The Counterpublic Papers vol. 7 no. 5

Over the past several years I’ve mentioned how important comedy is to black popular culture (and through that, black politics) although it’s largely gone unexamined. Over the past two weeks the conversations black folk have had around Dave Chappelle’s final Netflix concert The Closer (which serves as the final show in what could be called a Chappelle Netflix Tetrology which begins with Dave Chappelle, continues with Dave Chappelle E.qua.nim.i.ty & the bird revelation and then Dave Chappelle Sticks & Stones, and then concludes with The Closer) have had me thinking even more about how one might go about examining the politics of comedy. Chappelle is one of a growing group of comedians who have become, in the wake of #metoo and the rise of “cancel culture”, concerned with a certain type of policing. And this concern is the concern animating The Closer, which is why we should take it seriously.

But what does it mean to examine the politics of comedy? What would that look like? How might we approach a comedy concert the way we might approach an essay or a novel or a film? Here’s a newsletter stab at it. Just as the musical concert has as its fundamental unit the song, I think the primary unit of the comedy concert is the “bit”. Now these don’t simply come one after the other, rather they are often connected by specific types of transitions, which may entail in both the music and comedy concert performers talking to the audience or improvising (or more likely seeming to improvise) in order to segue to the next song/bit.

Further, these bits are strung together in a way to elicit certain types of affective responses, with these responses designed to generate an affective arc. The comics good enough to make a living off of comedy know how to effectively string together a series of bits to produce almost any type of laughter they’d like. The comics good enough to make a living off of comedy knows how to assess whether their bits are evoking the laughter they desire. And then, as comics perform in front of an audience, I imagine the comic knows how to generate bits that include as well as bits that exclude—here I’d include bits designed to go after a particularly bad heckler.

What types of political claims do these bits (and the transitions between them) make, individually? How do these individual claims knit together to make larger claims? How do these individual claims use a combination of reason and affect to generate their power? How do these claims work alongside “common sense”? How do they push against it? Finally, and there’s more but I don’t want to spend too much time on this, what type of political community do they create?    

In The Closer, Dave Chappelle juxtaposes two communities (the LGBTQ community and the black community) against one another. The problem is that these two communities are not mutually exclusive. He comedically constructs them as if they are, which then makes the political claim (that “LGBTQ community” in engaging in “cancel culture” is harming “the black community”) easier to take. Although arguably the brilliance of The Dave Chappelle Show is contained in The Closer, in The Closer we see that brilliance deployed to simplify and exclude rather than complicate and include. (For other takes on this read Kenyon Farrow Roxanne Gay Saeed Jones.)

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Two weeks ago Johns Hopkins President Ron Daniels released What Universities Owe Democracy. Over the last several years, but particularly after Trump’s election and Black Lives Matter organizing, university administrators across the country have been engaged in hard discussions about the role of the American university in this specific moment. What Universities Owe Democracy represents the most notable book length stab at it.

It makes sense that a Hopkins President would attempt to take a leadership role in figuring this out. Afrter all, Hopkins is the first American research university, has the oldest continuous academic seminar in America (“The Seminar” held on Mondays in the History Department) and has one of the two oldest political science departments (I think Columbia was first). Further, given Hopkins unique geographical location--sitting between the higher institutions of the north and the south—it was perfectly situated to bring together the North and the South in the wake of the Civil War (indeed, it was one of a number of universities arguably created to deal with the stick ideational problems presented by that war—if the most modern republic could simultaneously generate the bloodiest civil war in the history of the world, what did that mean for modernity?). Finally Hopkins is in the midst of building an Agora Institute created for the purpose of understanding and solving the growing international problem of political polarization.

Yet and still.

If we were to look at Hopkins’ relationship with Baltimore and then again with how the university governs itself, we’d see two dynamics that should give us pause. First, while Hopkins provides a range of services to Baltimore, the one thing it doesn’t provide is taxes. Second, while Hopkins touts democracy to its students, it doesn’t quite practice it--as can be seen not only in the attempt to resurrect a private police force that by all accounts only has support amongst a select number of students, faculty, and staff, and little support amongst Baltimore community members, but also in its prominent role as a real estate developer.

More to come, but a preview of the text can be found here.

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I don’t normally use this newsletter to advertise, but in concluding I call your attention to three academic jobs (two open rank positions, and one postdoc based on a project that I’ll talk about in another issue) we’ve got at Hopkins for those of you who may be interested for one reason or another:

And:

• Working with Professors Spence and Shilliam in thematizing, organizing and moderating the seminars;

• Supervising graduate student fellows in their production of Seminar “afterlives”, primarily (but not solely) in the form of a public facing online-repository;

• Teaching one course per year through Hopkins’ Center for Social Concern, bringing community partners into the classroom as co-teachers of Hopkins students;

• Writing one research article directly related to the Seminar’s activities and content.

I’m on both committees and it’s my hope that with these three positions we bring in scholars who are as interested in pushing places like Hopkins to be more democratic as they are in scholarship.