BLACK FEMINIST COMEDIANS AND CRACKING UP TIME

The violence of forced performances for slave owners, minstrelsy, and state-sponsored marginalization well into the twenty-first century has meant that black performance is often employed to operate as “an oppositional move within a matrix of disciplining powers reigning over the black body.”⁵ Histories that address black performance in the United States consistently cite comedy as both a subversive and interventionist method of dissent.⁶ Studying black comedy in the 1960s and 1970s post-soul era United States, Bambi Haggins asserts that comedy has been key in the expression and formation of black identities alongside coping with systemized oppressions and celebrating black culture. The roots of standup comedy in minstrelsy do not detract from the empowerment and pleasure black performers and their audiences have derived from comedic performances that reflect the actuality of the black diaspora rather than fictional stereotypes produced and consumed by white performers and audiences.⁷

Haggins states that resistance has always been foundational to black comedy: “Historically, the black comic has retained the ability to get the audience laughing while slipping in sociocultural truths.”⁸ Aligning with Haggins, Glenda R. Carpio writes that black humor draws upon a distinct “diasporic sensibility” to mark the body as a site of power.⁹ In Laughing Fit to Kill, Carpio theorizes the black comedic artist as a conjurer who symbolically redresses slavery through joke-telling, performances of the grotesque, satire, and re-formation of black stereotypes.¹⁰ That is, the black comedic artist reveals tropes of minstrelsy and racial archetypes as constructions of white supremacist history through the “arsenal” of black US American humor: the insult, tall tale, trickster tale, and “blues-infused” joke have created a foundation on which black humor bonds performer and audience through a shared sense of time and legacy.¹¹ Refusing to comply with the confines of chrononormativity, black performance interrogates and animates the dynamics of “African dislocation, imperialist trade, capital accumulation, human violence, and black abjection.”¹² Typically, these collective memories of trauma are ignored, disregarded, and/or silenced in service to chrononormative interests in US American culture. In direct contrast, BFCP employs jokes and their resulting laughter to “talk back”¹³ to the cultural, political, and historical narratives that caricaturize and confine black culture to the dominant imagination.

As a form of black performance, I situate black feminist comedy as a means to employ joke-telling and laughter to express how systemic racism, sexism, and heterosexism are imposed on the everyday lives of black women and black queer women. Black queer women comics occupy the stage as not only a place for enjoyment, but also a platform from which to speak bold truths. It was in black vaudeville troupes of the early 1900s, the Chitlin' Circuit, that black women comedians honed jocular aesthetics rooted in African American cultural traditions of folklore and dance, and also in queer theatrical tropes such as camp and drag. In the working class, “no holds barred,” and often sexually explicit comedy of the Chitlin' Circuit, black women performers used humor for backlash and bonding.¹⁴ The work of Moms Mabley set standards for black women to tell jokes in “response to systematic oppression based on their racialized gendered identity and minority sexual orientation as asexual and hypersexual representational others.”¹⁵ A more recent example of this kind of work comes from black butch lesbian comedian Sam Jay, whose comedy centers her race, gender, and sexuality as intersectional sources of empowerment. For example, in her performance on the podcast 2 Dope Queens, Jay celebrates her blackness and queer gender performativity when she states:

Boston is a little closed-minded town, so people act like they're afraid of me, you know? Like it's obvious my underwear has dickholes and they shouldn't, you know what I mean? They look at me funny. I'm a black dyke and old white ladies cross the street when I'm walking down [it], but I like that. I like that power.¹⁶

BFCP, then, “stands up” in the face of and against historical legacies of racial violence, stereotyping, misogyny, and homophobia while also pushing against cultural norms that center mostly cis black heterosexual women in conversations about black womanhood.¹⁷

Anchored by black feminist thought, BFCP utilizes the stage to convey knowledges gained via “outsider–within” positionalities and embody self-definition and self-determination, which Patricia Hill Collins defines as the power to name one's own reality and destiny.¹⁸ Since black performance has historically been linked to white supremacy and the “spectacle of black contentment and abjection,”¹⁹ the presence of black women center-stage on their own terms is inherently subversive. Artist Pearl Cleage calls this the creation of a “hollering place,” or artistic work committed to creating a conduit for black women's voices.²⁰ BFCP provides a hollering place for black women to both bond over shared experiences, and understand the complexities of their differences, echoing bell hooks's explanation that it is harmful to “assume that strength in unity can only exist if difference is suppressed and shared experience is highlighted.”²¹ Thus, the hollering place is a space in which black women can narrate and hear the various stories that constitute the specificities of blackness, womanhood, and queer life in public and private spheres. When interpreted amidst the rich history of black performance, Sykes's standup situates black women as radical agents within history, their subjecthood, and their communities—despite the imposition of dehumanizing hyper(in)visibility at various intersections of systemic marginalization. Audre Lorde states that black women asserting their “sources of strength and support,” and pursuing power and political interests is a “vital component in the war for black liberation.”²²

