Talking Shit,Egos,and Tough Skin: Humor Among Elite Black Men

Abstract

Extant research considers humor integral to the Black experience. Previous work on the topic, however, mainly focuses on humor among lower-class Blacks and remains disconnected from broader sociological research on humor and small group culture. Drawing on semistructured, in-depth interviews with 29 members and over 30 months of participant observation this article explores humor in an elite Black men’s social club. “Talking shit” is central to sociability among members, signaling belongingness (having “tough skin") and cementing cohesion on interpersonal and group levels through the deconstruction of egos. By finding amusement in the ambiguities of social identity members interpret its boundaries and articulate feelings in the process of creating and sustaining a culture of hilarity. Ultimately, the analysis illuminates how social identity shapes the content and processes of humor within small group culture.

Keywords

humor small groups race and class sociability

Introduction

The laughter gay like sounding silver ringing,

That fills the whole wide room from floor to ceiling, —

A rush of rapture to my tried soul bringing—

The deathless spirit of a race revealing. ¹

Claude McKay’s words acknowledge the significance of laughter to the Black experience, considering it one of the most common exigences of survival. Much scholarly attention has been paid to Black humor (Dollard 1939; Prange and Vitols 1963; Simmons 1963; Genovese 1976; Levine 1977), particularly in the urban ethnographic literature (Hannerz 1969; Abrahams 1970a; Majors and Billson 1992). However, social scientific research on Black humor has limited its attention to Black male youth and/or inner-city, lower-class street life. Consequently, questions pertaining to the role(s) of humor within the social world of middle- and upper-class Blacks and the ways race and class shape its content remain largely unanswered. In addition, the narrow focus of such work remains disconnected from broader research on humor and its place within small group culture.

Drawing on interview and observational data from an over 30 month long, ongoing ethnography of the Founders Club, a private Black men’s social club, this article explores humor in an elite Black social setting.² Playful banter, or in the Club’s terms, “talking shit,” is central to participation in the organization. By exchanging insults members convey that they have “tough skin,” a signal of belongingness, and challenge each other’s egos. By finding amusement in the ambiguities of social identity members interpret its boundaries and express feelings in the process of creating and sustaining a culture of hilarity. Ultimately, the analysis illuminates how humor emerges within small group culture and how social position shapes its content and processes.

Humor as Play and Structure within Small Group Culture

In his classic treatise on sociability Simmel (1971) asserts the essence of pure sociability as a “play-form of association” void of objective (e.g., economic interests) and subjective content (e.g., personal troubles). Unhindered by such matters, people create “an ideal sociological world” of sociable reciprocity entailing the mutual experience of three “sociable values”: joy, relief, and vivacity. Yet, even in this “shadow world” where the “frictions” of everyday life do not manifest, sociability must remain tethered to them or risk “turn[ing] from play to empty farce” (Simmel 1971, 132, 139) devoid of meaning.

What makes interactions humorous are their tinkering with social reality, or what Flaherty (1984) calls “reality play.” Humor often inverts reality by introducing unexpected and contradictory interpretations into social interactions that disrupt predictable patterns of action and systems of meaning (Zijderveld 1968; Davis 1993). Humor also identifies and exposes the ambiguities and incongruities inherent to social structures (Douglas 1975; Mulkay 1988). The meaning-making process relies on the capacity to frame social interactions from the standpoints of both reality work and reality play (Koestler 1964). In other words, by reflecting and applying to “a larger social reality that actors are expected to share if they are to be in ‘on the joke’” (Tavory 2014, 282) situational-specific humor is part and parcel with wider social experiences.

Identifying where and when reality work ends and reality play begins, however, can be difficult to determine. According to Flaherty (1990, 93), social actors “inhabit situations” and their “culturally predefined context,” but more often than not, “enact situations” by engaging in behaviors that will define the expectations and interactions of social encounters. Jocularity, he finds, is less situationally predetermined than spontaneously initiated. Play’s manifestation, symbolic value, and limits, though, depends on group dynamics (Goffman [1974] 1986). Recurrent jocular themes, or what Fine and De Soucey (2005) refer to as “joking cultures,” emerge within small groups. In addition to historicizing sociability and undergirding the group’s social identity (Walsh 2003), ongoing themes must be morally acceptable and “fit the status structure, organizational needs, and cohesive identity of the group” (Fine and De Soucey 2005, 7). By experiencing pleasure through humor and other means, small groups produce affective emotional energy, establish shared goals, and foster commitment (Fine and Corte 2017). Cultivating humorous interactions helps to manage emotions on the individual and collective level, enabling the positive emotion of amusement to prevail (Francis 1994) and be sustained via interaction rituals (Collins 2004). Spatial and temporal affordances can enable or constrain group fun (Fine and Corte 2017), and when in accordance with the conceptual categories of difference (Lamont 1992) set by particular groups, contribute to its delineation between insiders and outsiders.

Studies of small groups from a variety of settings, from informal third places (Oldenburg 1990) like bars and taverns (LeMasters 1975; May 2001), eateries (Duneier 1992; Murphy 2017), and street corners (Anderson 1978) to more formal, organizational arenas such as the workplace (Roy 1959; Linstead 1985; see also Coser 1960) have illustrated the emergence and experience of humor in a local interactional order (Goffman 1983) and its relation to larger cultural and structural dynamics. Status hierarchies and shared knowledge about individual backgrounds and shared space provide group members with material for jocularity. Recurrent joking themes stabilize interactions (Roy 1959) and distinguish between “regulars” and “nonregulars” (Anderson 1978; Murphy 2017). For example, in Murphy’s (2017) recent study, the ability and willingness to “give it” and “take it” in “humor orgies” of insult exchange, drawing on yet minimizing status differences associated with larger society, equalizes participants and strengthens ties among them. However, Murphy admits that the status dimensions informing his analysis do not include age, gender, race, and sexuality. How these salient aspects of identity emerge and are experienced, collectively and emotionally, within a marginalized group remains unclear.

