It has often been said that comedians deal with pain through humor. We laugh so we don’t have to cry. I know that’s true for me. I have spent much of my life laughing to keep the tears at bay, trying to stay one step ahead of the sadness and the despair. Like most of my colleagues in the game that we call stand-up comedy, I’ve used levity to fuel my flight. It’s the motor that helps me to escape the things I can’t handle. So when I got a letter that especially upset me one day, I responded with my natural instincts. Rather than truly deal with it, I wrote and performed the following routine:
Although I’m a stand-up comic by trade, I also do a radio show for a talk station in San Francisco. I’d been out on the road for a couple of weeks doing comedy, and when I got back into the station, I had all this mail piled up. In talk radio, mail generally comes to you from two sources: old ladies and whack jobs. That’s it. Old ladies and kooks. Nobody else writes you. That’s the downside. The upside is that it makes the mail easy to sort.
So, I’m going through the pile. Old lady. Old lady. Death threat. Old lady. Death threat. Ooh, here’s a good one. Death threat from an old lady.
Then, I come across one that’s typed . . . I mean typed on an actual typewriter. What antique shop did that one come from? Where do you find ribbon for a typewriter in the twenty-first century? Do you walk into Office Depot?
“Do you have any typewriter ribbon?”
“As a matter of fact we do. Right over there next to the buggy whips. No, over there across from the whale-oil lamps. By the icebox.”
So, I look at this envelope. Addressed to me. Local postmark. No return address. I open it, taking out a single, unsigned typewritten sheet that reads:
“As an African American, I am disgusted every time I hear your voice because YOU are not a genuine black man!”
I’m not a genuine black man. I am not a genuine black man?
Okay, I’ll be honest. I’d heard that one before. Actually, people have said that to me a lot throughout my life. Generally, when I hear it I like to give the intellectual response:
“FUCK YOU!!!”
I then grab myself and ask, “Is this black enough for your ass?”
Not a genuine black man. Why do people say that to me? Is it how I talk? Is it how I dress? Is it how my machine is set to TiVo Frasier?
I don’t even know what that means. If you’re talking about pigment, you can tell by looking at me that I am clearly black. But if you’re talking about some cultural delineation, I don’t know. I don’t talk ghetto. When I hear the word “ax,” I think of it as a noun. It’s not a verb.
“I’m gonna go ‘ax’ my mother.”
Who are you? Lizzie Borden?
I’m Catholic. Is that “black”? I was an altar boy for five years.
Apparently, one of the “lucky” ones.
True story: Not too long ago a priest I served mass with as a child was arrested for abusing altar boys during the time that I was serving mass with him! My only question is: What was wrong with me? Wasn’t I cute? What, Father only wanted the white altar boys? What kind of racist bullshit is that? At the very least it would’ve been nice to be asked. Or axed.
I like old Motown; that’s black. But I also like the Beach Boys. That isn’t.
I don’t believe blacks should be paid reparations for slavery, but if they send me the check, I’ll cash it. I’m confused, I’m not crazy.
I can’t swim. That’s black. But I can’t play basketball, either. I’m not even sure that’s male.
I like chitlins. But I call them chitterlings. That’s what they’re called. Read the bucket. Chitterlings. To me that always sounded like a family name.
“The Chitterlings are coming over for dinner this evening.”
“Aw man, those nasty-ass people stink up the house every time they come over here.”
I love watermelon, but I won’t buy one at the store. I refuse. I’m not going to shuffle up to the clerk at Safeway with a big green melon under my arm. Rochester I ain’t!
“Hellooo, Mr. Benny. I done gots us the dessert!”
Not me. Sorry.
I don’t talk back to the screen at the movie theater. Now that is definitely a black phenomenon. Black people, do not even begin to delude yourselves into thinking that you have no idea what I’m talking about.
“Oh, don’t go in there! He hidin’ up in there! He got a gun in there. He behind the door!”
HE CAN’T HEAR YOU!!! I just spent ten bucks to get in and sixty-seven dollars for popcorn. SHUT THE HELL UP!
I’m a Democrat. That’s black. I’ve never understood black Republicans. To me, a black in the Republican Party is like a deer joining the National Rifle Association.
“Yes I’m a deer, but I’m not one of those deer!”
Cops think I’m black. Especially in the suburbs.
Cab drivers think I’m black. Even the ones with turbans, and that’s what I don’t understand. Now let me get this straight. You look like you just crawled out of a cave in Afghanistan with a bomb strapped to your torso, and you’re afraid to pick my ass up?
