Notes on Comedy, Cultural Fingerprints, and Blacktags in the Twitter era
Hi there. Headline is a little hifalutin, sorry. But I was quoted in the NY Times on the subject of Black people using Twitter, and predictably there's been some backlash, erm, BLACKLASH.
The dynamics of "blacklash" are nuanced and sensitive enough to require a dedicated post sometime in the future. I was originally going to discuss it here, right now (f it, we'll do it live!). But my full-on responses to the original questions about whether there's a racial divide on twitter were TL;DR enough that I'll just save the subject for later.
For now, I've paraphrased the original questions to protect the journalist. and I hope my notes add some more color and context to the conversation, but also help w/r/t transparency in how these these pieces are written.
this was all one email response to a handful of questions:
First, I should say that I'm not on Twitter at the moment. I imagine myself as part of an across-the-board trend of "normals" going to Twitter more for information and updates. both casually and for dedicated research. so personally, i have been scouting more per the book and new writer gig. but generally, especially in the circles i sometimes hang in, I'm light on info w/r/t the mechanics of Twitter and hashtag memes that become trending topics. how the broader algorithms work. There was the high profile slate article on black people and twitter last summer, and I'd probably just abide by that reporting for the science of trending topics angle. but on the cultural dna front...
here are my answers to your questions. I erred on the side of the conversation, but feel free to whittle down and take whatever letter or punctuation mark works for you.
1. Notes on what i make of the trend: I don't think there's much more of a reveal than young black people making jokes, at the heart of it. there's a cultural conditioning at play, yes, the same way a tumblr meme, or a loosey-goosey comment thread on a site like The Awl has definite white cultural fingerprints. I think on the internet this is illustrated best by exclamation points usage (my post linked). more recently, a tumblr writer I enjoy, tyler coates, wrote this post complaining about an article on the new Jane site. and in the big ocean of internet content, it's innocuous. but up-close you can deconstruct it for the currency that works on tumblr. there's the voice, and the usage of caps, and the "I. Can't." formulation, all very "white culture" to my reading. not to say it doesn't translate -- which will lead to question #2, is it funny -- but the beauty of language, and the bubble-busting of Trending Topics allows us to more easily see the infinite array of choices in how we talk, couch ideas, etc. borges said something like "to speak is to fall into tautology" mcluhan probably said something relevant too, heh...so i guess what i make of it, as someone who branded/bylined as The Assimilated Negro, is that I'm fascinated and amazed that more often the cultural trend pieces highlight the cultural differences over the human similarities. to me it's much more of a cultural conditioning matrix at play, another somewhat related blog of mine, on black people boob video vs. white people boob video stabs at that. and so the hashtag meme joke that pokes fun at the new jane pratt magazine doesn't exist as an issue of cultural interest and priority (more white internet users will know jane mag and sassy), but even if per wikipedia information age, everyone knows the same stuff, then the joke formulation would still look different. #janesnothittingitright, #uknowurwhitegirlfriendhastogowhen ...are off the cuff riffs.
2. notes on whether it's funny: this is the beauty of comedy. a good joke can walk through territory riddled with cultural landmines, engulfed in racial flamewars, and the laugh creates an insulated oasis. jokes are like hurt lockers. so for me, like anything else, it's hit or miss. per the coates tumblr. "I. Can't." makes me laugh. but i know some of that is the assimilation talking.
now i took a bit of an internet break not too long ago, and it's probably a little fresh and novel for me. that sort of formulation, like with the exclamation points, or something like "Shots Fired!" gets meme-y and old quickly. but it's usually a LOL the first or second time around. reading the hashtags, i find it similar.
i also think with the hashtags you chose. looking at them some are more Ghetto Comedy Voice than others. like i thought #itshardwhen was going to be ghetto dick jokes. more twitter version of "that's what she said" stuff. but when i clicked it was more spiritual affirmation. "it gets better", type stuff. this does raise the continuum of comedy and spirituality that might be more ostensible in the black community. Tyler Perry. Steve Harvey. a lot of people are making a living off of jokes, and then praying to god after. so some of the hashtags play on that continuum as well, maybe.
