Sass
Black Women's Humor and Humanity
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
Black women comedians are more visible than ever, performing around the world in physical venues like comedy clubs and festivals, along with appearing in films, streaming specials, and online videos. Across these mediums, humor—and particularly sass—functions as a tool for Black women to articulate and redress cultural, social, and political marginalization.
J Finley theorizes sass as a new critical lens to better understand the power of Black women’s humor and humanity and explores how sass functions as a powerful resource in Black women’s expressive repertoire. Challenging mainstream assumptions about “sassiness” as an identity or personality trait to which Black women humorists may be reduced, Finley deploys sass to create a new genre of discourse for understanding the ways in which Black women use language, style, gesture, and intent to produce meaning—often humorous—in speaking back to authority. Grounded in an ethnographic approach to Black women’s experiences, Finley conducted extensive interviews as well as participant-observation as a critic, audience member, and comic herself to collect and honor the stories that Black women comics tell about themselves. Interdisciplinary and conceptually rigorous, Finley’s work shows us how we can and should read Black women’s expressions of sass in humor as attempts at social transformation that involve a fundamental critique of power and authority, and a gesture at collective liberation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Finley, a stand-up comedian and assistant professor of Africana Studies at Pomona College, debuts with a nuanced and creative analysis of how Black women use sass as a means of "deflection and humanization." Comprising rhetorical (appraisal, questioning, and provoking) and gestural components (eye-rolling, teeth-sucking, and finger-snapping), sass, which the author characterizes as "a dialogic, intelligible pattern of address... to an assumed superior in institutional or interpersonal settings," pushes back against power structures and the pressures Black women receive to "stay in one's place." Among other topics, Finley analyzes how raunchy humor "functions in the framework of sass" to interrogate white patriarchy, citing a group of protestors who sang Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion's "WAP"—a "raunchy... Black feminist credo"—outside the White House following Donald Trump's 2020 presidential defeat and how butch female comics use sass to "deal with their butchness onstage" and compel audiences to "expand their ideas of what Black womanhood means." Mining a rich trove of examples, including the character Topsy from Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, comedian Jackie "Moms" Mabley, singer Gladys Bentley, and contemporary figures including Michelle Obama and Jada Pinkett Smith, as well as her own experiences as a Black comedian, Finley provides an enlightening and rigorous examination of sass as a means of asserting one's power in an oppressive world. It's an insightful study of the politics of humor.
