Sophie Tucker was also a Coon Shouter before evolving into the Red Hot Mama stage. Some of herraunchy comedy began in character as a black woman, though it came to be an old Jewish woman.
Shirley Q. Liquor- a white man who does a black drag act- is the only popular blackface performer I can think of today. Whoopi Goldberg and RuPaul have both praised his act, but he’s picketed at many of his club dates. (He’s undeniably funny in character.)
The minstrel show deconstructed, as it were.
In a way (bear with me here) it’s sad the minstrel show has passed from the scene. It was the one uniquely American form of live stage entertainment ever invented. Serious theater is older than Sophocles, music is older still, Vaudeville was just American music-hall, Broadway musicals derived from Old World operettas, jazz-dance from ballet, but the minstrel show was an American original. For most of American history, white America regarded black America with a curious mixture of fear, contempt, and affection. In the minstrel show, at any rate, we see only contempt and affection: The blacks are not to be taken seriously, but they are in a way to be envied, as free spirits untrammeled by civilized social conventions.
Sampiro, I <3 U and stuff, but if that “Zwarte Piet” is from Spain I need a new passport.
In Spain you used to get something similar to blackface (dark base makeup but IIRC no exaggerated lips, at least in the ones I’ve seen) on January 5th “receiving the Magi into town” parades; it became obsolete as soon as we started having actual black dudes available to take the role of Baltasar. You still get blackface in cases where there aren’t black people available, but in any case it’s intended to be a representation of Africa - simplified and superficial (it’s for the kids, not for a PhD in geography), but if it offends it’s by mistake (the guy who has been playing Baltasar at my mother’s parish on the Epiphany’s high Mass for some 25 years recently got told to drop the “Mamie” accent, on account that nowadays we all know black folk don’t sound like that - if that parish ever gets a black parishioner he is so getting volunteered for the role).
I remember that year when there were already black people living in my small town but Baltasar was a white guy: the major’s ears got burned through by all manner of folk demanding to know why had such a miscasting taken place. The first black player Pamplona’s soccer club had was received in the dressing room with “by the way, you’ll be playing Baltasar this year, are you familiar with the role?” He wasn’t, but he thought it was absolutely cool.
It’s acceptable in comedy, but would be frowned upon in a social setting. You probably shouldn’t black up before attending a dinner party for example.
In the UK the most well known variant was the Black and White Minstrel Show. It had been running since the 50s and entered the 70s still pretty much accepted. However, it didn’t make it out of the 70s still on television, it was cancelled in 1978.
So I guess in the UK the answer is “somewhere in the 70s”.
Does that matter? Armisen isn’t black, Obama is. I didn’t know Armisen’s background but I don’t think it’s better or worse if you get extra minority points.
Burton played Othello onstage in 1956. Olivier did Othello on stage in the early '60s and a film version came out in 1965. The rules were different for serious actors. That was especially true for British actors: they’d been playing Othello since Shakespeare wrote the play, and blackface was an American invention.
I still can’t believe Neil Diamond did it in The Jazz Singer. I realize that it’s a reference to Al Jolson’s minstrel shows and the original version of the film*, but it doesn’t play well at all in the period of Diamond’s movie. It drew pretty uniformly condemnatory statements in reviews of the film.
For that matter, I was troubled by Gene Wilder’s shoe polish-covered face in Silver Streak. I think they got more of a break because this film was intentionally a comedy.
So by circa 1980 movies were still doing it, but people were shifting guiltily in their seats.
Not only that, but black performers put on blackface to do minstrel shows for black audiences. Blackface in a minstrel show was part of the costume, much as clowns or mimes wear whiteface. Audiences of the time – black and white – didn’t see black men; they saw minstrels (much as we see someone in whiteface as a mime).
Minstrel shows weren’t entirely demeaning stereotypes (Mr. Bones was a classic trickster figure), but there were plenty of them to go around, and they overwhelmed the less offensive portions of the show. People began to see the characters as portraying Blacks, not minstrels, and the shows lost favor (also partly because of the rise of movies as entertainment – they went the same route as vaudeville). Even into the 50s, though, they were fondly remembered, but by white audiences exclusively.
Note that link that Brainglutton posted. Venon and Ryan’s introduction recalls many great minstrel performers – including Bert Williams, a Black comedian who performed in blackface, but who avoided racial stereotypes in his act. Williams was considered by other comedians of the time as one of the greatest, and Booker T. Washington said of him, “He has done more for his race than I have.”
