Where things have no repercussion, there are bound to be truths revealed. It’s odd that in a day of decadence, political correctness is still enforced. Truth and humor walk a fine line between one another you see, as things, in reality, are as far-fetched as all hell and far from our perceived stereotypes often. Racism in comedy for all intents and purposes is a paradox of sorts as we laugh at what we understand too well, and what we can’t understand at all. In case you haven’t noticed, there’s no in-between here in the art of entertainment and performance.

It turns out that reality’s really a beach, with plenty of grains of salt to be had by conservative analysts looking for statements to grab and make an example out of. While race is undoubtedly still a contentious issue across the world, it would only make sense for it to find its way into the mainstream annals of media as entertainment is derived straight from modern-day phenomena, and truth, from what is cast on screen to the masses. For in reality and the minds of the many, what is the truth but not the thing most readily observed? It is for this often explicit reason that racism, (a phenomenon so painfully real and observed today) is a thing still found funny in comedy.

Paradoxically, the appeal of humor teeters in between two tenets of knowledge. The abundance or absence of it. We laugh at the ridiculously stacked with knowledge nerd like Urkel, or at the callously and slow ignorant country bumpkin like Forrest Gump. Seldom are we entertained by the average or normal caricature of humanity, that is quite frankly observed everywhere and day in our offices, classrooms, etc. Truly think about it. We’re only humored by what we understand. Though ironically, our attempts at trying to make sense of the very things we cannot, the most far-fetched, is so often that makes things funny. Comedy, and Racism being funny in comedy, is derived from making fantastical sense of the things that we know we cannot in reality, though it is our attempt at trying to understand no matter how foolishly put or stated. Since I couldn’t tell you why white and black men were created, I could at least tell you what it is I find so funny about them in an attempt at understanding this madness we’ve all been thrust into. Comedy, in the context of today’s so distinguished, organized, and politically correct climate I find, is the abstract reasoning. I mean, you tell me if the man who can hijack a plane with a butterknife deserves the plane or not.

I can sit here and bawl about babies on the corner in the hood of low-income communities and how Chappelle himself can afford to do something most black people in America can’t, “think about it,” but truth be told it’s a comic’s very own attempt to make sense of the things in their environment that fuels our laughter.

Us humans, with all our wit and ways, crave displays of superiority so that we may aspire to emulate that very thing. It’s an absolute art form when one can take the plight they face and turn it into prosperity and awareness on certain issues no matter the intellectual capacity of those in the audience. While one person’s recreation is another’s reality, it pays to know that Comedy is a form of action that ought to be heralded as one of the many disciplines as one of the two major phenomena that change the world: art, Lest we resort to the second, pain, from not having a discussion of the so very ridiculous differences that exist between us humans.  

With virtually no context can we laugh at something, because if surely it were our pain, we wouldn’t. In reality, we’re so fearfully unable to even to have the wits and innate empathy with which to comprehend the fear of truth’s infallibility. Empathy is made and gauged, and on the frontlines of the clash between art and pain that creates culture, sadly absent.  

Though while comics may appear callous and misled (it would appear a very many of them are admittedly I can’t even lie), one thing remains. They are perhaps history’s most perplexed and daring.