What is there to do with the impulse when watching a Kyle Mooney video, to ask,“Would he ever interview a Black woman?” Is it wrong that I resent fat white women for the place they hold in comedy? Not only do they get to be funny, but they get to lay claim to an irate sexuality that’s briefly gesticulated towards. This rash appeal is denied in total with the Black female comedian. It used to be funny to make fun of us for just being us, now that that’s considered racist nothing about us is supposed to be funny at all. What are we supposed to be? If we’re not Aunt Jemimas, or fighting whores, or disciplinarians, or multicultural Rastafarian Muslims, or nurses with baby daddies, or doctors and lawyers, or government workers with side-hustle bakeries, or budtenders? I know some Black female comedians that are drop-dead gorgeous that I know the American Comedy Industry would not welcome because of their beauty and whistling-sexy bodies. Does a Black woman have to be making fun of herself to be funny? When I think of the Black women that Saturday Night Live has featured, they were either masculine in their gender/sexuality or performing a kind of Black female millennial comedy that seems outmoded. Where are our crazy comedians? The natural impulse here is to say ‘our Sarah Shermans’ but the Black woman does not seem to produce humor of this kind. That’s fine, that humor doesn’t interest me. Where are our niche humorists? With them, I am not familiar. I’m no longer interested in seeing Auntie humor or Don’t-Touch-My-Hair humor coupled with self-deprecating punchlines. I don’t want us to make a splash. Are we capable of our own distinct humor? We don’t like when other people laugh at us, we don’t like other people commodifying our memories, we don’t like for our linages to come under inspection. All of which are necessary for comedy. I fantasize delivering quips and bits to an audience. I don’t want to make fun of myself. Do I just want to be a politician? A great orator? Why is it shameful to make people laugh when you are Black? I tell my Mom that a friend of a friend told him that I’m ‘beautiful, smart and funny’ and she took deep offense to the ‘funny’. The Negro is no longer supposed to be humorous and instead should be a bleak business professional. Have not my people a long history in entertainment? What does that promise in our current century? Economic servitude to a small class of the uber-wealthy for a brief shot at maintaining low-end wealthiness? Does it ever end? I want to make a joke about it. I want to shine. I want to walk on stage with my sweat smelling sweet as a comforter, from my chlorophyll, and make people grin from ear to ear. It would not be honest for me to say that I don’t care if these people think that I’m pretty. I want them to think that I’m everything. I want to entertain them. I do not want to sell my body, sell my sex, shame my womb, devitalize my spirit, disrespect my ancestors, bring hellfire in the process. A little warm room and I’m making the crowd tremble with my he-he’s. Down the street, Netta is performing and she’s pretty n not making jokes about herself being stupid. The crowd goes wild.
The Crowd Goes Wild
I’m the woman that blesses the water
We were holding hands by the fire, listening to Erykah Badu. It was one of those times when I recognized that Miss Badu was teasing of her body by different plays in the lyrics. This is in the album that I like the most, Mama’s Gun. She talks about her titties hanging low and her nebula hair being short and shoulder-length and shit, I understand all kinds of things like that. Do you? With your Eyes low. I’m eyeing you. Of course you would never understand, not even through me, which is how I’m able to exchange love with you so innocent. Oh, I love how your jaw connects to the pinions in the back of your throat that make your voice work. You are distinctly not a little bird at all. You could be a monster if you wanted to be. The thrill runs up the back of my neck and I have to suppress a giggle. It’s not funny, but it’s hot to be scared. Women say, “It’s not funny…” and crowd-work scan the room because they know by their heinous little giggles. Yes, yes it is so silly girls. I always loved the phrase: peals of laughter. Yes.
Oh, yes. This is something here, chaste and bumbling.
The bed of the truck rumbles to life and the trees that float by are full of life…they’re lifeless to us in our submarine, though, because we’re inside of a vehicle. A machine! Our feelings toward each other could be mirthless and hostile but still the mechanisms of the vehicle would hold us separate from all of the highway’s Others. The road is hopelessly expanding like a ventricle, creating berths and verisimilitude and little isolations. Here’s our car and here’s the rest of the world. Making love is like, here’s us and your penis and then there are other people who do this as well. We’re all of them when we do it together. I’m reading Sartre so I wonder if that’s God, when we know we’re all one and separate the In-Itself and the For-Itself. Can you believe it? Are you For-Me or is this passing slicing fruit and mouthes? Our eyes briefly meet as I watch you drive and you roll you eyes, beautiful pony who loves attention. Your jaw is loose because you’re singing, and you’re happy. The exorbitant price of this emotion! But you’ll pay. You get the kind of aggrieved that is born out of delicate insecurity but the salt of you sweats it away. You get the kind of rosacea I think is sexy on your face and you always have bits of it when you’re happy and the sheer cost of that emotion. You give it away as though you have nothing left. I like it though, whatever. For how long. I watch your eyebrows blanch different shades of colors. In lecture, I’m briefly stunned because a woman’s hair is so, so beautiful — soft chestnut tumbling into creamy blond, and all curly and spilling forward from the back of her head like a fountain. Aspirants know that a woman’s neck is a column and the nape is the temple. My hand touches the cool metal of the building’s austere handles and the ghosts of the institution appear. They cry together, beautifully, “Become a member of the bourgeoisie! Embrace academic privilege! Let your beliefs in a radiant new universe melt into published books, settled salaries!” Here then, appear the sciences; here is poetry, here is Spanish literature, here is mob relief, here is black pepper, here is your beating heart. Here is logic and here is delusion; here has become puerile and so we must start writing our radiant future. Together.
Didn’t it make you laugh, when digging into a falafel bowl, there was a whole wedge of lime, but seasoned with sazon of all things — or it could’ve been Tajin, but it was crunchy and OD deep-fried like it was intended to be a vegan sausage or something — I think bad writing is often greed because it relies on the writer’s life being a lilting cartwheel to work. What I mean to say is don’t get caught up on making everything try to look like a lush little department store catalog, and we’re all hunching over teeny granola packs with our thumbs up our asses. Bumper sticker headass you think your life is supposed to be a movie. I’m more like the evening you and your tribe decide to rest for a blip in the refuge of a marble cave and a wolf comes in with a strip of his flank missing but he walks in like a dancer and laughs like he’s not crying. He knows that the wound will heal. I’m like the wolf. I’m like the dense fear in the cave. I think Thoreau was a little greedy because he was surrounded by a lot of natural glory that has been generationally eroded by industrialists so I’ll never get to see it the way he saw it — I think he was a little greedy because he had all that beauty and of course phrases were coming to him so orgasmically that he was a wooden medium, vessel, oscillating and oscillating. He had people coming over, too, all night long. Not every night. I’m becoming politically quite atheistic but subliminal things in that way make me connect the dots. I was thinking about X so I saw X and now I believe in X. Conspiracy is poetry and the schizo void is Saturnian in it’s discipline. Everything has to be fascinating in the narrative of the life of the author, one must be a great writer. One must be a great writer, suffering is the bracing wilderness. The wilderness is fascinating, one must be every thing. One must be in the narrative, fascinating.