Okay, he’s just profiling me like I’m profiling him. Since 9/11 we’re all profiling each other, consciously or unconsciously. We’re all doing it. I called the FBI because my daughter got out of the shower with a towel on her head. It’s okay. They cleared her. Eventually.
Not a genuine black man. What does that mean? If you think about it, throughout American history, it has always been the racists who determine what the racial categories are. For example the Irish weren’t considered white when they first came to America. Then apparently white people had a meeting. They all huddled in a circle, arms linked and debated.
“What do you think? Yeah? Okay then. O’Leary, you’re in. McDonald, too. What’s that? He’s Scottish?? No. No sheep fuckers. Just O’Leary.”
Are black people doing this now, too? Did this letter come to me from some Soul Patrol Commission on Blackness? Are they reviewing applications?
“Let’s see. Bryant Gumbel? He’s out. Kobe raped a white woman . . . so she claims. He’s persecuted. He can stay. Michael Jackson? We ain’t ever heard off him. O.J.? White people can have him, but dead or alive, we’re keepin’Johnnie Cochran!”
Who decides this stuff?
Racial identity has always been a confusing issue for me. It was a changing, mutable concept as far back as I can remember. As a very young child, I remember being colored. Whenever we’d run into other dark-skinned people, Grandma would refer to them as colored.
“Go over there and ask that colored man where the canned peaches are,” she’d say to me at the grocery store.
Then, one day when I was about four or five, I said something in front of my mother about being colored.
“Don’t say that! You’re black. You’re black. I’m black. We’re a black family. We’re black.”
This was the late ’60s and she bought one of those mass-produced paintings with the black woman wearing the huge afro and hoop earrings, cradling a little huge-afro-wearing boy to her breast, with the caption BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL. So, for a long time, I was black.
Then, one day at school, we were given some government paper that had race boxes that the class was to check. I was six years old and confused because no place on this form was the word “black.” I asked the teacher, who, incidentally, was white, what to do.
“You’re a Negro,” she told me. “Check the box that says ‘Negro.’”
I thought I was black, but okay, I’ll check Negro. So, I was a Negro. Or at least I was for a few weeks until I said something about Negroes in front of my mother.
“I thought I told you that you were black,” she shrieked.
“But the paper with the boxes said I’m a Negro.”
“Well the paper’s wrong!”
So, I was black again. I was black for a very long time, until one day in high school, somebody said to me, “Don’t say black. Charcoal is black. Do you look like charcoal? Asphalt is black. Are you the same color as asphalt?”
“No, I guess not,” I answered, after giving it some thought.
“You are a person of color.”
“A person of color?” I asked, more confused than ever.
“Yes,” came the response. “A person of color.”
“Well what’s the difference between a ‘person of color’ and a ‘colored person’?”
“I don’t know. They’re just different, that’s all.”
So, fine, I was a “person of color”. . . for a while. Until college, when this girl who was militantly active in the politics and issues of people of African descent jumped all over me for using the phrase.
“A person of color?” she said. “What are you, desegregating buses? Marching from Selma to Montgomery?
You are African American. Your ancestors came from Africa. Had they come from Italy, you’d be Italian American. If they were from Ireland, you’d be Irish American. They were from Africa; that makes you African American.”
“All right,” I thought driving home from school that day. “I finally have it. This makes sense. I’m African American.”
Then, I made a lane change and accidentally cut off a white motorist. He rolled down his window and screamed, “Nigger!”
It’s confusing. I don’t understand why the NAACP is still called the N double-A C P. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. We can at least agree that we haven’t been colored since the ’60s. It should probably be the National Association for the Advancement of African-American People. The N triple-A P. That way, we not only get equality, we get road service.
Whatever the answer is, I’ve always been a person who believes in personal responsibility. It starts with me. It ends with me. Therefore, any confusion I have about race, any misunderstanding I have about ethnicity, any confusion I have about blackness . . . is my mother’s fault.
The routine was very successful. I performed it to roars of (sometimes nervous) laughter across America, as the opening act for Smokey Robinson. The piece was well received in venues from Constitution Hall in Washington D.C. to the Fox Theater in St. Louis to the Universal Amphitheater in Hollywood. My “funny mask” had won the day again. Behind most of our masks, however, is a truth that is hidden for a specific reason. Often, we don’t even know what that truth is. I wasn’t ready to deal with my truths, but ready or not, they started to bubble to the surface. Once that began to happen, try as I might, I couldn’t get the toothpaste to go back into the tube.
I had to face a truth that started with my mother.