Hollering places for black women and their allies exemplify the generative, formidable work of what M. Jacqui Alexander calls “knowing who walks with you,”²³ signaling the power in solidarity created through performance. Black feminist comedians use the mic as a means to foster belonging and to exchange important ideas about identity/ies, history, and culture. Mirroring the rich tradition of fostering empowerment via black feminist ideology in cultural spaces ranging from kitchens to classrooms to churches, on stage Sykes performatively models how intersectional identities and history need not be dictated solely by white, patriarchal, and heteronormative domination.²⁴

Omi Osun Joni L. Jones insists that blackness and queerness are linked insofar as they operate “transtemporally” and refuse crystallization, instead generating sites of possibility whereby performance “enacts roads to movement.”²⁵ Both exclusively and jointly, blackness and queerness intricately disrupt and intercept linear time, historical narratives attendant only to those in power, and value judgments of who and what is worthy of the time and space for public discourse. Black feminist comedic performances challenge time and resonate with Alexander's defense of embodiment of the sacred as key to the liberation of black people, queer people, and women. The sacred “dislocates clock time, meaning linearity, which is different than living in the past or being bound by tradition.”²⁶ Shifting temporality from linear to non-linear can generate “counter-memories,” defined as “the disparities between history as it is discursively transmitted and memory as it is publicly enacted by bodies that bear its consequences.”²⁷ Counter-memories conjure and articulate the multi-dimensionality of time and the ways marginalized bodies experience aspects of life such as culture, history, sexuality, violence, and joy. Sykes's comedic performances are generative survival strategies, deeply imbued with black feminist and queer assertions of self-definition, communal empowerment, and transtemporalities as vital tools of resistance.

Throughout this essay, I read Wanda Sykes's comedic performances closely for important moments of black feminist and queer critical historiography, or a cracking up of time. I analyze her words, narratives, vocal inflections, and movements for cultural commentary that critiques white supremacist, misogynist, and heteronormative structures in service to black feminist and queer empowerment. I make explicit how her rich, skilled, and intricate performances reveal the shortcomings of chrononormativity and deconstruct temporalities that silence the multiplicities of black queer womanhood in the United States.²⁸ Akin to how black feminists dismantle dominant narratives that invalidate black women's standpoints and insist that black cisgender, transgender, and gender-queer people matter,²⁹ BFCP operates as an exemplar of embodied black feminist theorizing. Sykes, speaking up and out, mirrors Kimberlé Crenshaw's call to take “Black women's intersectionality seriously,” as well as Rachel Alicia Griffin's and Hortense J. Spillers's assertions that black feminist performance works to expose whiteness and extend possibilities for empowerment, and generate black feminist praxis innovatively.³⁰

COMING OUT AS BLACK

Sykes's black feminist and queer articulations are woven into the ethos of her comedic persona in her 2009 full-length comedy special, I'ma Be Me.³¹ In and of itself, the title of this performance bespeaks a black feminist sensibility by employing vernacular grammar and self-declaration. “I'ma be me” suggests that authenticity is something to be declared, self-defined, and embodied determinedly. By comparison, although Sykes's previous standup addressed issues of race, gender, and sexuality, she took on a passive role in her joke-telling. Prior structuring of her jokes often included hypothetical, third person narratives. For example, a joke about racial profiling and fears of black masculinity in her 2006 comedy special, Sick and Tired, proclaimed: “When we see a white man running down the street, we think, ‘He must be late!’”³² While still highly political and vocal about racism, sexism, and gay rights, Sykes distanced herself from the scenario, acting as the observer or commentator who critiques and laughs at raced, gendered, and sexual oppression, but rarely made herself (e.g., her identities and experiences) a main character in her performances.

I'ma Be Me was the first comedy special in which Sykes announced herself as lesbian, marking an important turn in her comedy as a mode of black feminist and queer self-expression. Her audience, seemingly in the know based on their applause and vocal excitement, cheers loudly when she states, “Had a lot of changes in my personal life.”³³ She elaborates:

I got married. Happily married, got married in California. Then I had to publicly come out. Had to do that. I had to do it. After Prop 8, after that, you know that Prop 8 fiasco in California, I had to come out. I had to say something. 'Cause I was so hurt and so fucking pissed.³⁴

Sykes conveys that she had not planned to come out publicly, but was emotionally compelled to do so. She acknowledges this when repeating, “I had to come out [emphasis added],” and uses “had” repetitively to communicate the high stakes of self-definition. The camera closes in on Sykes as she says this line with a furrowed brow. Sykes's “newly” announced presence on stage as a black lesbian woman becomes defiant in this act of chosen self-naming coupled with a frank, even serious, delivery. After the passing of Proposition 8—which rendered the legality of Sykes's marriage void—deciding to come out due to hurt and anger privileges the emotional and spiritual nature of naming and valuing oneself despite oppositional forces.