3. notes on how it starts: i guess this is probably more a mechanics of twitter question. but it does make me think about how i, as a poor black kid raised in the south bronx, before going off to a boarding school, there were no internet communities for me to squirrel away in. no anonymous message boards to rant and rage on. my father was a musician. and by high school i had the seeds of a hip hop group agenda that i would cultivate going forward. so maybe for me it would never have been as relevant. but before the music, i read and watched tv, and had limited options otherwise. for an old TONY article i once wrote about how it was interesting that when you got to college there was often a natural self-segregation in the cafeteria/dining room. liberal arts college is the idealized melting pot, and i wouldn't say it doesn't do the cultural mindmeld stuff, but the self-segregation that happens on a college campus would indicate it's not just old people that hold on to cultural provincialism. gays want to talk to gays. ethnic minorities to other ethnic minorities, etc.
4. notes on whether "blacktags" are work or not: i definitely wouldn't attribute any "work" there. you and I might be doing the work -- and I don't discount our work, at least on the good days -- but in reading the twitter tea leaves it'd be dangerous to attribute too much "purpose" or self-consciousness(?) outside of the literal "making jokes on twitter", i think. it's like the thinkpieces on Odd Future. or any young celeb sensation. you can be a genius or prodigy when young, but you're still young, and thus inexperienced in the ways of the world.
5. notes on the relevancy of Chris Rock or Dave Chappelle: Mentioning Rock and Chappelle strikes me as relevant in that as soon as you mention them I hear The Voice. I can hear Rock going into a variation of his "black people and n's" riff (didn't know it had reached wikipedia citation status!). I can hear Chappelle giggling while repeating some of the more amusing hashtags. I think there's a Black Comedy voice, an amalgam of those guys along with others from the Def Comedy Jam era. martin lawrence is in there. chris tucker. bernie mac. a lot of lowbrow ghetto humor, said with an irreverent lighthearted tone. almost like a form of genre fiction. i imagine some of these memes and threads use that voice, probably subconsciously. just like internet writers have been influenced by the snark-backslash-exclamation point vernacular of the internet. and just as literary fiction writers are influenced by the canon. on an individual level a canon is always relative. rock had a riff on not finding that girl who likes seinfeld and wu tang clan. that also indicates canon influence. he got to be influenced by cosby, wu tang clan, toni morrison, oprah, etc. i have some of that, but also some boarding prep school pedigree in there. but the key is that it's there, and subjective, and we're often not consciously aware of our influences, etc.
....I imagine rock and chappelle as comics abide by anything that makes them laugh. and they were always open-minded so i don't see them hating on the new technology. as a writer it's a daunting time, but it's also cool that there's so many ways to experiment and test out material. the mechanics of what they're doing, and how they're using their brain is pretty close to what professional joke writers do. the kids, i imagine, just don't have the professional obligation and conditioned work ethic of it all. like most young people. some of the blogging is new rapping angle comes from realizing my brain has a lot of thoughts, flares, etc, and at some time i was conditioned to direct those idea-flares into a musical idea, or a lyrical idea. and as i started blogging, writing professionally, i realized the same flare could be coded differently and work in a whole different platform. maybe that was just personal naivete, but i bet same percentage of folks who end up doing standup out of the population at large is similar to the percentage of people on twitter who might become joke writers for tracy morgan, rock, or somesuch. some people do it out of boredom, some do it cause they need to, or really enjoy the craft of it.
this element of it also taps into reading it as a digital form of The Dozens, snaps. i think that was part of the slate piece. and it's relevant. but i think at this point we should see The Dozens as also being like figuring out a crossword, or playing angry birds, sudoku. whatever puzzle or brainteaser works for you, funny or otherwise, it's all mental stimulation/exercising.
6. notes on whether the trend is progressive: i've probably answered this in the excess above. it's tough to call any specific joke, thread, meme progressive. maybe the term itself is getting outdated as we're getting more fluid over modular as a society. categories to my mind are getting tougher and tougher. everyone's a fluid mix of various x's and o's. i think it's a liberated time though. very exciting. and those hashtag memes are part of the energy.
