African American Comedy Film.

The first 200 words of this essay...

Banos 1

Angela Banos

WGS 300.50

14 October 2003

African American Comedy Film

Reid centers on the interaction of textual, sociopsychic and socioeconomic factors when describing African-American Comedy Film. Minstrel was formerly a popular stage show in which white performers with blackened faces sang, danced and joked. The three forms of race humor described by Reid are blackface, hybrid, and satiric minstrelsy. "Carwash", the comedy about the life of black workers in a carwash business, is an example of the second variety of minstrelsy. The movie deals with a number of race and gender issues that permit different readings of the same text.

Blackface minstrelsy consists of white people wearing a blackface and performing caricatures of African-Americans. Their lifestyle is objectified in this way. Hybrid minstrelsy, on the other hand, includes both white and black players. They share the textual construction that consists of an addresser, a black object of ridicule and a spectator. In "Carwash", the industry film is the addresser, a bunch of African-American employees in a carwash business is the object, and it is aimed to an interracial mainstream audience. For example, the cameo appearance of Professor