Dope Queens and Awkward Black Girls: Black Women and the Alternative Comedy Scene

Professor J. Finley, American Studies Program and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies Program, will give a talk as part of the 2016-17 Life of the Mind Series.

This talk is an exploration of black women comics who are attached to the alternative comedy scene, primarily in New York City, and the exciting ways in which the comedy they are producing and communities they are forging in the process are expanding the boundaries of the black stand-up tradition. I will explore some of the ways black women doing alt-comedy foster more nuanced understandings of black women’s multifarious experiences of everyday life, experiences that have historically been elided, trivialized, or, worst of all—universalized. My goal is to give black women comics performing in the alt-scene due credit as being fundamentally rooted in the black comic tradition, while at the same time engage in critical analysis of their cultural production at the intersection of studies of new directions in black comedy and the alternative comedy scene.