The camera pans out as Sykes continues in a conversational, yet serious, tone. She cites the election of President Barack Obama and the passing of Proposition 8 as simultaneous victory and regression. “I was up here,” she says raising her hand high above her head, followed by “Now I'm back down here,” gesturing towards the floor.³⁵ The swiftness with which Sykes and so many other lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people felt degradation that election evening reflects the constant (re)orientation of time and place at the intersections of race and sexuality in the United States.³⁶ This “objective vertigo” is described by Frank B. Wilderson III as a “life constituted by disorientation rather than a life interrupted by disorientation.”³⁷ This state is inherent to blackness and, I would add, queer subjectivities because, as Wilderson explains, “one's environment is perpetually unhinged.”³⁸ At the intersection between structural (e.g., imposed by the State and social institutions) and personal (e.g., a feeling of uneasiness or being unsafe), disorientation is the state wherein marginalized bodies experience daily and unavoidable dis-ease. Sykes's feeling of simultaneous elation, joy, anger, and disappointment demonstrates how black queer subjectivities operate under continuous temporal discontinuity, or vertigo. That is, time is experienced as a forward/backward, multiplicative, and confusing entity rather than linear—and thus, heteronormative—progression for black queer women.

Sykes's paradoxical feelings of being “up here” were linked to her race, while being “back down here” was linked to her sexuality. Her elation as a member of the black community linked to Obama's election followed by her disappointment in the passing of Proposition 8 as a member of the queer community created a temporal whiplash, revealing the commonplace impossibility of linear progress for people who are multiplicatively marginalized and privileged via their respective positionalities. For example, while Sykes is certainly privileged as a cisgender US American who is presumably able-bodied and upper class; she remains targeted both personally and politically as a black lesbian woman.

Focused on comically resisting marginalization, Sykes essentializes queerness and blackness, declaring: “It's harder being gay than it is black.” The set-up for this purposefully anti-intersectional joke demonstrates the confusing, conflicting feelings of homophobic regression paired with racial progression. Without pause, she continues:

It is harder. It's harder being gay than it is being black. 'Cause there's some things I had to do as gay that I didn't have to do as black. I didn't have to come out black. I didn't have to sit my parents down and tell them about my blackness. I didn't have to sit them down [and say], “Mom, Dad I gotta tell y'all something. Hope y'all still love me. I'm just gonna say it. Mom, Dad: I'm black.”³⁹

Although stating that her gay identity is more difficult than her black identity could potentially alienate her audience, her pacing is quick, and she explains herself before she loses her audience to hostility. They applaud and laugh when they realize she has replaced the word “gay” with “black.” She does not deny the oppressive experiences that characterize being black or the racism black people endure; rather, she satirizes the often anti-intersectional language of “coming out” to demonstrate how both her queer and black identities are bound by chrononormativity and subject to a queer and racialized vertigo that impacts her life as a queer black woman.

Sykes utilizes the structure of “coming out” narratives to critique normative assumptions of coming out as inherently progressive. Next, she performs a narrative in which she plays both herself and her mother in a hypothetical conversation wherein she “comes out as black.” In a miniature one-woman show, Sykes quickly switches between her voice and her mother's voice. She sets the scene by gently sitting her parents down and slowly looking out towards the audience (standing in for her parents), and says, “Mom, Dad… ”⁴⁰ Pausing for dramatic effect, she says, “I'm black.”⁴¹ Sykes immediately pops to her mother, who is clearly upset. Her imagined “Mom” holds out her hand as if she cannot/will not hear what her daughter Wanda has disclosed. Playing her mother, Sykes exclaims, “OH NO LORD JESUS NOT BLACK!”⁴² while wailing gutturally. Sykes turns her back to the audience and outstretches her arms yelling to God, “Anything but black, Jesus! Give her cancer, Lord, give her cancer! Anything but black, Lord!”⁴³ As Sykes turns her back to the audience, they become the people “Mom” is rejecting. Playing multiple characters in this narrative, Sykes replaces herself with the audience as she switches to the persona of her mother. Thus, the audience has the opportunity to embody empathetic simultaneity while watching the experience of Wanda “coming out,” and also becoming the character of Wanda being rejected by her mother.

