There’s plenty of fun to be had without mocking black people

I reversed the trajectory of the glove – and there they were, laughing, shouting and dancing with furious intent. About seven or eight browned-up Michael Jacksons, costumes picked from the Thriller era. They waved joyfully at me.

I didn’t know where to look, so I concentrated on the Smurfs, the Marios, the air hostesses and the other 80s get-ups. Eventually, the collected Jacksons drifted offn to the bar.

Afterwards, we complained to our bookers – and their response was instant and impeccable. A corporate edict about outlawing offensive costumes was issued, along with an assurance this would be rigorously enforced. But the complexity of the moment has never left me. A band of white Scots (with, at the time, a black American drummer), drawing deeply and lovingly from the well of soul, jazz, funk and blues.

And before them, a bunch of minstrelled revellers, doing massively inexpert moonwalks, as they blew out their south-west-located, service-and-retail lives.

I’m observing, and robustly supporting, the current wave of comedy removals from our broadcast digital archives. Little Britain most spectacularly, but also League of Gentleman, The Mighty Boosh, Bo’ Selecta, Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway and others. All of these have contained blackfaced white comedians, portraying real, historical or fictional black characters. (And wait for the Two Ronnies revelations.) Given that George Floyd’s death was like a violation and degradation of vision itself – how can we even see this cruel oppression, how can it even be happening? – the media companies’ response is deeply understandable.

They have the power to scour their servers and remove those images that turn black people into objects, not subjects (or targets, not citizens). Let them exert it.

And what’s going on in these shows is, literally, objectification. Mounds of latex are used to make up the shuddering, bulbous masses of Little Britain’s Desiree DeVere or Pastor Jesse King, Bo’ Selecta’s Craig David or Trisha Goddard.

For the League of Gentleman’s Papa Lazarou, or the Mighty Boosh’s Spirit of Jazz, the oldest and earliest conventions of minstrelsy suffice. That is, highlighted lips, whitened-out eyes, weird and erratic behaviour. There’s so much to account for here. One element may certainly be the growing emptiness of the “alternative” impulse in UK comedy.

It’s a long way from Lenny Henry watching his first gig at the Comedy Store in the late 1970s and seeing how comedy could leap free from trading in sexual and racial stereotypes (which was his own act at the time). Yet being able to “play with everything” (hello, postmodern air-quotes) always risked the old prejudices slipping back in, however “ironic” the performance.

You look at the liberal and progressive David Baddiel in the mid-90s, blacking up to rib the Premier player Jason Lee, in the hit show Fantasy Football League. Rasta locks sprout from a pineapple on Baddiel’s head (into which Frank Skinner dips a drinking straw).

The schtick about Lee’s misfiring performance as a striker even trades on one of the core tropes of the minstrel routine: black clumsiness. You genuinely wonder: What. Were. You. Both. Thinking? The history of blackface and minstrelsy provide no excuse but at least the beginnings of an explanation for its persistence. One that might even connect those hapless members of our coastal gig audience to this awakening and enlightening moment.

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As a brace of historians have demonstrated over the last few decades, minstrelsy literally started up as a cultural response to the end of the American Civil War. It answered a demand from white working-class audiences of the time, who (in the words of musicologist Dale Cockrell) “felt squeezed politically, economically, and socially from the top, but also

from the bottom”. That is, from the black population newly emancipated from slavery, seeking economic and social progress.

THE National Museum of African American History and Culture states it plainly. “Comedic performances of ‘blackness’ by whites in exaggerated costumes and make-up cannot be separated fully from the racial derision and stereotyping at its core. By distorting the features and culture of African Americans – including their looks, language, dance, deportment and character –white Americans were able to codify whiteness as its antithesis, across class and geopolitical lines.”

And that whiteness justified a whole range of social segregations, laws and policings towards their new black fellow citizens. From recent American commentary, you may have heard fears that the country is returning to the “Jim Crow” era of racism against black people.

What that actually refers to is the character created by the first-ever white minstrel performer, Thomas Dartmouth Rice in 1830. The “black codes” that suppressed the rise of black Americans were named after a character whose song Jump Jim Crow shows him as violent, rapacious, superstitious, criminal, cowardly. How expedient.

Alongside Crow, I discovered, was a minstrel character called Zip Coon, first performed by George Dixon in 1834. According to the website

black-face.com, Zip “made a mockery of free blacks. An arrogant, ostentatious figure, he dressed in high style and spoke in a series of malaprops and puns that undermined his attempts to appear dignified”.

It’s easy to see the persistence of both these stereotypes in the most recent blackface archive that’s been dug up in the last few days. And the connection currently being made – between a worldwide protest that black lives matter and the deep historic and cultural ignorance which made them matter much less in the first place – will hopefully see the definitive end of the practice.

History has further explanations for us. When I once interviewed the black cultural historian Mel Watkins in New York, he reminded me that minstrelsy was a vehicle for many black performers, not just white, in the late 19th/early 20th century.

The great black historian WEB Du Bois may have said “the more highly trained we become, the less we can laugh at Negro comedy” yet as Watkins also pointed out in his book On The Real Side, performers such as Bessie Smith, Bert Williams, Ma Rainey and Josephine Baker used the minstrel circuit as their proving ground.

Minstrelsy certainly provided the cultural programming behind laws and practices oppressing black Americans. Was it, to some small degree, also a kind of meeting place? Historians such as Eric Lott point out that Tom Rice often offered alternative lyrics to Jump Jim Crow (here rendered in the original spelling): “Should dey get to fighting/Perhaps de blacks will rise/For deir wish for freedom/is shining in deir eyes.”

That white audiences of black entertainments should adore what they simultaneously demean is indeed a strange yearning and one not confined to minstrelsy (take contemporary rap or sports). Through it, black and white societies “touched while maintaining distance”, says historian Marc Aronson, “connecting through performance while living separate lives”.

It’s an odd, poor meeting place, though. Maybe better would be a full and equal citizenship – where the white majority begins to recognise the need for material reparations for colonial slavery (as Glasgow University made a bold step towards recently), alongside an even deeper uprooting of our racial blindnesses and assumptions.

This would be a far more robust act of the imagination than asserting a free speech right to comedically abuse any human you like. Sometimes, you know, progress actually happens. The ground you stand on is raised higher and wider. Things can’t carry on as before.

I hope, before the next big weekender bender, some of this news is tumbling around in the minds of the potentially blackface-minded. There’s much fun to be had, folks, and let’s be having it! But it doesn’t require a punchdown that’s been going on for far too many centuries. Onwards and upwards.