White Comics Lack Nuance Needed to Mine Obama

President-elect not lacking in comic fodder; it's mainstream comedians who are lacking

By Kevin Spak, Newser Staff

Posted Nov 7, 2008 3:37 PM CST

(Newser) – Bill Maher recently said Barack Obama “needs to give comedians something to work with.” The President-elect is “too perfect,” he groused, and worse, liberals are afraid to laugh at black people. If only Dave Chappelle were working, laments Salamishah Tillet for the Root. He’d quickly prove Obama is plenty funny, if only white comedians learned the “cultural nuances of black America.”

Comedians have typically dealt with black people either by way of stereotype, or black invisibility. Fred Armisen imitates Obama well enough on Saturday Night Live, but it’s not funny because the performance lacks “backstory.” To get Obama, you need to understand the “black bourgeois respectability” Obama represents. “It’s not that Barack and Michelle aren’t funny,” it’s that white comedians need more black writers.

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"Mainstream satirists will have to learn the cultural nuances of black America," Tillet writes, if they're to find the comic fodder in Barack Obama. (AP Photo)

It's not that Barack Obama isn't comic fodder, Salamishah Tillet writes, it's that white comedians "miss the complexities, contradictions and the interior features of African-Americans lives." (AP Photo)

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White Comics Lack Nuance Needed to Mine Obama