Underscoring a black feminist sensibility to advocate for herself as a black gay woman, Sykes also uses exaggerated gestures and vocal affect to satirize her mother's reactions. Sykes, as Wanda, is quiet and calm—the rational one. She plainly explains, “No, Mom. I'm black that's just what it is.”⁴⁴ Her “Mom's” voice immediately becomes serious and suspicious. Sykes hunches over and points her finger out at the audience in an accusatory manner, her “Mom's” voice lowers, coupled with narrowed eyes and says, “No. No. You know what it is? You been hanging around black people [… ] they twisted your mind!” The pace quickens as Wanda switches between herself and mother, heightening the emotional tension between the two women.

wanda: No, Mom. I'm black. That's just how it is.

mom: What did I do? I know I shouldn't have let you watch Soul Train!

wanda: No, Mom. It wasn't Soul Train. I was born black.

mom: You weren't born black, I don't want to hear that. The Bible says, “Adam and Eve,” not “Adam and Mary J. Blige!”⁴⁵

Through this performative exchange, Sykes satirizes coming out of the closet to reveal its social and political constructedness—a processual norm based on white male European narratives, and one that looks ridiculous when universalized onto a black lesbian body. While the closet metaphor asserts time as progressive (i.e., coming out = liberated), its narrow temporal path leaves little room for the varied histories of diverse queer bodies and desires in existence beyond the parameters of the more commonly heard and understood coming out narratives of white, upper-middle-class, gay, cisgender men.

This is not to imply that such narratives are not met with painful impositions of heteronormativity and homophobia, indeed they are.⁴⁶ Rather, Sykes uses BFCP to convey that allowing the parameters and expectations of coming out to be naturalized in accordance with raced, classed, and gendered privilege counter-productively excludes her as a black queer woman. Echoing Sykes in the context of race, Marlon Ross declares “this narrative of progress carries the residue, and occasionally the outright intention, born within evolutionary notions of the uneven development of the races from primitive darkness to civilized enlightenment.”⁴⁷ Thus the closet, a paradigm racialized to the benefit of white queer people, preserves white supremacy and forecloses queer modes of self-naming for queer people of color.

Sykes substitutes the language of sexuality with the language of race not to separate her black and queer self, but to ridicule the raceless closet paradigm. The role-play between mother and daughter reanimates and reconfigures raceless cultural scripts of coming out—we see the ridiculousness of sexuality having to be declared through the closet paradigm and the racial vertigo of white supremacy. When Sykes's mother accuses her of “catching” blackness by telling her she has been “hanging around black people,” and exclaiming, “they twisted [her] mind,”⁴⁸ we see not only the disorienting, warping nature of coming out, but also of attempting to split and separate Sykes's intersectional identities as a black/lesbian/woman. Cindy L. Griffin and Karma R. Chávez explain that when an anti-intersectional politic reigns “within oppressed communities, it tries to purify the oppressed group and erase or negate those who would pollute the purity.”⁴⁹ However, because time moves quickly in the structure of the joke traveling between antiquated and unfair prejudice from her mother and Sykes's present-day acceptance of herself and identity, the “twisted” mind in Sykes's exaggerated performance is not her own, but rather her mother's—and implicitly the audience's. Thus, Sykes's black feminist comedy demands recognition of both her blackness and her lesbian identity beyond the narrow structures of the closet. By replacing the word “gay” with “black,” Sykes creates a world in which the language of sexuality and race collide and thus transform normalized narratives of coming out from progressive and necessary to laughable and exclusionary.

Through I'ma Be Me, Sykes also temporally cracks up the parent–child dichotomy by reversing the affective roles of mother and daughter. Sykes-as-mother reacts harshly, while Sykes-as-daughter remains calm. Sykes performs the stoic role that LGBTQ children who come out to their parents often have to play, even as they put themselves at risk for rejection, abandonment, and violence. Commonly, they also become the receptacle for familial anxieties about sexuality and compliance with state, religious, and social authorities. However, even without using “black” as a stand-in for “gay,” Sykes could easily fall into the historical trope of the tragic queer, which would function to render her infantile, mad, deviant, or disturbed.⁵⁰ Rather, Sykes's time-traveling BFCP re-tells the story to re-imagine Wanda, a representative stand-in for all black queer women, as empowered to “talk back”⁵¹ to her mother's dehumanizing reaction and to control her own narrative. The stakes of such strong declarations of black and queer existence emanating from a black queer woman are high because, as Matt Richardson writes, to disremember black queer people from historical narrative purposefully means that “black queers become unrecognizable as part of blackness and disqualified from collective grieving. To be unrecognizable as black opens up a process of disrecognition, the transformation of black queers into not being black after all.”⁵²

