Because there sat, either in the audience or on the other side of the TV screen, white America. There is nothing like Negro humor. It is loud, profane, juicy, wondrous, scabrous, willful, tricky, and sometimes delivered in coded language. It is steeped, as well, in American history, in blackface and Jim Crow laws and segregation. And also in the stuttering integration we all still participate in.
Comedy is hard.
And when it is awash in racial battling, it is even harder. He held aloft a copy of his autobiography, titled nigger . It drew laughter, gales of it. He looked somber and spoke somberly, holding a piece of paper in his hands, reading from it. He talked of Negro rights and the long arc of history that was now circling the country regarding the Negro.