The Black Pack: Comedy, Race, and Resistance

Actor, filmmaker, and scholar Great (African American cinema studies, San Francisco State Univ.; coeditor of Black Cinema & Visual Culture: Art and Politics in the 21st Century) deftly examines an era when a group of Black actors, writers, and comedians met and collaborated on a brand of subversive comedy that generated laughs while calling out the hypocrisy and absurdity of racism. This group, known as “the Black Pack,” consisted of Paul Mooney, Keenan Ivory Wayans, Robert Townshend, Arsenio Hall, and Eddie Murphy. All shared their talents through stand-up shows, sketch comedy, and films and became major power players in the Hollywood scene of the late 1980s. Great argues that this type of comedy continues a Black American tradition from the days of enslavement, in which enslaved people alternated between performing subservience to white people and vehement mockery of their ignorance and cruelty. This became an active (and safe) form of resistance, a tradition that continues today. Great gives the talented men of the Black Pack their due in each chapter, while providing social and cultural lessons.