Starkly divergent, I'ma Be Me demands black feminist recognition through self-expression. Serving as the ending to several of her jokes, personifying her mother in a mimicked and hushed voice, Sykes scolds: “White people are lookin' at you!”⁵³ This repeated punch line reveals the complexities of racial visibility and the white gaze. The implication of the comment for audience members is to stop doing whatever they are doing. The first time Sykes uses this punch line, she recalls a time when, as a child, she is dancing in the car and her mother yells at her. Sykes's mother, attempting to protect her from an objectifying white audience by “acting dignified,”⁵⁴ scolds her daughter's unruly behavior as “too black” and “improperly” feminine.⁵⁵ Within the construction of this through line, Sykes explores the quotidian as well as the political ways in which white heteropatriarchy functions, and even more importantly, how her child-self located modes of black feminist resistance through movement (dance) and enjoyment (of music).

Throughout I'ma Be Me, Sykes takes her time transitioning between jokes and often stops to laugh at her own material, a performative move that refuses the strict linearity of set-up–punch line and trespasses the performer–audience divide. The last third of her performance as a black feminist comedian becomes even more confrontational and personal. After speaking to the audience about coming out as a lesbian, she explains, “It's great being out. I love being publicly out. Everything is on the table. I am what I am. That's it. I'm happy about it.”⁵⁶ Putting “everything on the table” regardless of the gaze of “white people” signals Sykes's awareness of how normalizing societal forces target her as a black lesbian woman. Each layered joke becomes more explicitly self-expressive and dissects the imposition of whiteness, misogyny, and homophobia into the lives of queer women of color. Centering the intertwined racism and sexism Sonia Sotamayor experienced during her Supreme Court nomination hearings, Sykes asks:

Isn't it funny that the only time your race or gender is not questioned is when you're a white man? I think, I think white men get upset. They get nervous if like a minority or another race gets a little power, it makes them nervous. Cause they scared that that race is gonna do to them what they did to that race. So they start screaming, “Reverse racism reverse racism!” I'm like wait a minute. Isn't reverse racism, isn't that when a racist is nice to somebody else? That's reverse racism. What you're afraid of is called karma.⁵⁷

This inquisitive joke-telling reveals oppressive structures and discourses that dilute racism and antiquate white supremacy while directly confronting hegemonic fears that people of color can and will engage in racial discrimination if they gain access to power and status in the twenty-first century.

Furthermore, beginning the joke with “Isn't it funny that… ” asks the audience not only to laugh at, but also to examine critically the material and psychic harm of dominant structures embedded in US culture. Sykes's use of this phrase beckons the audience to occupy two opposing affective responses simultaneously: amusement and outrage. She then not only points out the systemic impossibility of reverse racism, but also offers up Hindu and Buddhist notions of cyclical time by mentioning karma as a manifestation of “revenge.” Sykes shows the inadequacy of chorononormativity for black and queer communities as well as heterosexual people. That is, regardless of economic status, gender performativity, or race, “straight” (i.e., heteronormative) time is a constricting entity that (re)produces fear of progress and change beyond white supremacy and heteropatriarchy. In essence, Sykes asks the audience to imagine society beyond the “matrix of domination”⁵⁸ that keeps our nation in a firm temporal deadlock—unwilling and/or unable to articulate the intersectional complexities and consequences of power dynamics against the backdrop of public policy and daily life.

Laughing through and at injustice positions Sykes and those who identify with her as no longer silent or silenced. In agreement with hooks's emphasis on how performance is a vital tool for generating change, Sykes's work garners movement toward freedom. As hooks elaborates, “Whenever we choose performance as a site to build communities of resistance we must be able to shift paradigms and styles of performance in a manner that centralises the colonisation of black minds and imaginations.”⁵⁹ BFCP refuses to be trapped in temporalities dictated by logics of mutually exclusive identities, linearity, and false claims of a “post-” identity politics United States. As such, Sykes's BFCP functions to humanize, educate, and liberate.

HISTORY BUSTS OUT OF THE WHITE HOUSE

Just as BFCP moves beyond dominant ideologies, hegemonic discourses, and linear time, it also jolts audiences out of oppressive understandings of history and citizenship. More specifically, Sykes cracks up dominant narratives by speaking, laughing, and generating audience laughter at historical landmarks such as the White House. In so doing, she centralizes black queer women as important cultural figures, and contextually her audience—as seated ticket holders gazing upward at a black lesbian comedian heightened by the stage and illuminated by a spotlight—must do the same. Paul Gilroy claims, “subversive or disruptive communicative opportunities can co-exist with the painful demands made upon black subjects by the everyday politics of white supremacy.”⁶⁰ Mirroring Gilroy's assertion, I am particularly interested in examining moments when BFCP moves us towards a time and place in which the everydayness of domination and its historical roots are disrupted, or cracked up. Sykes did precisely this during her 2009 performance at the White House Correspondents' Dinner as she simultaneously celebrated victories of black feminist achievement and implicated systems of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy in US history and politics.