The whole blackface thing hasn’t been funny since 1865…IMHO
Well, there is a definite ontological linkage here between “blacks” and “minstrels.” The minstrel show was the product of a society where the finest black in America, even a larned skolar like Zip Coon, was an obviously inferior creature next to Huck Finn’s Pap. And because they were inferior, their stage portrayals could be minstrels, mimes, mummers, all-licensed fools, zanies, Harlequins – that is, characters who, in an age of very stiff social conventions and mores, could say or do anything and get away with it, however vulgar or shocking, because they had no higher social expectations to meet and no dignity to lose.
Funny isn’t everything. IEHO.
It may be a factor that in both cases, not much tint was required to approximate Obama’s and Jackson’s skin tone. I suspect they’d be a lot more reluctant to have a white performer imitate someone with very dark skin.
I just thought of two current examples of white comedians playing black people: Frank Caliendo as Charles Barkley and Jimmy Kimmel as Karl Malone. As far as I know there’s no hue and cry about these because they’re playing specific people and mocking their characteristics, and not doing any racial stuff.
Random memories:
The very first time I learned what ‘blackface’ was was on a TV comedy with Nell Carter. She played nanny for a white family. One of the daughters convinced the youngest son to dance in blackface at Nell’s church. And then we all learned how very very bad blackface is. I’d estimate this as an early 80’s show. Based on this I’d also estimate that that is the time when blackface==bad became common. In other words, they wouldn’t make a very special show about it if it was commonly known and generally accepted would they? I can’t imagine a modern show addressing blackface in one of their shows.
I agree that SNL et al. who perform as someone else avoids the line since the bits are about the celebrity and not about race. It’s equivalent to a dark haired guy wearing a blond wig to impersonate someone blond. I’m not even sure if it qualifies if they aren’t pigmenting their skin.
When Miss Saigon (musical) premiered, there was a small amount of protest from the Asian community about a white actor being cast in the lead male role, who is Asian. Most of the protest focused on jobs for Asian actors rather than some insidious racial insensitivity. Though I recall that the production also stopped Asian-ifying the actor’s appearance in response.
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When Miss Saigon (musical) premiered, there was a small amount of protest from the Asian community about a white actor being cast in the lead male role, who is Asian. Most of the protest focused on jobs for Asian actors rather than some insidious racial insensitivity. Though I recall that the production also stopped Asian-ifying the actor’s appearance in response.
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One of the most irksome things about that to me was one of the ringleaders was the (not Asian) Tony Randall, who in Seven Faces of Dr. Lao portrayed an Asian stereotype more offensive than Mickey Rooney’s character in Breakfast at Tiffanys. The hooplah centered specifically on Jonathan Pryce who had originated the role of the Engineer (a Franco-Vietnamese pimp) but whose successors have almost all been Asian, albeit they’ve run the gamut (Filipino, Japanese, Hawaiian-Chinese, etc.). I’ve wondered if they added the “halfbreed” slur and the lines about his father being a Frenchman since the first production.
What’s hysterical is that the show has been released to high schools and there are several clips on YouTube from earnest all-white-teenager productions. (One random example of many.)
Re: SNL- Maya Rudolph, who is biracial, used to darken her skin with makeup to play some black characters and lighten it to play some white characters.
I don’t remember the name of the show but I remember the episode. He began to sing Al Jolson’s “Swanee” and abruptly got pulled off stage. Right after, the kid said, “What’s wrong?! I was imitating Al Jolson! He was a black singer!” (This kid being no older than eight and not up on certain facts of cultural history.)
While in college, I went to see a play at school set in the 1920’s. Between the acts, they would play songs from the era. When an Al Jolson song came up, the old lady asked me if I knew who that was. I said “Al Jolson.” and then because I’m a jerk (not ignorant), I added, “That famous Black singer.” She patted my knee and said, “He wasn’t Black. He was a nice Jewish boy.”
Patrick Stewart has played Othello without makeup in a show with an otherwise all-black cast. It’s kind of the opposite of blackface, but it’s still also kind of a racial stunt. I don’t think it drew any criticism.
In Germany, blackface is still an element in the holiday of Epiphany on January 6th. There’s no caroling on Christmas itself, but on Epiphany groups of children around the age of ten go from house to house representing the three wise men, one of whom is black. You can see blackface in the picture of the wikipedia article.