I’ve had the epiphany that I hate most black comedy…

… now before you get all twisted up listen. In the last couple of days I’ve had either Comedy Central or BET (yes, I know why am I allowing BET to stay onscreen longer than 10 seconds) during Russell Simmons Def Comedy Jam at night.

The reason I have come to this conclusion is that most black comedians take the following routines and beat it into the ground:

1.) How blacks are so inherently different than white folks in every aspect of everyday life.

2.) How blacks are different than [insert ethnic group here] and how blacks do it better

3.) Living in the ghetto

4.) How living in the ghetto has made them so much better equipped for life than their white/other ethnicity counterparts.

5.) Drug culture [both selling and using]

6.) The differences in black men/women and their white/other ethnicity counterparts

7.) Baby daddy/baby momma, going to the club to get laid, and skanky women/stupid men

8.) My man’s in jail/he’s a pimp etc

and the list goes on

And liberally saturated among these “jokes” are the words nigger, ho, bitch, motherfucker, etc. I guess I’ve either outgrown this stupid shit that passes for comedy or I’m just not into comedians being forced into a niche’, i.e: you’re a black comedian so you are relegated to the above list and cannot stray from that sphere of material or else you are no longer a black comedian.

Or if you talk about other topics you are *amazing gasp* just a comedian who is funny. There is such a broad range of humor to be exploited, used, and manipulated for laughs instead of just race based “humor”. I guess I just don’t get the humor since I didn’t grow up in the “hood” as it were so about half the list I just put up is eliminated in terms of what I’ll find funny.

The other part of why I’ve just called it quits is that I abhor the N-word and to hear it fall from the lips of people whose job it is to amuse me, so liberally and with no shame hurts me. It makes me weep for the future of black folks when the power of that word means nothing to them but a punch line or an accent.

For them, I leave this video… think on it people. Think about what you are doing when you drop the N-word like its nothing, when you pigeonhole yourself into being a black comedian whose only worth is to give the “black experience” to the audience.

Julian Curry on Def Poetry Jam… My people, my niggas