On 28 April 2009, congressional leaders, dignitaries, and First Lady Michelle Obama gathered in Emancipation Hall at the United States Capitol to, after ten years of legislative labor, reveal the bust of Sojourner Truth. Truth became the first African American woman to be memorialized in Emancipation Hall, which was built in 2008 to “recognize the contributions of the enslaved laborers who helped build the US Capitol.”⁶¹ Before revealing the statue, First Lady Obama stood proudly at the podium and warmly said, “All the visitors in the US Capitol will hear the story of the brave woman who endured the greatest of humanity's indignities.”⁶² Truth's bronze statue stands 37 inches tall and depicts her gazing forward with a soft smile and a bonnet on her head. Among busts dedicated to honoring those who are largely erased from US American collective memory, I am particularly interested in what went unsaid at this ceremony. The “indignities” First Lady Obama mentioned allude to racism, sexism, impoverishment, and myriad inhumane violations of black women's bodies before and after Truth's time. But what does it mean that they remained explicitly unstated during the ceremony? Amid the formalities of the Capitol and the White House, what would it require to “destabilize existing practices of knowing” and dissolve “the fictive boundaries of exclusion and marginalization”⁶³ that keep black US women on the margins of cultural memory?

Two weeks after the ceremony revealing Truth's bust, Sykes was the first out black lesbian to be the keynote performer at the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner. With the backing of the President and First Lady, both of whom laughed gallantly in response to her standup, she embodied the destabilizing force of Alexander's aforementioned inquest via BFCP. Dressed in a conservative, tailored black pantsuit, chandelier earrings, and high heels, Sykes confidently walks on stage from the end of the head table to the podium that faces a ballroom filled to bursting with reporters, celebrities, and politicians. She begins by thanking the audience and making jokes about President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden. Moving on to the First Lady, Sykes is flattering and points out how beautiful Michelle Obama looks in a sleeveless bright pink dress and an ornate necklace. She does not break eye contact with Sykes, she laughs and even mouths a reply to her. Sykes cyclically directs her attention back and forth between the First Lady and the larger audience, but in a moment of seriousness, Sykes lowers her tone and gestures palm-up towards the First Lady: “I have to say, to the First Lady, kudos to you for unveiling the bust of Sojourner Truth in the White House.”⁶⁴ In response, Obama closes her eyes and nods with tight lips in a humored expression of the pride in Truth's presence in Emancipation Hall. The audience applauds and Sykes does as well with an affirming “Yes.”⁶⁵

Then, suggesting the following request is just between the two of them, Sykes looks directly at Mrs. Obama and asks, “But can you do me a favor and please make sure it's nailed down real well?” She drops her tone again, pursing her lips, “Cause, uh, cause you know when the next white guy comes in, they gonna move it to the kitchen.”⁶⁶ In this moment, under the guise of “joking,” Sykes exposes white patriarchal privilege—past and present—and provides stark cultural commentary on how white men have typically done whatever they deem appropriate to black women. By mentioning the recent ceremony, the audience is directed to acknowledge the considerable exclusion of black women from US cultural memory. Also, by suggesting the “appropriate” place for Truth to be placed by the next, presumably white, president is the kitchen, the audience is directed to recognize that black women are in constant danger of being confined by white, patriarchal ideals. In a single punch line, Sykes confronts the history of black US women's servitude to white power structures from enslavement to the help in white households to present-day entrapment in underemployment and unemployment.⁶⁷ More importantly, Sykes's BFCP conveys what was tangibly unspoken by First Lady Obama at the unveiling ceremony. Here, black feminist comedy dismisses politically correct decorum in favor of more inclusive, revisionist histories that transparently address the horrors and the grave, ever-present remnants of slavery. Sykes, as a black lesbian invited to perform at the White House, becomes the figure most able to “unveil Truth.”

To nail down the legacy of both Truth and the Obamas dislocates US national heritage from being synonymous with whiteness to acknowledging black women's contributions to our global culture. As Alexander contends:

If hegemony works as spectacle, but more importantly as a set of practices that come to assume meaning in people's everyday lives (that is the ways in which ordinary people do the work of the state and the work of war), then all spaces carry the potential for corruptibility.⁶⁸

However, the joke-teller manipulates the everyday operations of hegemony not only to divulge its potential for corruptibility, but also to actually corrupt. Sykes places the White House center-stage, a space rife with historicized and institutionalized hegemonic practices, to highlight racism and sexism as endemic to US public policy.

