{"product_id":"9780190870089","title":"To Be Real : Truth and Racial Authenticity in African American Standup Comedy by Lanita Jacobs","description":"To Be Real: Truth and Racial Authenticity in African American Standup Comedy examines Black standup comedy over the past decade as a stage for understanding why notions of racial authenticity--in essence, appeals to \"realness\" and \"real Blackness\"--emerge as a cultural imperative in African American culture. Ethnographic observations and interviews with Black comedians ground this telling, providing a narrative arc of key historical moments in the new millennium. Readers will understand how and why African American comics invoke \"realness\" to qualify nationalist 9\/11 discourses and grapple with the racial entailments of the war, overcome a sense of racial despair in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, critique Michael Richards' [\"Kramer's\"] notorious rant at The Laugh Factory and subsequent attempts to censor their use of the n-word, and reconcile the politics of a \"real\" in their own and other Black folks' everyday lives. Additionally, readers will hear through audience murmurs, hisses, and boos how beliefs about racial authenticity are intensely class-wrought and fraught. Moreover, they will appreciate how context remains ever critical to when and why African American comics and audiences lobby for and\/or lampoon jokes that differentiate the \"real\" from the \"fake\" or \"Black folks\" from so-called \"niggahs.\" Context and racial vulnerability are critical to understanding how and why allusions to \"racial authenticity\" persist in the African American comedic and cultural imagination.\u003cbr\u003eBinding: Paperback \/ softback","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56225287078261,"sku":"9780190870089","price":26.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780190870089.jpg?v=1762229840","url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/products\/9780190870089","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}