Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai explicate comedy’s role in undermining and creating categories of race and racial identities. By extension, comedy and the telling of jokes serve a political purpose. In the case of BlacKkKlansman, the lie detector scene presents several instances of tasteless jokes being told both by the white supremacist as well as Adam Driver’s character, Flip. Flip is a police officer who’s infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan, and pretends to share the ideologies of the white supremacists, one of whom is interrogating him in this scene. The purpose of tasteless jokes is to offend and this is heavily evinced in the conversation both characters have about black people, Jews and the holocaust. In using derogatory terminology as well as denying the holocaust ever happened, this scene deals with problematic statements that question the very status of a joke. The audience’s awareness about Flip being a Jew and supporting the Blacks softens the blow of this scene. However, the tension within the scene remains intact, becoming stronger with each attempt at make a tasteless racial joke. As Albert Laguna refers to William Cheng’s notion of the “comedic alibi,” he states that if “something is funny by consensus,” then the “burden of responsibility becomes diffuse, soothing moral qualms along the way.”[1] By contrast, the lie detector test scene is by no means funny, and is extremely uncomfortable to watch. Going against the grain of Cheng’s ideology, BlacKkKlansman does not provide any sort of soothing respite or relaxation to the audience. Instead, such tasteless jokes, highlight the role of comedy or racial jokes, in critiquing racism itself. It not only makes the audience question the ideologies being propagated by white supremacists in the United States but also increases the audience’s burden of responsibility. By showcasing such anti-black and anti-semitic racist jokes, the film exposes ongoing everyday racism. In this way, comedy becomes political as jokes both denigrate an individual or community but also serve as a call for action.
[1] Albert Sergio Laguna, “On the Comedy of Race,” Cultural Critique 111 (2021), p. 116
This scene arouses us significant tension as well because we know the stakes here and we’re hoping that the guy with the gun will believe Flip. The jokes come off, to us at least, as desperate and unfunny since Flip is trying to convince the guy with the gun to believe him.
While on the complete other end of the spectrum, this post reminded me of the movie White Chicks (2004), in the scene where Marlon Wayans and Shawn Wayans say the n-word and allow the other ‘white girls’ to say it as well. While it is not political, to the audience the scene is awkward and uncomfortable but is supposed to be funny because they are Black Men dressed as White women