The aftershock of the joke becomes an intimate moment between Sykes and the First Lady as black women cracking up the White House as a symbol of domination. In C-Span's broadcast of the dinner, the camera stays on Obama for the duration of this particular joke.⁶⁹ Watching their interaction unfold moment to moment, as Sykes thanks her for revealing the bust, we hear the audience's applause, and see Obama's prideful nod. When Sykes asks her to nail down the bust “real well,” the audience laughs lightly while Obama looks down, her shoulders rhythmically shaking as she mouths, “Oh my god.”⁷⁰ She gazes up with her head still low, one eye towards Sykes and smiles widely. Sykes responds with a chuckle as well. The audience is relatively quiet at this point, and bears witness to the women's intimately joint understanding of black women's marginalization in the United States. Through witnessing—either by laughing or experiencing Obama's and Sykes's shared, knowing laughter—we see an acknowledgment of and resistance against state-sponsored repression of black women's bodies and voices.

Sykes also manipulates an important interplay between past/present and public/private. While the “success” of a joke is wrapped up in a bond between audience and performer through the vocal response of laughter, Sykes aims the punch line of the joke specifically at Obama. This is a moment of knowing laughter and intimacy between two black women among a crowd who, for the most part, have presumably little understanding of their standpoints. Sykes's joke, delivered directly to the First Lady despite the presence of the larger audience, creates an intimate moment of temporal consciousness. They share in the historicized experience of being dis-remembered from US cultural memory, but simultaneously delight in calling out present day structures that have oppressed black women and black queer people. Through Sykes's reaction to Truth's bust, comedy operates as a liberatory act. Laughter becomes that which frees “the physical reality of teeth clenched, unable to or unwilling to speak, biding your time, holding your tongue, not saying the things that you yearn to say.”⁷¹ While the unveiling of the bust indeed signifies a liberatory act in Emancipation Hall, Sykes's embodiment of BFCP as a black lesbian woman provides layered emancipation from the physical reality of past and present domination. The spontaneity of sometimes robust, sometimes reserved, laughter explodes past silence, in spite of social expectations to “behave.”

Also visible from the White House Correspondent's Dinner, is Sykes's demonstration of how BFCP serves as a unique medium to historiographically crack up narratives around race, nation, patriarchy, and power. Sykes's humor is a modality that not only critiques history, but also moves black women and black queer bodies from passive subjects in US history to active (re)creators of national heritage. Stuart Hall describes national heritage as a discursive practice that is bound by power to enable nations to create a collective memory that perpetuates colonial myths deeply steeped in oppressive rationales. He writes:

The Heritage inevitably reflects the governing assumptions of its time and context. It is always inflected by the power and authority of those who have colonized the past, and whose versions of history matter. These assumptions and co-ordinates of power are inhabited as natural—given, timeless, true and inevitable.⁷²

Implicit in the construction of US heritage—or what it means to be a US citizen—is the cultural scenario of the systemically privileged control, commodification, and exclusion of people of color. “It follows that those who cannot see themselves reflected in its mirror, cannot properly ‘belong.’”⁷³ However, Sykes's BFCP at the White House Correspondents' Dinner dislocates the various cultural practices that bind national heritage to dominant groups. Cultural memory and heritage are powerful tools employed to create and sustain a seamless narrative that celebrates some and silences Others.

Sykes's comedy as cultural commentary illustrates how whiteness, maleness, and heterosexuality have become synonymous with “proper” citizenship. Fiercely deploying the image of nailing down the bust of Truth real well, Sykes cracks up the assumed power and credibility of conservative white male political figures, and the absence of black feminist histories. The joke emerges as a performative device that not only imagines a future of shifting hierarchies, but also confronts white supremacist and misogynist anxieties about black feminist liberation. Sykes stages herself within a scenario that points out historically prevalent white anxieties about black women's vocality and “Truth”-telling. Obama's nod to Truth, and black feminist truths, leaves little room for suspicion of white supremacy. Sykes, however, demands that her audience see those who hold political power (specifically, wealthy white males) as the possible enemy who have, can, and continue to harm black women.

Diana Taylor contends that performance generates opportunities for deconstructing scenarios that position bodies of color as threats to the nation. By re-enacting such scenarios in an artistic medium, performance challenges “the way history and culture are packaged, sold, and consumed within hegemonic structures.”⁷⁴ Both Sykes's physical presence as a black, openly lesbian woman on a White House stage and her evocation of Truth, dislocate the inherent credibility and authority of those systemically assumed worthy of power, privilege, and agency. Sykes's keynote revises history not only by directing attention toward dehumanizing practices, but also by ridiculing dominant cultural scripts that insist on the embodiment of nationhood as inherently white, male, and heterosexual. In doing so, she dismantles historical narratives that disallow individual and cultural agency of marginalized peoples—particularly US black queer women. From the stage Sykes is at the center, rather than in the margins, overtly asking Obama to nail down the bust of Truth. Covertly, she is asking Obama and the audience to nail down the “Truth” of oppression throughout US history.