Ethnic and Racial Humor

As ambiguous yet consequential boundaries ethnicity and race have held prominent places in humorous discourse across human societies (Apte 1985; Davies 1990). Ethnic jokes contribute to boundary maintenance (Smith 2009) by defining moral boundaries through the imposition of undesirable qualities on groups at society’s geographical and social margins (Davies 1982). While ethnoracial minority groups have often been mocked for behavior considered morally dubious (Davies 2011), intergroup ethnic humor is not unidirectional. By making majority group members the butt of jokes minority groups can redirect hostilities (Burma 1946; Arnez and Anthony 1968). Through intra-group humor, particularly of a self-deprecatory type, marginalized groups may also strive for social integration by conforming to mainstream cultural standards (Boskin and Dorinson 1985; Lowe 1986). At the same time, humor enables group solidarity through moral enhancement (Obrdlik 1942) and the strengthening of intraethnic/racial bonds (Zenner 1970). Each of these utilities have been used to explain Black humor, a subject of longstanding interest (Dodge 1870; Schechter 1970).

Black Humor and the Dozens

In The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (2007, 34) James Weldon Johnson writes, “I have since learned that this ability to laugh heartily is, in part, the salvation of the American Negro; it does much to keep him from going the way of the Indian.” Johnson, like other Black literary writers and scholars, demonstrate and identify the legacies of merriment and wit as a key element of perseverance in an ongoing struggle against racial subordination (McKay 1919; Talley 1922; Fauset 1925; Locke 1925; Du Bois 1940; Hughes 1966). In addition to ridiculing other marginalized groups (e.g., immigrants, Jews) and humorizing the systemic ironies of their subordination (Levine 1977) Blacks have historically used stereotypes about themselves (e.g., lack of cohesion, laziness, sexual prowess, etc.) to make fun of each other. Black-on-Black humor has consistently been a point of scholarly interest and captures one of the ways intraracial comedy among Blacks emerges interpersonally.

Beginning with Dollard’s (1939) examination of the “dialectic of insult,” anthropologists, folklorists, and sociologists alike have attempted to understand the origin and utility of the Dozens—a verbal exchange where insults are playfully exchanged without malign purpose or intentions to instigate violence (Abrahams 1962, 1970b). While emerging in other studies of Black youth in the South (Johnson 1941, 1946), analyses of the Dozens centered on its prevalence and various psychosocial utilities among inner-city youth, including relief from aggression (Dollard 1939), masculinity and sexuality socialization (Schulz 1969; Abrahams 1970a), and nurturing verbal skills necessary for defending and/or enhancing one’s status (Hannerz 1969; Abrahams 1970a). Meanwhile, Garner (1983, 47) insists the Dozens has no “racial overtones” and provides strategies for mediating within-group conflict in a playful manner.

What ensures the Dozens’ playful character? According to Labov (1972), the rituality of insults relies on their absurdity. Once ritual insults lose their nonsensical character and touch upon personal truths play transforms into nonplay. Kochman (1983), on the other hand, emphasizes the response of recipients: if the recipient of personal insults responds in kind, play will continue. In Kochman’s view, this effectively increases the threshold of reality play as well as Blacks’ tolerance of racial affronts encountered in reality work.

With the urban turn in the ethnographic literature and its focus Black populations, sociability within “ghetto culture” became intensely scrutinized. According to Kelley (1997), rather than seeing the Dozens as merely a pleasurable form of interaction where individuals are able to share a laugh at the expense of themselves and others, urban ethnographers have historically attempted to formalize sociability among urban Blacks by imposing misinterpreted meanings. Such assumptions and assertions reinforce the image of urban Blacks as “Others whose investment in this [ghetto] cultural tradition is much deeper than trying to get a laugh” (Kelley 1997, 33). In other words, previous work on insult humor among Blacks need not be dismissed, but scholars must keep in mind its simple, emotional purpose of arousing laughter, among what may be other functions of this type of social interaction.

Such work also obscures how class differentiation within the Black community may shape humorous interaction. For example, Middleton (1959) and Middleton and Moland (1959) consider Black university students’ propensities for telling stereotypical jokes about Blacks to reflect intraracial class tensions whereby middle-class Blacks ridicule lower-class Blacks and not the race in general. Bell’s (1983) and May’s (2001) studies of Black bars represent the only in-depth analyses of Black middle-class “play.” In both settings “talking shit” referred to a playful and intimate type of interaction where participants stylistically share experiences, personal information, and similar to the Dozens, tease each other to provoke laughter. Such sociability encompassed “ordinary” conversation, allowing patrons to challenge each other’s actions and words and discuss their roles as men, women, wives, fathers, etc. Among lower- and working-class Black men banter has been found to be a mechanism for maintaining friendliness in fleeting encounters with passersby on the street (Hannerz 1969), upholding status differentiation (Anderson 1978), and reaffirming interpersonal bonds (Duneier 1992).

The following analysis extends the social scientific literature on humor by examining its manifestations within an elite Black men’s social club. Using interview and observational data, as well as personal experiences as an ethnographer brokering the insider-outsider divide, I explore how humor emerges and shapes interactions at the small group level. Moreover, the analysis considers how social identity and the ambiguous boundaries underlying it inform the interplay between reality work and reality play, ultimately producing a highly emotive culture of hilarity.

