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    Why Black Satire Is the Art Form for Our Absurd Age

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    Black American novelists, filmmakers and other writers are using comedy to reveal — and combat — our era’s disturbing political realities.LAST SPRING, DURING the Broadway revival of “Appropriate” (2013), Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s sardonic drama about white family members returning to their ancestral plantation home in southeast Arkansas to bury their father, a rare moment of cross-racial candor transpired — not onstage but in the audience. In the third act, Bo, the middle-aged older brother played by Corey Stoll, unleashes a rant about the burdens of whiteness in 21st-century America. Even a passing acquaintance with the work of Jacobs-Jenkins, who’s a queer Black man, would condition theatergoers to understand the outburst as satirical exposure of a threadbare fallacy of racial innocence. “You want me to go back in time and spank my great-great-grandparents?” Bo says. “Or should I lynch myself? You people just need to say what it is you want me to do and move on! I didn’t enslave anybody! I didn’t lynch anybody!” The speech usually leaves audiences squirming. On this night, however, one person clapped.“They were clapping in earnest,” says Jacobs-Jenkins, as if Bo were “someone who’s genuinely out here now just telling his story — you know, ‘Found his letters and read each one out loud!’” Before the playwright, actors and audience could fully register what was happening, a voice called out from the darkened auditorium: “Are you serious right now?” For Jacobs-Jenkins, 40, the whole thing was a delicious disruption. “Part of what the work is doing is exposing these fissures inside of a community — these feelings that we’re encouraged, as we are with most conversations about race in our country, to nurse in private.” At its best, Jacobs-Jenkins says, the theater can become a space to “risk learning something we didn’t anticipate” about one another.Satire is the art of risk. It relies, after all, on an audience comprehending a meaning that runs counter to what the text reads, the screen shows or the comedian says. In this regard, it’s vulnerable to misinterpretation and to deliberate distortion. When that satire concerns race and when the audience is as diverse and as divided as the United States is today, those risks compound. Why hazard satire’s indirection when even the most straightforward language — the term “woke,” for instance, or the seemingly incontrovertible good of “equity” — is manipulated and weaponized against its original ends? Yet perhaps these are the conditions that demand satire most of all, meeting absurdity with absurdity.I spoke with Jacobs-Jenkins, whose new political family drama “Purpose” is now on Broadway, 10 days before Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States, the same week that Trump gave a press conference at Mar-a-Lago in which he, among other things, called for renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” acquiring Greenland from Denmark and welcoming Canada as the 51st state. The way Jacobs-Jenkins sees it, “this is probably going to be one of the most difficult moments in recent memory to be an American, but it’s also going to be kind of the funniest — because come on! I think the question of this time will be: ‘Are you serious right now?’” The Black American satirical tradition, with its roots in the unfathomable dehumanization of slavery and the persistent pressures of racial discrimination, offers equipment by which all of us might better endure and even combat our lacerating realities.From left: the writer-director-actor Jordan Peele, the novelist Paul Beatty and the playwright Lynn Nottage.From left: Vivien Killilea/Getty for Imdb; Alex Welsh for The New York Times; Bryan Derballa for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Black Satire Is Having Its Hollywood Moment, but Something Is Missing

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      Recent releases like “American Fiction” and “The American Society of Magical Negroes” have used absurdist humor to examine race. But they have also depicted narrow views of Blackness.In 2017, Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” was a critical and commercial smash that immediately became one of the defining movies of the Trump Era. The next year, Boots Riley’s masterful “Sorry to Bother You” seemed to herald a new golden age for Black satire films. But as those movies stood out for using surreal plot twists to humorously — and horrifically — unpack complex ideas like racial appropriation and consumer culture, the crop that has followed hasn’t kept pace. The current moment is defined by a central question: What does the “Black” look like in Black satire films today? Too often lately it’s “not Black enough.”By that I mean to say a recent influx of films, including “The American Society of Magical Negroes,” “American Fiction” and “The Blackening,” have failed to represent Blackness with all its due complexity — as sometimes messy, sometimes contradictory. Instead, they flatten and simplify Blackness to serve a more singular, and thus digestible, form of satirical storytelling.The foremost example is “American Fiction,” inspired by Percival Everett’s 2001 novel “Erasure,” which won this year’s Oscar for best screenplay. In the film, a Black author and professor named Monk (played by Jeffrey Wright) finds literary success through “My Pafology,” a novel satirizing books that feed negative Black stereotypes. But Monk’s audience receives his book with earnest praise, forcing him to reconcile his newfound prosperity with his racial ethics.The surface layer of satire is obvious: The white audiences and publishing professionals who celebrate “My Pafology” do so not because of its merits but because the book allows them to fetishize another tragic Black story. It’s a performance of racial acceptance; these fans are literally buying into their own white guilt.Monk’s foil in the film is another Black author, Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), who publishes a popular book of sensationalist Black trauma about life in the ghetto. Profiting on her white audience’s racist assumptions about Blackness, Sintara is this satire’s race traitor — or so it initially seems. Because when, in one scene, Monk questions whether Sintara’s book is any different from “My Pafology,” which she dismisses as pandering, she counters that she is spotlighting an authentic Black experience. Sintara accuses Monk of snobbery, saying that his highfalutin notion of Blackness excludes other Black experiences because he is too ashamed to recognize them.But the fact that it is Sintara who voices the film’s criticism of Monk shows how loath “American Fiction” is to make a value statement on the characters’ actions within the context of their Blackness. Sintara, whom Monk catches reading “White Negroes,” a text about Black cultural appropriation, somehow isn’t winkingly framed as the hypocrite or the inauthentic one pointing out the hypocrisy and inauthenticity of the hero.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Square,’ ‘Sorry to Bother You’ and More Streaming Gems