Amid Sykes's cracking up the assumed authority and credibility espoused via the White House setting, the positive response of laughter from the audience is an engagement with Sykes, and an awakening. The physical, vocal, and emotional act of laughter expresses communal agreement, or at least communal recognition. Sykes's BFCP works both to name boundaries that keep certain people in the United States silent, and to break those boundaries and mark emergent times and spaces for transformative action. By cracking up history, Sykes takes us to the present moment to celebrate black women of the past and present, articulating a wariness of narratives that position US society as beyond offensive and oppressive policies and practices.

LETTING IT ALL HANG OUT: FUTURITY AND EMBODIED BLACK FEMINIST PRAXIS

At the crux of this essay, I theorize how BFCP cracks up chrononormativity in the service of articulating the complexities and joys of being black, woman, and queer. My commitment to doing so is driven by hooks's assertion that

Theorizing black experience in the [United States] is a difficult task. Socialized within white supremacist educational systems and by a racist mass media, many black people are convinced that our lives are not complex, and therefore unworthy of sophisticated critical analysis and reflection.⁷⁵

However, performance allows for a proclamation of the self in relation to and/or against dominant culture. Moreover, BFCP operates as an important vernacular rhetoric wherein the multiplicities of black realities in the United States are placed center stage. Sykes's humor has developed throughout her career to vocalize an ever-expanding commitment to black feminist praxis. She has moved steadily toward self-definition and self-determination, alongside blatantly refusing to accept what dominant historical narratives say and imply about women who identify with her.

Sykes's insistence on taking up physical and affective space, despite chrononormativity, peaks during I'ma Be Me when she addresses her experiences of getting older. In 2009, she was forty-five years old. Without shame or self-deprecation, she marks her body as changing—or as she calls it “relaxing”—once she passed the “40 mark.”⁷⁶ With one hand on her belly, Sykes strokes her midsection and says to the audience, “Like this area right here? I just named it, this is Esther. … Esther Roll. … Esther is a beast! Loves bread and alcohol.”⁷⁷ While seemingly compartmentalizing herself into discrete body parts, Sykes uses her stomach as a somatic symbol of rebellion. Esther possesses Sykes's whole self—unapologetically taking up space as a middle-aged, black, out lesbian. Despite attempts at containment, Esther is unruly, especially in public. For example, Sykes recalls appearing on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in 2008 and putting on control-top underwear. “I was like, Esther I gotta put you in the Spanx,” to which Esther replies, “I hate Spanx! Don't put me in the Spanx! I wanna be on TV!”⁷⁸ Sykes makes her voice gruff, grumbly, and insistent in spite of Esther's protests. As Esther, she is loud and mean—with no understanding of “proper” behavior politically linked to white feminine propriety and the heterosexual male gaze. Esther shakes her head and hunches her shoulders. Esther, like laughter, bursts through and forth despite attempts at stifling or minimizing her.

As Sykes builds her story about The Tonight Show, she recalls how difficult it was to manipulate her body into a thinner state and still feel comfortable:

I put Esther in the Spanx and she's just fightin' me. She's like, “Ooooo, eeeee, ooohh you're killin' me! Oh this hurts! Oh I want some cheesecake!” So I got Esther in the Spanx, right. And I'm sittin', you know, on The Tonight Show. Now things are going great. But all of a sudden in the middle of the interview, I feel something rolling down. And I could just hear, “Ooohhh. Ahhhh.” Esther is climbing out of the Spanx! I looked down, and there's Esther! [Esther says,] “Hey Jay!”⁷⁹

Sykes covers her forehead with her hand in embarrassment and looks down at her belly, shaking her head to convey a desperate “no.” Then she quietly mumbles, “Fuck you Esther,” followed by dramatically stretching out her arms and whispering loudly, “White people are looking at you!”⁸⁰ Her dark purple jacket is unbuttoned, underneath she wears a tight, also dark purple vest, and she slowly paces from left to right. As the joke dies down, Sykes laughs with the audience. Suddenly there is no separation between her psyche and her stomach; Esther is easygoing, content. Allowing all of who she is to age and move forward in time, Sykes does not resist it; rather, she rests in it displaying how black feminist comedic performances, at their core, acknowledge, affirm, and privilege black women as historical, political, and social agents. Such performances not only recollect, revise, and resist, but also offer up models for social change and justice long after the laughter has faded.