The Case and the Methods

Established nearly a century ago in the large Midwestern city of Langston, the Founders Club was formed by a handful of Black students due to their exclusion from social events at the local YMCA. As the Club’s membership matured it became a social organization for adult African American men. There are currently 31 members in the Founders Club, ranging in age from 37- to 83-years-old. The longest standing member has been with the organization since 1978 and the most recent additions (3) came in December 2018.

Reflecting the Black middle- and upper-classes that developed in the first half of the twentieth century (see Landry 1987), many of the early Founders were part of the Black community’s entrepreneurial and professional classes, including bar and hotel owners, attorneys, educators, and white-collar workers. Today, the number of business proprietors are few and the majority of members’ professions no longer constitute the Black community’s institutional backbone due to their dispersal into mainstream communities and workplaces. Nearly all of the members are college-educated and their white-collar jobs, ranging from government personnel to corporative executives, place them firmly within the professional sector. Except for two members, all are married, and many of their spouses are members of analogous African American women organizations (e.g., the Circle-Lets, the Links, and the Northeasterners).

The Founders Club nonetheless differs from most of their counterparts and thus presents a unique case study. The Club’s intimacy derives from its small membership base and the fact that it is a singular organization with no chapters in other cities. Thus, the Founders Club has remained autonomous for nearly a century without a large pool of members or affiliate organizations to draw resources. Unlike most other Black social clubs, the Founders Club has had a clubhouse for the majority of its existence.³ After initially meeting at members’ homes, the Club has owned and occupied two clubhouses on the same property, the latter of which the Founders constructed in 1966 using their own capital.

The privacy offered by the clubhouse is integral to the definition of the Black elite subscribed to in this analysis. Beyond the status dimensions traditionally associated with the Black elite, including skin color, lifestyle (i.e., consumption patterns), and occupation, what ties middle-to-upper class African Americans together is their valuation of “front,” Drake and Cayton’s (1945) conceptual tool to capture the Black elite’s emphasis on respectable public behavior. Defining the Black elite in this way reflects prior research (Higginbotham 1993; Gaines 1996; Lacy 2007) while also, as Muraskin (1975, 14) states, “protects us from casting aspersions on the morality of the black lower class or assuming behavior differences that remained unproved.” Previous ethnographic work (Anderson 1978; Duneier 1992; Lamont 2000) has shown that working class Blacks, too, uphold their own moral codes. However, it is the importance Black elites place on public behavior, regardless of their activities in private, that distinguishes them as a group.

While I have had ongoing contact with the Founders Club for over three years, the majority of the data collection has occurred from September 2017 to the time of writing. Specifically, I draw on semistructured, in-depth interviews with 29 members of the Founders Club collected over thirty months of participant observation.⁴ The interviews were digitally recorded while jottings on my smartphone during observations provide the basis for fieldnotes. The simultaneous data collection has allowed for an iterative analytical process, juxtaposing interview and observational data to gauge (in)consistencies between attitudes and action (Jerolmack and Khan 2014). Members’ awareness of the study’s observational component has given both members and me the opportunity to discuss and interpret the type of sociability constituting participation in the organization as it relates to topics like class, race, and humor during formal interviews and informal conversation.

From attendance at an open house for prospective members to the funeral services of a now-deceased Founder, in addition to interviews with prospective members, recently inaugurated members, and Founders with thirty-plus years of affiliation (and all those in-between), I have been able to understand and witness membership processes across multiple stages. While not a member of the Club, because of my research objectives and participants’ cordiality I have been granted many privileges of membership, including the ability to go to the clubhouse on a regular, informal basis to fellowship with members. Over time, my frequent presence, willingness to help out at events, and participation in the group’s daily interactional life, including “talking shit” (as discussed later), has coincided with the transition from being an outsider to more of an insider, or to use the variety of terms members have applied to me, “brother,” “honorary/pseudo Founder,” and “[Club] historian.” Attendance at private events (e.g., Super Bowl parties), where only members, close friends, and spouses are invited, to public events where anyone can attend for a minimal fee (e.g., holiday parties, happy hour events) reveal consistencies, differences, and tensions when nonmembers enter, or attempt to enter, the Club’s social world. The vast majority of the ethnographic data, though, draws on informal gatherings at the clubhouse where Founders sociability is most readily apparent. Including mornings, afternoons, and evenings on weekdays and weekends, and the activities of drinking, playing cards, smoking cigars, watching television, and “talking shit,” the Club’s daily life across time and content has been thoroughly covered. Such informal gatherings and their atmosphere of hilarity provide the main sources of data for the following analysis.

Talking Shit: Having “Tough Skin” and Deconstructing Egos

During the first public event following Ellis’s joining in December 2018 Simon informed the new member about the importance of having “tough skin” in the Club because members talk a lot of “shit.” Ellis laughed, telling Simon he comes from “a long line of niggas who talk shit,” and when his family makes fun of you “that means they like you.” “Yup. Yup,” Simon said, smirking in concurrence. “I grew up like that,” Ellis noted, saying that if his family finds something that “pushe[s] your buttons” they use it relentlessly. When I interviewed Ellis a few weeks later he said it was “refreshing” and somewhat surprising to learn that the members are “not as stuffy as I was, you know, thinking.” Rather than being “focused on these titles” and “this status or whatever in the community,” members “do things just like everybody else would,” including “talking shit.” Ellis experienced this firsthand upon meeting Owen, a member known for his sharp tongue:

. . .first time I met Owen, he walks up to me, and he looks, and looks at my hair, and he’s like, ‘Oh. So we letting brothers in with S curls now?’ [I laugh] Like that’s my introduction. ‘Oh yeah man. That’s Owen’ [Ellis recalls another member interjecting]. I’m like, ‘What the hell is this?’ [I laugh]. Like, this motherfucker don’t even know me and he talking shit [laughter]. See, I like that cause I talk shit. So, you know, that’s all cool with me.

