Rolling – Blackness and Mediated Comedy

"Rolling offers a rigorous and absorbing exploration of the spaces where blackness, comedy, and media converge. Meticulously researched and wide ranging in scope, the essays assembled by Dr. Alfred Martin present an in-depth look at the myriad ways that Black humor has operated as a site of catharsis, social commentary, and resistance within popular media. Rolling is more than a study of Black humor and media: it is a celebration of one of the most enduring forms of Black culture."—Racquel Gates, author of Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture

"Alfred L. Martin, Jr. has constructed the most comprehensive collection of Blackness and humor to date. Black humor evokes deep feeling, bodily movement, and a cackling laughter from the Black interiority. Through its series of cultural, industrial, and political examinations, Rolling requires its readers to confront these emotions and to revisit and reframe theories of comedy that have historically privileged whiteness and heteropatriarchy. Readers of this text are prompted to ask themselves, what does it mean to laugh Black?"—Adrien Sebro, author of Scratchin' and Survivin': Hustle Economics and the Black Sitcoms of Tandem Productions