Why Black Satire Is the Art Form for Our Absurd Age

Last year, Everett published “James,” his reimagining of the American classic “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” told through the voice of Mark Twain’s enslaved Black character Jim. In the strictest sense, “James” employs parody and pastiche, drawing broadly from Twain’s plot and characters but endowing its first-person narrator with the wit and eloquence that his original creator denied him. Generous readers of Twain’s novel, like the writer Ralph Ellison, who bemoaned that “Twain’s bitter satire was taken for comedy,” forgive “Huck Finn” its many abuses — the 219 instances of the N-word; the indulgent last third of the book (which Ernest Hemingway advised readers to skip), which gives itself over to Jim’s gratuitous confinement and petty torture, masterminded by a sadistic Tom Sawyer and a complicit Huck. Everett retains the best of Twain’s story — especially the freewheeling adventures of Huck and Jim on the Mississippi — and layers over them a sophisticated satirical register in which Jim, now James, claims agency.

The second chapter begins with James leading an unconventional elocution lesson for a group of Black children, instructing them on how best to fracture rather than to refine their English pronunciation. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” James tells the children. One of his keen pupils offers up an axiom: “Never address any subject directly when talking to another slave,” she says. When encountering a kitchen fire, for instance, instead of warning directly, you might instead exclaim, “Lawdy, missum! Looky dere,” so as not to show up your white mistress. “What do we call that?” James asks his pupils. Together they respond, “Signifying.”

“Humor is vengeance,” the novelist Paul Beatty writes.

Signifying, a form of semantic indirection, is neatly suited to satire. As the literary critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. defines it, signifying is encoded linguistic play that exposes “the figurative difference between the literal and the metaphorical, between surface and latent meaning.” Signifying, like the broad category of satire, is a double-voiced art; it doesn’t so much say one thing and mean another as it says one thing and means two. An abiding practice that stretches back through the Black oral tradition — in the playful and profane narrative poems called the toasts, in the games of verbal jousting called the dozens and in sermons and songs — signifying testifies to the centrality of satire as a resource for Black Americans, both artists and everyday people.

THE FIRST BLACK American satirists were enslaved, lampooning the rituals and manners of those who called themselves masters. Cakewalks, emulations of white high society’s formal promenade dances, were ostensibly performed for the benefit of plantation owners, though in fact they were exquisite parody — exposing white pretensions through Black virtuosity. Traces of this same sensibility are apparent in 19th-century folk lyrics that white listeners often mistook for songs of mirth. Such subtle comic subversions sat beside more overt expressions that centered persuasion over amusement. David Walker’s “Appeal” (1829), a groundbreaking antislavery pamphlet that made the case for abolition decades before Harriet Beecher Stowe’s stilted and stoic novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (1852), calls out the hypocrisy of a South Carolina newspaper that had the temerity to label the Turks “the most barbarous people in the world” for their treatment of the Greeks while advertising a slave auction directly below. “I declare,” Walker writes, “it is really so amusing to hear the Southerners and Westerners of this country talk about barbarity, that it is positively, enough to make a man smile.”

The Black smile would be cast as caricature starting in the early decades of the 19th century with the advent of blackface minstrelsy, a practice in which white male performers would “black up” their faces using burned cork, painting on rictus grins of livid red. The songs, skits and comic routines of the minstrel stage served as cruel inversions of Black linguistic fluency and imaginative expression. Satire had no place in minstrelsy because the joke was invariably one-note: punching down at those excluded from the promise of American freedom. In the aftermath of the Civil War, some newly liberated Black performers would take the minstrel stage themselves, introducing a satirical sophistication winking from behind the black mask. This practice extended into the 20th century, most notably with the comic actor Bert Williams, who along with his co-star George Walker created “In Dahomey: A Negro Musical Comedy” (1903), the first full-length musical written and performed by Black artists to appear on Broadway.