Ellis sees talking shit “as part of African American culture” and “one of the ways that we socialize” as a means of entertainment and storytelling. According to Ellis, at its core, talking shit entails “not taking yourself too seriously. Like, everybody can get it.” Having experienced this interactional style growing up, Ellis is not only familiar with it, but knows participation in it is a key indicator of inclusivity.

Being able to dish out and take insults is integral to participation within the organization, and as the exchange between Ellis and Simon demonstrates, members are aware of this function. When asked about the prospect of the Club ever having a white or woman member, Preston did not deny the possibility, acknowledging that the organization’s constitution does not prohibit women or white men from joining. In his view, what will be important is whether “the person [could] stand being harassed by these fools all, all the time.” Preston continued:

Not in a negative kind of way, but just in a fun, joking kind of way. . .you know, we harass each other. You’d been down here. You see we harass each other. So, you know, you have to have a thick skin to be able to tolerate that as well.

On a Sunday afternoon, after joking about incorporating the personality trait “on the membership application,” Simon concretized his sentiment with an example of a former member. “That’s why Tristan couldn’t last,” essentially identifying the ex-Founder as someone who does not have tough skin. According to Jermaine, Tristan had a tendency to become confrontational when drinking, resulting in heated arguments between himself and other members. Drinking is another element of what constitutes masculinity in the Founders Club, but it usually does not provoke volatile reactions to insulting remarks. Thus, drinking possibly exacerbated Tristan’s apparent lack of tough skin, a combination that threatened the Club’s atmosphere of lighthearted sociability and conveyed Tristan’s inability to fit in the Club.

The arena of tonk—the Club’s current cardplaying game of choice—is especially fervent soil for members to exercise their wit and enjoy each other’s’ comedy, even if by doing so they affirm gender-, race-, and sex-based stereotypes.⁵ As an ethnographer attempting to fit into the Club’s social world participating in card play and reality play partially marked the transition from being an outsider to an insider.

Not all Founders gamble and play tonk, but several do, and when three or more “tonk players” are present someone is likely to initiate a game. Often, a mild form of talking shit, including claims that one is in need of and/or looking to take others’ money, instigates gameplay. Sometimes it can be more obscene. After having already discussed tonk while hanging out on the Club’s patio on a Wednesday evening Simon asked me, “You ready [to play tonk]?” as he stood up from the patio table. I said yes. “Should I get a condom. There should be some magnums lying around,” he chuckled, simultaneously insinuating sexual and physical prowess, two traits purportedly associated with Black masculinity (Staples 1971; Oliver 1989). At the same time, Simon implied domination and my need to be prepared to lose. Such comments are not unique and are especially prevalent during actual gameplay where members use put-downs suggesting dominance and entreating more assertive behavior from others.

“Having a big dick ain’t all it’s cracked up to be,” Harold said in his best melancholy tone as he played cards with Isaac and Owen, listened to music, and watched the NCAA men’s basketball tournament in late March 2018, making Simon and I laugh. “It’s a curse,” Harold added, continuing to put a solemn twist on his alleged physical prowess and encouraging me to “blend in like Simon here. Be [an] average Joe.” “It’s not the size, it’s what you do with it,” Isaac interjected, countering Harold’s aggrandizement. “Spoken by a small dick man,” Harold immediately responded. Harold continued on his self-sacrificing bent, saying, “it’s the cross I bare.” “I’m full blood,” Harold stated, essentializing his situation. Owen rebutted Harold’s claims, asserting that there is “no one to vouch for it” and women are needed to validate them. Harold, Isaac, and Owen continued taking turns in both games of tonk and talking shit. “You’ve got this big equation,” Owen added, raising his hands in the air in front of him to bracket the formula he sees Harold mistakenly forming. Harold continued insisting that he’s “full blood” and pointed to “DNA” as the key variable in his equation. “DNA doesn’t mean shit,” Owen replied, to Isaac’s concurrence. “Those [West African] brothers” have “third legs” Harold asserted. Simon and I listened to the conversation with much amusement, laughing together at the comments. “Don’t need to go to the Funny Bone [comedy club]. Come here,” Simon said to me, acknowledging how the Club’s comedic aspect informs his participation. It was around this time that I began becoming more of a participant than an observer by playing cards and talking shit.

