All comedy is Black

Well, they would be…If any of these so-called “facts” were true. 

Long before the all-white Compass Players “revolutionized American comedy” by being recognized as the first improvisational theater troupe, Pat Chappelle’s Rabbit’s Foot Company toured the country as a traveling minstrel show. After the first season in 1900, Chappelle had essentially cornered the Black vaudeville market, employing 75 performers that traveled to 16 states. After he “accomplished what no other Negro has done…successfully run a Negro show without the help of a single white man,” Chappelle bought a baseball team that traveled with the Foots. But none of that compared to the biggest draw.

After noticing that the crowd response to the acrobats, singers, musicians and circus performers paled in comparison to his comedic actors, Chappelle decided to create a second tour that focused explicitly on comedy. And, to ensure the main show kept its audience, the comedic actors rotated between the two shows. Because they didn’t have scripts or pre-rehearsed routines, they interacted with the audiences and basically created a new show in every city. 

And that’s why, in 1906, almost a half-century before the 1955 founding of the Compass Players, the Black-owned  Funny Folks Comedy Company was actually America’s first improvisational theater troupe.  

Google doesn’t know anything.

Take that 1958 “first” comedy album, for instance. In 1955, record label owner Dootsie Williams asked one of Malcolm X’s friends—a comedian named John Elroy Sandford—if Dootone records could record his act. The comedian wondered why anyone would pay to see him live if they could just buy a recording. The comic eventually relented when his brother, Fred Sanford Jr., told him it was a brilliant idea. But just to be sure, he should do some “special” material for the album. The result was Laff of the Party, which sold 250,000 units and made the comedian a household name in Black America. And since the material was created just for the album, it was also the first release of a live comedy special.

By 1958, when that white dude released The Future Lies Ahead, that comedian known as Redd Foxx had already released 14 live comedy albums on Black-owned Dootone Records. 

Foxx and his Black contemporaries like Moms Mabley were selling millions of X-rated records for decades and saying whatever they wanted in soldout live shows before Lenny Bruce supposedly “used comedy to challenge free speech restrictions.” Not only did Black comedians like Flip Wilson and Dick Gregory use comedy as social commentary before George Carlin and Bruce, but when Carlin recorded AM & FM, the album that “marked Carlin’s metamorphosis from straight-laced to hippie, intentionally embracing the growing counterculture,” it was on Flip Wilson’s record label. 

Yes, white people did lend a helping hand. The two white men who created Sam n Henry should be applauded for creating the first American sitcom that became Amos & Andy. Sure, they patterned all the characters after Black minstrel shows, pretended to be Black and used caricatures of Black people for a show that was technically a drama. But, for some reason, it’s called a situation comedy. 

Maybe this is BuBu’s fault.

Every. Single. Thing.

Black comedy isn’t just the origin story of American laughter; it influenced American culture in several ways. Whether it is Dick Gregory airing the first national viewing of the Zapruder film or the fact that one of the highest-rated comedies of all time (Friends) is just a ripoff of a Black show (Living Single), Black comedy has been the constant in every niche of American culture. 

Remember the Rabbit’s Foot Company? Well, one of the show’s performers showed up with a new wife at the beginning of the Foot’s 1904 tour. Gertrude Pridgett joined the tour with her husband as the comedy and dance duo The Black Face Song and Dance Comedians, Jubilee Singers [and] Cake Walkers. After her “vulgar and sexually frank” routine, “Madame Gertrude” would always sing one song as an encore, a sorrowful tune that was different from every other song in the main show that made the audience go wild. When anyone asked her about that kind of music, she told them she just called it “the blues.” By the time the music was popularized, Madame Gertrude had adopted her husband’s last name and was a superstar known as “Ma Rainey.” 

That’s right, the woman who is remembered as the “Mother of the Blues” honed her skills as a comedian. And since jazz, rock and hip-hop evolved from the blues alongside Black comedy, it could be argued that Black comedy has influenced American music more than actual white musicians. 

Once, while I was sitting with the late comedian Tyler Craig, he elaborated on Chris Rock’s premise that opens this story, explaining why Black comedy is simply better. “When I perform in front of white people, I only have to be amusing. They paid for a few laughs in a world that makes them smile every day, so they want you to be funny,” Craig explained. “But Black audiences are like: ‘this motherf***er better make me laugh’ because they live in a world that gives them something to cry about every day. And that’s the difference.”

“White folks wanna laugh,” he said before adding:

“Black folks need to laugh.”

Thank you for coming out. 

Good night, God bless.

Michael Harriot is a writer, cultural critic and championship-level Spades player. His book, Black AF History: The Unwhitewashed Story of America, will be released in 2022.

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