Golden girls of comedy introduce black women in all their complexity

In a superlative bit from HBO’s A Black Lady Sketch Show (in India on HotStar), one of the characters reveals, to the horror of her friends, that she does not cover her hair before bed because it makes her head hurt. “Unnecessary pain is an important part of being a black woman, everybody knows that,” one friend shoots back. Another asks, “So no scarf at all? Like a black chick on a TV show written by white people?” This at once reveals one of the finer points of the black experience and the lack of accurate representations of it. The show is deeply rooted in black culture, having been written and acted by an all-female, all-black cast, and is laugh-out-loud funny even to those outside it.

It is also an antidote to Saturday Night Live, for which having more black performers has only meant “more opportunities to be more racist”, as the culture critic Miriam Bale recently pointed out. The actors (led confidently by show creator Robin Thede, and co-starring Ashley Nicole Black, Gabrielle Dennis, and Quinta Brunson) assume various roles while black guest stars appear in some of these vignettes. While the need for such corrective art was urgent it plays out without losing any of the irreverence of the sketch form. For those who miss comedy duo Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele’s Key and Peele, this is especially good news.

A still from HBO’s A Black Lady Sketch Show

There is subversive social commentary. In one of the sketches, the ladies play a 1950s male blues band in which other members rush to compensate for the wildly misogynist lyrics of the lead singer, giving us aggressively appropriate lines like: “Girl, you are a stone cold fox. Capable of driving a truck or giving birth to our babies. Or not. Your uterus is yours to do with as you will.” Another vignette takes the premise of women being told they look sick whenever they skip wearing makeup — something that happens all too often — to humorous excesses.

Since Christopher Hitchens wrote his rambling, unconvincing 2007 essay, Why Women Aren’t Funny, there have been a series of answers in the form of great shows headlined by funny women. It is an outcome of women edging their way into writers’ rooms in numbers so they could burst out laughing at each other’s jokes the way men typically did for one another. More recently, more black women have stepped into important positions. Take Issa Rae, who is producing A Black Lady Sketch Show, and previously created and starred in Insecure, a blithe comedy about an awkward black girl with a middling career in a non-profit and a so-so long-term relationship. She loses her doubt only when rapping at the bathroom mirror.

Around the same time that Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag debuted in India (Prime Video), so did Michaela Coel’s Chewing Gum (Netflix). Both shows, excellent and enjoyable for different reasons, were developed out of short plays the creators had written. Where Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag tried to get her business off the ground in the lovely posh bits of London, Coel’s Tracey was having a late-onset adolescence in the East London suburbs. The latter show achieved a remarkably difficult thing — bawdy humour which was also somehow entirely innocent. The Ghanaian-British Coel used a combination of fast talk and elastic physical comedy (maybe the best since Mr Bean) to show a 24-year-old, raised in a deeply religious family, trying desperately to come of age. Tracey, who gets into all manner of cringeworthy situations, is too proud to be anything less than positive.

The usual depictions of the black woman as strong, sassy and angry can come across as empowering but it is still a stereotype. It is excellent to be introduced to black women in all their complexity — awkward, bumbling, struggling, scarves on, scarves off.
 

ranjita.ganesan@bsmail.in