Early in the field work members typically did not talk shit to me, reserving their degrading remarks for each other. However, after several months of being consistently present members began including me in their quips and taunts. The transition, in addition to how humor emerges in this setting, is encapsulated by my relationship with Tucker, a 69-year-old and semiretired member who is at the Club more than anyone else. At the beginning of fieldwork Tucker acted very uneasy around me, fidgeting in my presence and often departing quickly following my arrival. Rather than playfully engage me as he did with his fellow members Tucker mostly limited our interactions to asking “are you okay” and if I wanted a drink, thus offering the respectful courtesies of a host but not the (dis)respectful jests of a close pal. Gradually, Tucker subtly extended invitations to the group’s sociability. “Why you laughing?” he began asking, accompanied by a stare, and continually more often, a fist pound, whenever I would laugh at an exchange between himself and others. Tucker soon took to targeting me, hurling many “fuck you’s” for no apparent reason. As both a researcher and a man from thirteen to over 50 years junior to every Founder (I was 23 and a half years old when I began the study) I refrained from talking shit, or at the very least, responding to slights with expletives. Instead, I merely laughed off the insults and cuss-outs. However, responding in a reciprocal manner is anticipated and preferred. “If you don’t tell Tucker ‘fuck you’ he’s not going to respect you,” Simon told me one day following one of Tucker’s remarks. Preston and others advised likewise, and as a result of becoming more comfortable with the members (and they with me) I gradually began responding as opposed to simply laughing. Rather than decline Tucker’s drink offers I started accepting them, and over time, initiate play in the process. Using shoulder shrugs and blank stares in response to Tucker’s “Do you want a cocktail?” question eventually evolved into a running joke between the two of us. “Oh, why not” became Tucker’s characteristic follow-up, along with laughter and a dap. To members’ amusement I began talking shit, particularly once I started playing tonk.

On a Sunday afternoon Harold, Simon, Tucker, William, and I were playing cards. As usual for the player who follows his turn Harold threw me unhelpful cards when I could have used some “help” following someone else’s spread. In his characteristic way Harold would nevertheless stare at me before completing his discard, making disingenuous comments while discarding such as, “I’m gonna help you out” and “Does that help you out?” “Nah. That doesn’t do shit for me, Harold,” I retorted. The others enjoyed the responses. “Did you hear that [my comment]?” Tucker asked Simon, turning around and laughing. “I heard that,” Simon nodded. Harold also laughed at my remarks, pointing out the others’ influence on my behavior. “I don’t want them turning you into a thug,” Harold jokingly commented several times. In doing so, he played with the meaning of the class and racially connotative term, simultaneously identifying it with coarse behavior unbefitting yet in accordance with the group’s style of sociability.

Beyond it serving as a sign of having tough skin, according to William, talking shit also has another organizational function. In discussing the possible addition of a few more members and its advantages and disadvantages William suggested how the personality of the membership base can create conflict while also enable the organization to accomplish tasks. “When you bring alpha males together,” William said, they are able to “put ideas together” and thus create opportunities for organizational innovation. Nonetheless, William admitted that there is “a lot of vainness” inherent in having such a membership base. “Big egos, but you can poke at them and get them to work for you,” he added, reflecting on the utility of having a congregation of these personality types. “How do you go about poking at them?” I asked. To answer William used me as an example. “It’s like you. Texting me this morning and talking shit. You’ve earned it,” William noted, “Guys earn it.” Reiterating what he told me in our interview months prior, William described the club as a place “where you let your hair down” and are okay with being “vulnerable” to the slights of others in spite of one’s ego.

The will to tease and be teased builds cohesion among members by cultivating affable sociability. Captured in the idea of having “tough skin” Founders delineate between those who do and do not belong based on the ability to engage in their style of banter, commonly invoking notions of race and masculinity. A great variety of subjects can spark humorous discourse, from actions and behaviors, such as choice of drink, habits, and gaffes, to personal characteristics that have historically served as status markers among Blacks, like place of origin and skin tone.

Complexions of Humor

Colorism has traditionally stratified the Black community (Frazier 1949; Gatewood 1990; Kerr 2005), particularly its social organizational life (Drake and Cayton 1945; Graham 2000). The Founders Club has always included men whose skin tones range the color spectrum, and members acknowledge the likelihood of racial mixture and how complexion could have influenced participation in the past. According to Benjamin, in the 1940s and 1950s “rumors” circulated “that you had to be light, bright, damn near white to be a Founder.” Benjamin, though, asserts the “brown paper bag test” gossip to be false. “I can show you pictures on the wall [referring to photos of past members], a whole lot of dark-skinned guys around here.” The current presence of members with a variety of complexions continues to shape the content of humor. In addition, my ethnoracial identity as a Dominican and Italian with a light-skin complexion, considered nonwhite by a couple of members and white by most, sometimes finds a place in their jocularity.

Light-skin members, including Darius, Isaac, Philip, and Tucker are frequently the butt of jokes. When Philip, who often goes to tropical climates for vacation, returns from one of his trips other members are quick to point out his “tan” and tease him for his attempt to become darker, as the following fieldnote excerpt illustrates.

Philip enters the clubhouse, his hue visibly darker. He greets me and former member Rawls.

Rawls:

Philip, either tell me where you went [on vacation] or what tanning booth you went to.

Marcus:

Damn, you’re as black as me [Turning around on the couch to look at Philip as he walks behind him and to the bar]. Look like Trump [everyone laughs].

Cameron:

You went from Barack to Trump. One president to the other.

Philip:

That’s cold [shaking his head and chuckling as he sits down].

Moments later a hearing aid advertisement with an elderly white man plays on the television.

Marcus:

Why can’t a brother [Black man] do that [slapping his knee and looking around at the rest of us]?

As Marcus suggests the white actor to be a Trump supporter Philip glances at me.

Philip:

[Looking at Marcus and pointing at me with a smirk] Joe’s kinda white.

Marcus:

[Pauses briefly and quickly glances at me before turning towards Philip] Joe doesn’t count. You [Philip] were white before [everyone laughs].

Simon:

You went from Grippo [barbecue potato chips] to Cheeto [more laughter].

Philip teasingly interrogates Rawls about his educational background. Rawls dances around the question, first by saying he went to school in Mississippi followed by generically asserting, “I matriculated.” Philip considers Rawls’s answer to be an admission of not graduating high school and receiving his “GID [GED].” They move to questioning each other’s Mississippian roots. Rawls fires off specifics of the state’s geographic landscape to affirm his heritage and simultaneously dispute Philip’s claims to having ancestral connections to the South, reaffirming Philip’s alleged whiteness.