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      This month’s offbeat streaming recommendations include several very dark satires, a handful of engaging indies, and two documentaries that cinephiles will adore.‘The Square’ (2017)Stream it on Hulu.The Swedish director Ruben Ostlund follows up his pointed social satire “Force Majeure” with this arch, uproarious and bitter attack on the pretensions of the art world. He adds a few famous faces to the mix (including Elisabeth Moss and Dominic West), but his biting voice has not been tempered — if anything, he cranks up the blatant discomfort and inescapable embarrassment. That doesn’t sound like much fun, granted, and at times it is not. Yet Ostlund’s refusal to soften (or redeem) his characters is admirable, and if you have the right kind of darkly comic sensibility, it’s a deeply funny piece of work.‘Sorry to Bother You’ (2018)Stream it on Netflix.The musician and activist Boots Riley makes his feature directing debut with this wildly funny, frequently bizarre mixture of Marxist dogma and Marx Brothers-style silliness. Lakeith Stanfield (later an Oscar nominee for “Judas and the Black Messiah”) stars as Cassius, a telemarketer who discovers the secret to success and must determine how nakedly to exploit it. That sounds like a fairly straightforward setup, but Riley approaches the material with the surrealistic eye of an experimental filmmaker, and ends up taking Cassius on a journey into the dark heart of extreme wealth and depravity. You may love it or you may hate it, but you’ve certainly never seen anything quite like it.‘God Bless America’ (2012)Stream it on Amazon.If “Sorry to Bother You” pushes the limits of comic satire, “God Bless America” blows them to smithereens — quite literally. The stand-up comedian and comic character actor Bobcat Goldthwait writes and directs this story of a suicidal middle-aged loser (Joel Murray) who teams up with a cynical teenager (Tara Lynne Barr) and goes on a killing spree, targeting sources of frustration from reality-TV stars to movie-theater talkers. Calling this a dark comedy is an understatement — this is pitch-black stuff, certain to alienate a large chunk of the viewing audience. But those who can tune into its wavelength will find a shockingly earnest (if take-no-prisoners) commentary on the toxic nastiness of contemporary culture.‘Identifying Features’ (2021)Stream it on HBO Max.The writer-director Fernanda Valadez makes her feature debut with this striking, patient and frequently wrenching drama of grief and helplessness. Mercedes Hernández stars as Magdalena, whose son Jesús (Juan Jesús Varela) left their home in Mexico, attempting to cross the border, and disappeared. Magdalena attempts to track him down, or determine what happened to him, encountering resistance, secrecy and even apathy along the way. Valadez is an extremely confident filmmaker, trusting her audience to follow the picture’s sad, mournful tone and loaded silences rather than laying out its themes in dramatic dialogue. And her eye is impeccable, particularly in the picture’s haunting, dreamlike concluding passages.‘The Glass Castle’ (2017)Stream it on Hulu.Between his critical breakthrough with “Short Term 12” and his commercial one with “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” Destin Daniel Cretton directed this emotionally forceful adaptation of Jeannette Walls’s best-selling memoir. Its main acting attraction is the “Short Term” breakout Brie Larson, but the most memorable performer is the perpetually undervalued Woody Harrelson, whose crackling turn as Larson’s wildly irresponsible father is an ace showcase for his particular charms and peculiar charisma. Max Greenfield (so delightful as Schmidt on “New Girl”) makes an effective counterpoint as Larson’s judgmental, yuppie boyfriend.‘Prince Avalanche’ (2013)Stream it on Amazon.The director David Gordon Green has tried a bit of everything in his career, from broad comedy (“Pineapple Express”) to slasher horror (the 2018 “Halloween”) to inspirational true stories (“Stronger”). But his specialty, from the beginning of his career, has been modest indie dramas like this one, which he builds as freewheeling showcases for terrific actors. This time, those actors are Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch as two mismatched guys spending a summer doing country highway roadwork. Their dislike grows to grudging affection, of course; the story beats are not shocking. But Rudd and Hirsch give their characters life and agency, and Green’s easy-breezy style makes this a pleasing watch.‘Django & Django’ (2021)Stream it on Netflix.From the title and thumbnail art on Netflix, you might think this is some sort of bonus feature for Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” (also currently on Netflix). Some familiarity and affection for that 2012 film is helpful, but that’s merely an entry point for this documentary celebration of the Italian genre director Sergio Corbucci, who helmed the original 1966 “Django,” from which Tarantino drew his title and aesthetic inspiration. Tarantino dominates this entertaining and informative bio-doc, telling Corbucci’s story and sharing his readings of the filmmaker’s subtext (as well as a closing-credit fan theory about one of the film’s biggest questions). But the “Django” star Franco Nero and that film’s assistant director Ruggero Deodato (who would become a notorious filmmaker in his own right) also appear, to detail the making of Corbucci’s greatest films, and help clarify how his work helped change the Western genre forever.‘Oscar Micheaux: The Superhero of Black Filmmaking’ (2021)Stream it on HBO Max.For once, the title isn’t just hyperbole, or an example of the framework we apparently have to attach to everything in popular culture — Oscar Micheaux was born in Metropolis, Ill., which has tried to claim itself as the home of Superman, a striking choice when the town is the real home of a cinematic groundbreaker. His is a truly American story, of a man born to modest means who became an author and filmmaker. That story is told here by historians, directors and cultural figures, breaking down the nuts and bolts of how Micheaux built a network of self-distribution within Black America, while analyzing several of his surviving works. “I wonder how many know him?” Morgan Freeman asks, early on; hopefully, thanks to this film, more will. More