., among poets, Robert Lowell, a Boston Brahmin. That, perhaps, is why confessional artists have tended to be white, at least in early, pivotal moments in each art form. And yet, over and over, these white, confessional artists have adopted the voices of ethnic and racial others, credentialing their angst through appropriation. Not only is confessionalism unbearably white as a movement, but confessional artists tend to find their own whiteness unbearable. Nonwhite confessional artists, though, do something similar—e.g., in comedy, Richard Pryor—blending personal expression with persona performance, fostering identifications across identitarian boundaries.

This chapter examines fictional depictions of African American presidents as a popular trope in U.S. film, television, and literature, as producing a discourse of “black presidentialism” that implicitly embeds a logic of passing that comes into relief in sketch-comedy performances by Richard Pryor and David Chappelle. This chapter argues that Chappelle’s “counterburlesque” as “Black President Bush,” which rearticulates George W. Bush’s Iraq War policy and its justifications rearticulates in terms of black hypermasculinity and street vernacularities, exposes how popular culture’s discourse of black presidentialism, in its post–Civil Rights era instantiations, invokes what the traditional passing narrative understands as the disconnect between its protagonist’s appearance and presumed essence of his or her identity, with acute attention to the role gender plays in racial semblance. In the case of the black president trope, that dualism is recoded as the tension between the abstracted white manhood of the office of the presidency and black masculine racial particularity.

Privileging imagination and creativity, this chapter is composed of vignettes that consider the complex and sometimes paradoxical relationship between crisis, vulnerability, and empowerment. It begins with Toni Morrison’s Beloved as a theoretical framework for seeing what imagining grace looks like and demonstrating how black feminist theory provides important tools for seeing power in vulnerability and emotiveness. President Obama’s appearance on the cover of Ms. and his accompanying feminist declaration, social commentary on Tom Joyner’s radio show, Donald McKayle’s dance performance “Rainbow ‘Round My Shoulder,” Richard Pryor’s comedy, Presidential initiated social policy, and the visual art of Kehinde Wiley all work together to illustrate how the author both employs and negotiates the challenges of synthesizing black feminist and black masculinity studies. Read together, these vignettes lay out the stakes for critical black gender studies, as well as the complicated nature of constructing complex masculine identities in an era dominated by dialogues of crisis. While vulnerability and emotiveness is privileged in this chapter, the chapter also considers how what Mark Anthony Neal references as illegible masculinities—those expressing vulnerability in this case—are not always a progressive performance that fosters self-actualization and resistance to crisis metaphors.