Philip:

Why he got to be so racist for [looking at me again]?

Rawls:

He’s not white. He’s Puerto Rican. What are you [turning towards me]?

Me:

Dominican and Italian.

Rawls:

Told you [looking back at Philip].

Philip:

And Italian. That’s white [shrugging his shoulders].

Rawls:

He’s more Dominican than Italian. I can see it in his eyes.

To support his assertion Rawls claims people from Mississippi have the ability to discern such ethnoracial nuances. The two then continue to engage in an ancestral authenticity ritual.

Rawls:

I picked cotton, yes.

Marcus:

Picking cotton? Goddamn.

Rawls:

Us brothers from Mississippi we always carrying. Just warning you. I carry shotguns and grenades [Philip holds out his hands in a gesture of capitulation]. Shoot this place up [they both laugh].

Marcus:

No middle ground [referring to Rawls’s remark].

The discussion briefly takes a serious turn as Rawls genuinely asks Philip if his family is really from Mississippi. Philip affirms, explaining how his grandfather moved north to work in a factory.

Marcus:

I would have thought your grandfather was from Hartford [Connecticut]. That 23andMe give you some fucked up shit [laughter].

Philip:

I would have thought too, but damn, Mississippi [chuckling].

Rawls shows us another high school yearbook photo on his phone. Again, Philip calls for legitimate documentation of Rawls’s high school education.

Rawls:

I didn’t go to high school. I matriculated.

Philip:

Oh! You didn’t go to high school?

The previous exchange illustrates how humor flexibly works across multiple boundaries and simultaneously emerges situationally and spontaneously. Rawls enacts reality play with his “tanning booth” remark, stimulating a string of responses from others present. Philip responds with laughter and a headshake, conceding to and recognizing the playful situation he is now inhabiting where he is the target of mockery. When conversation begins to take a serious shift with Marcus’s criticism of the advertisement Philip uses the opportunity to divert attention away from himself. In pointing out my own ambiguous ethnoracial identity by saying “Joe’s kinda white” Philip attempts to shift the joking target by highlighting my outsider status. Instead, Marcus and Rawls subsequently rebut Philip’s claim, reinforcing the blurriness of race and ethnicity as categories while reaffirming Philip’s outsider status for the purposes of the ongoing joke. Ostensibly unable to undercut Rawls’s racial status, Philip redirects attention by questioning the legitimacy of Rawls’s educational credentials. Their common claim to Mississippian roots, however, provides the window to jokingly and sincerely explore their ancestry and interpret the nuances of geographical and racial boundaries according to their own “maps” of Black identity (see Hunter and Robinson 2018). In the process, Marcus (“Picking cotton? Goddamn”) acknowledges the expansion of acceptable obscenity with Rawls’s slavery allusion. Moreover, he uses it to shift Philip and Rawls’s sincere discussion about Philip’s personal background towards reality play by jokingly suggesting Philip has ancestral ties to a northern, presumably white geographical site (Hartford, Connecticut).

Colorism humor in the Club goes both ways, with members joking about the whiteness of some members while exaggerating the Blackness of others. Several members, the most prominent being William, have mostly eliminated the N-word from the Club’s vocabulary because of their aversion to it. However, it occasionally makes an appearance, and when employed within humorous discourse, can enliven sociability.

Following the mayor’s visit to the clubhouse on a Saturday afternoon Benjamin launched a playful onslaught against other members, using the N-word with unrestraint. Accusing Marcus and Preston of being white, Benjamin recounted his surprise at finding out that “a n—r [Preston]” is on the wall at the nearby municipal building. Benjamin then commented about Marcus having had spoken like a white person, perhaps referring to when Marcus asked the mayor a question in a formal tone. Marcus laughed and added substance to Benjamin’s comment by imitating a white person, possibly the mayor. Distorting his voice to sound nasally and prudish, Marcus jokingly stated his belief that if the guys all “work together” they can resolve the Club’s internal strife. Marcus broke out of his white character and laughed nearly to tears with the others.

Hitting on both ends of the racial spectrum, Benjamin continued, saying that Isaac is so white he can live next to and have dinner with Donald Trump, but has chosen to live his life as a Black man, living in the Black part of town when he first moved to the city over fifty years ago and participating in the Founders Club “catchin’ hell.” Slandering Harold’s place of birth, Benjamin referred to it as “n—r heaven,” asserting that the dark-skinned member did not finish first grade until he was 12-years-old. “Don’t put this in the book,” Gary said, turning to me and laughing.

Owen eventually became the main target of Benjamin’s quips. While his use of the N-word diminished, perhaps because Owen also does not like it being used, Benjamin continued to sprinkle it in as he made remarks about Owen’s boisterous behavior. Relative to his usual animated demeanor, Owen was reserved in his response to the senior member’s barbs. Rather than retort with his own comments, Owen smirked and shook his head. In an attempt to counter Benjamin’s depiction of Owen as a loud, obnoxious individual, Owen looked at us at the table and said, “I hope you guys haven’t gotten the same impression of me as he has.” To explain Benjamin’s verbal assault Owen stated that when the “house negroes” get out they go after the “field negroes.” The quip invokes alleged historical differentiation in the treatment of house and field slaves based on skills and skin color, with the former receiving preferential treatment because of their lighter complexion and mixed ancestry (Frazier 1939, 1949). While the treatment of slaves varied by plantation and may not have necessarily aligned with such distinctions, Owen and other Founders will jokingly use the analogy, sometimes even in reference to themselves.⁶

Harold brought a different twist to the exchange by affirming the purity of his Black ancestry while denying the Blackness of others. Looking at me and gesturing to the others Harold asserted that all of the members, excluding himself, have whiteness in them. He went as far as to contend that Benjamin engaged in passing as a child. However, Benjamin, Isaac, and other light-skinned members were not the only ones Harold suggested to be impure. Pointing to Marcus, whose complexion is similar to his own, Harold remarked that by looking at Marcus one can tell that Marcus has whiteness in him. Marcus retorted with his own comment about Harold, saying that he speaks “Congolese.”

Because of racial boundaries’ indefinite character, particularly in relation to skin tone, and the presence of members spanning the color spectrum, the meaning of Blackness is a favorite joking theme in the Club. Members commonly play with the fuzziness of boundaries, using the opportunity to jokingly determine who and who does not belong to their group and genuinely interpret the boundaries delineating social identity at the intersection of race, class, and geography. Otherwise unacceptable behaviors (i.e., use of the N-word) occasionally finds a place in a humorous discourse deliberately undermining group and societal norms to elicit intense emotional reactions on collective and personal levels.

Laughing to Keep from Crying

Darker-skinned members sometimes call Tucker “redbone,” a term historically used in reference to racially mixed persons in the Black community (Everett 2007).⁷ Occasionally, Tucker tries to pin the label on me. “Redbone. That’s your new name now,” Tucker said to me on a Sunday afternoon during a pause in cardplaying. “They call me redbone so what are you?” Tucker commented, repeating it as Simon returned to the table. “Who’s redbone?” Simon asked. After telling Simon he was referring to me Tucker leaned over and put his forearm against mine for comparison. “Tucker work out in the yard and thinks he’s dark skin now,” Simon said, laughingly commenting about Tucker getting “a tan.” Tucker typically embraces race-based exclusionary insults even when he is the target, laughing and continuing the banter despite it being a personally sensitive topic.

On a Thursday afternoon he delved into a deep conversation about his upbringing and the sufferings of his mother, revealing not only intimate pain and a depth of feeling I had not yet witnessed, but also the meaning behind such expressions. “I had a stutter as a child,” Tucker told me, and teachers blamed his condition on him being “a half-breed.” Besides the pain that this caused Tucker, he focused on what his mother had to go through because of having biracial children. He shook his head in amazement at the strength of his mother, a German woman, in the face of constant insults, including “n—r-lover,” and discriminatory treatment.

Following a brief interruption in the conversation with the arrival of another member Tucker returned to the serious conversation. “Thank you for allowing me to leak on you,” he said, reiterating the insult that clearly remains fresh in his mind. “Half-breed. Can you imagine that?” he asked, looking at me and tilting his head. He spoke of how his mother lost her friends for marrying a Black man and bearing his children. He recounted a story of when his mother brought him and his brother to a store near their home when they were children. “I was 8 and Percy was 6,” Tucker recalled. They were all dressed nice, but when they entered the store the workers told his mother they had to leave. Tucker’s mother did not challenge the unfair treatment but left with her children. “Can you imagine that?” Tucker asked with tears running down his cheeks. “I have a lot of hurt inside,” Tucker said, looking at me with heavy eyes, and evidently, a heavy heart. His mother once told him that “a bigger man walks away,” and Tucker has heeded this advice throughout his life. Before leaving Tucker thanked me again for letting him “leak on” me, reiterating that he had been thinking about his mother a lot and “needed to vent.” The intimate revelation gave new meaning to two phrases Tucker has repeated to me on several occasions: “I laugh so I don’t cry” and “you should laugh and giggle every day.”⁸ Fortunately, for Tucker and the rest of the members, sociability at the Club provides more than enough material for laughter to manifest.

“I’m a Black man and I’m going to burn down a Black neighborhood,” Marcus jokingly commented on a Sunday morning prior to the start of football games, making himself and several of us laugh. The remark pertained to a playful verbal and physical exchange over who would control the television remote. “Don’t make me move one more thing!” Marcus previously yelled, feigning anger by frantically moving his leather knapsack and two cups around from one spot to another on the coffee table. Simon laughed heartily. “That’s why I come here,” Simon said to no one in particular. “I love this place!” Tucker said loudly, extending his spread arms up in the air above his head. With William failing to relinquish control of the remote, Marcus confronted him. Standing over William from the side of his chair Marcus wrestled the remote from William’s hand as Tucker tickled William’s waist, causing William to laugh, twist his body, and kick his chair back a few inches. Having retrieved the remote and changed the channel Marcus returned to his seat, only to become frustrated again after giving the remote to Simon, provoking his neighborhood comment. Seemingly alluding to both the stereotypical image of the “angry Black man” and historical instances of violence on Black neighborhoods via arson (e.g., the burning of the Greenwood area of Tulsa, Oklahoma (aka Black Wall Street) in 1921) Marcus’s antics and comments used rhetorical and physical tools of subordination to add comedy to the sociable moment imbued with joy.

Discussion and Conclusion

Research on Black humor, particularly in the urban ethnographic literature, has mainly focused on the “ritual of insult” among lower-class Black men (Hannerz 1969; Abrahams 1970a), thus obscuring its class dynamics. The Black elite has historically occupied a liminal social position, not fully integrated into either the white or Black world. Humor often arises from ambiguities in the social structure, highlighting and making fun of the incongruities informing social relations. Examining humorous discourse among the Black elite offers an opportunity to understand humor’s emergence, content, and utilities in relation to social identity at the small group level.

Talking shit is key to sociability within the Founders Club, and its cohesive utilities are manifest in the recognized idea of “tough skin” and objective of ego deconstruction. Founders assert the importance of having “tough skin,” considering it an informal criterion of organizational participation and a valued masculine trait. The ability to be vulnerable to insults without having one’s feelings hurt is a valued point of emotional strength. At the same time, an unwillingness to talk shit may cause a person to lose the respect of other members. Responding conveys one’s ability to deliver and receive insults and deservingness of others’ deference. The concept of tough skin, then, illustrates the interactive duality of active and passive processes in a group’s joking culture, particularly of the put-down variety among men. Participation entails the assertiveness to insult one’s peers and resilience to their repartee. A person’s incapacity or reluctance to engage in a group’s style of banter threatens sociability by destabilizing the humorous discourse smoothing interactions within the group (Fine and De Soucey 2005). Meanwhile, humor can help bridge social distance beyond the interpersonal scale.

In the case of the Founders Club, its joking culture emerges from its interactional life as well as the experiences of a larger collective—the Black community—within which it is embedded. As a private club the organization is not open to everyone, and its exclusivity makes some outsiders see the Club as “bougie” and “elitist,” claims members acknowledge yet firmly deny. Much to his liking, Ellis quickly realized the irrelevance of status to sociability among members. Contradictory to his initial perceptions of the Club as possibly being “stuffy,” he learned that “everyone can get it.” By talking shit members are not simply minimizing status differentiation among themselves, but also in relation to the larger Black community. Through humor members are deconstructing personal egos and elite status at the group level to respectively further organizational efficiency and shape how they subjectively understand themselves in relation to other Blacks. Thus, talking shit, or put-down humor broadly, not only enhances solidarity among group members by minimizing interpersonal status hierarchies (Murphy 2017), but allows small groups to collectively bolster cohesion with higher order cultural subgroups.

Humor’s symbolic power lies in its ability to use the ambiguous boundaries of the “real world” to foster a culture where members have the capacity to “reverse and revalue myth[s]” associated with structural relations within a “nonreal” framework (Linstead 1985, 762–3). While humor may not prove consequential for restructuring the social order, the process through which it unfolds permits opportunities for introspection and a spectrum of intense emotional expression. Just as reality play leverages the incongruities of reality work for amusement (Flaherty 1984), reality work uses their exposure to reciprocally unpack their meaning. As interaction shifts between humorous and serious discourse otherwise ambiguous boundaries are contemplated, providing opportunities to interpret the complexities constituting social identity.

The predominance of reality play enables groups to experience and cultivate Simmel’s (1971) three sociable values of joy, relief, and vivacity. More specifically, the mutual experience of group pleasures (Podilchak 1985; Fine and Corte 2017) centered on a transgressive style of joking enables a potent yet flexible culture of hilarity to develop, allowing group members to emotionally articulate feelings and topics from the intimately personal to the collectively joyful. Social situations defined by a culture of hilarity not only foster positive feelings of attachment through emotional management (Francis 1994), but invert otherwise serious identity claims and norms to sustain conviviality. The trust, or in the case of the Founders Club, “tough skin,” humor requires and nurtures enables episodic breaks in reality play, permitting emotional relief through reality work. As such, cultures of hilarity help forge intense emotional bonds by laying them bare to provocative jocularity.

A culture of hilarity as such is not unique to the Founders Club. The privacy offered by the clubhouse certainly provides them with opportunities and privileges to play with prejudice by teasing each other about their skin tone and using stereotypes regarding Black male endowment without repercussions. Sharing space, experiences (as upwardly mobile Black men), and the purpose of sociability also strengthens the group’s sense of social identity (Walsh 2003). Beyond these factors, cultures of hilarity will be more likely to arise among groups with strong yet liminal social identities consistently laying bare incongruities of the social structure to comicality and earnest reflection.

This article contributes to research on humor by exploring how it emerges within and shapes small group culture in the context of social position. The ambiguous character of social identity serves as a subject of jocularity, enabling group members to collectively interpret their place within the social world and negotiate a continuum of emotions while maintaining sociability. Extending into the humorous realm of social interaction in an elite Black social setting demonstrates the class and status dynamics informing Black humor and general processes of reality play.

Lastly, the case of the Founders Club demonstrates how marginalized groups use humor to enable solidarity maintenance, group catharsis, and joy. Humor grounded in shared culture and experience support bonds and teasing affirms these ties by subsequently serving as a signal of belongingness and allowing for collective action. Reprieve from the oppressions constituting marginalization can be accomplished by engaging in group laughter. Together, these dynamics promote the “affective interests” (Bonilla-Silva 2019, 7) of marginalized groups rather than reinforce a hierarchy of emotions where the feelings of racial minorities are subordinated. In other words, humor can produce positive feelings by inverting the emotions deriving from negative racialized experiences. For the Founders Club the product is intimate Black joy, built on culturally-specific sources of pleasure and pain. For other marginalized groups the causes and mechanisms will may differ, but the outcome likely remains the same.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I thank Lucius Couloute, Townsand Price-Spratlen, Vincent Roscigno, Kara Young, and two anonymous reviewers for their feedback on earlier drafts of this work.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biography

Joseph A. Guzman is a doctoral student in sociology at the Ohio State University. His research interests include race and ethnicity and dynamics of race and class within the Black community and its social organizations. Guzman’s ongoing ethnography of a private Black men’s social club examines how sociability shapes the construction of Black masculinity and the tensions of navigating race- and class-based identities at the small group level.

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