African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century
Satire is hard. As a genre that hinges on the hazy boundary between the literal and the figurative, it is vulnerable to distortion and misunderstanding. To master this particularly unforgiving form, satirists have to anticipate the ways an audience might see only the literal while missing how the figurative undermines it. In Spike Lee's film, Bamboozled (2000), a Black TV writer, frustrated that all of his shows that feature Black professionals and nuclear families are rejected, facetiously pitches a neo-minstrel show featuring a Black cast wearing blackface to protest the clamor for caricatured images of Blackness by TV audiences. The show gets picked up and becomes a hit. Not only does his attempt at satire fail to land, it leads to his demise when he, too, loses sight of his own biting critique. His satire (within Lee's own) fails because, to TV executives and fans of the show, caricatures of Blackness are indistinguishable from actual Black people — the critique is illegible to them. The neo-minstrel show in the film serves as a cautionary tale: when satire misses the mark, it can give new life to the very ideas it means to dismantle.
Boots Riley's debut film, Sorry to Bother You (2018), an inventive and whimsical takedown of racial capitalism, does satire well. The film's sharp wit and humor reveal not only the worst exploits of racial capitalism but the delights and rewards of collective, liberatory work. Set in Oakland, California, the film unfolds against a backdrop of sprawling homeless encampments under highway overpasses and on sidewalks, everyday scenes of poverty that, for many, are both familiar and unremarkable. Yet, not until Riley's satirical critique comes to the surface through his leaps into the absurd and the comical do we really see the suffering (and the shadow world behind the suffering) we live amid.
Unlike the TV writer in Bamboozled, Riley makes his satirical commentary legible even to the less ironically inclined. Sorry to Bother You shows us that capitalism runs on the exploitation of the many for the benefit of the few, and that maintaining control requires obedience, complacency, and acceptance of the status quo, demanding that workers "stick to the script" so that money continues to flow unabated to the wealthy. Rileyurges us to question these scripts, to imagine new ways to live that aren't contingent on the exploitation of others, to refuse the lie that consumption will bring happiness and ease, to forge a more just path forward built on solidarity and care, not greed — all with a knowing grin on his face.1
In the film, Cassius (or Cash) Green (LaKeith Stanfield) is unemployed and living in his uncle's garage when he gets an entry-level job as a telemarketer at RegalView. In a delightful cameo, Danny Glover plays a seasoned telemarketer named Langston, who reveals to Cash the secret to making a sale: using his white voice, a gimmick to convince people that consumption will bring happiness by masquerading the logics of capitalism through whiteness as a proxy for ease. Langston clarifies that a white voice entails not just using "proper" grammar or "sounding all nasal" but "sounding like you don't have a care, got your bills paid. You happy about your future. You about ready to jump in your Ferrari out there after you get off this call." He tells Cash, "It's not really a white voice. It's what they wish they sounded like. So it's like what they think they're supposed to sound like." After learning how to ventriloquize a white voice (to hilarious effect, I might add), Cash lures in so many customers that, amid a work stoppage organized by a fellow telemarketer, Squeeze (Steven Yeun), he accepts a promotion to become a Power Caller, an elite telemarketer who rakes in millions of dollars by selling enslaved labor for a company called WorryFree. In his rise to the top, Cash sells out his friends, becoming a scab when his comrades go on strike to demand better pay and benefits. At first, his motives are more laudable, but then he indulges in fresh suits, a swanky apartment, and a sports car. But when the WorryFree CEO, Steve Lift (Armie Hammer), offers Cash a job to control and manipulate a new breed of workers — a human-horse hybrid called Equisapiens that will be "stronger, more obedient, more durable, and therefore more efficient and profitable" — Cash comes to his senses and lays plans to take down RegalView and WorryFree.
Detroit (Cash's fiancé, played by Tessa Thompson) and Squeeze form the moral and political core of the film. They give expression to Riley's anti-racist, anti-capitalist radicalism. Detroit scrapes by, cobbling together several side gigs from twirling signs on street corners to logging in some hours at RegalView, but these jobs support her real work: art that defaces WorryFree billboards and draws the connections between the exploitation of Black labor and capitalism. Wealth holds little allure for Detroit. She is invested in the struggle, in her friendships, and in Cassius. A full life, for her, is steeped in love and creativity and community, not measured by fame or material possessions or influence, so when Cash crosses the picket line, Detroit calls him "morally emaciated" and ends their relationship, telling him, "You sell fucking slave labor, Cassius."
Squeeze also sheds light on the structures that produce ongoing labor struggles. At a rally ahead of the work stoppage at RegalView, Squeeze tells his fellow workers, "We make the profits and they don't share. If we're going to give them our day, we need to have enough to cover our basic necessities." He explains to Cash how capitalism is rigged; how holding out the possibility, however slim, of becoming a Power Caller keeps the other telemarketers from upsetting the system that exploits them; how the Power Callers make so much more money because what they sell is morally indefensible; how solidarity among workers is the only antidote to their exploitation.
Even without Detroit and Squeeze making the exploitation of racial capitalism plain, the callous greed of Lift is impossible to miss, for Riley's filmmaking reveals how the real world and one he imagines blend too easily around the edges. The public adulation of Lift's wealth and celebrity resembles the present fascination with celebrity entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Travis Kalanick, and yet Riley also makes visible the inner workings of what Saidiya Hartman has called "a racial calculus and a political arithmetic" that degrades Black people and churns out profits for the most powerful.2 When Cash asks, "So you're making half-human, half-horse fucking things so you can make more money?" Lift responds, "Yeah basically. I just didn't want you to think I was crazy — that I was doing this for no reason — because this isn't irrational." Through the profit motive of capitalism, unbridled by ethics, technological monstrosities that pass for innovation become a matter of rationality. Creating a stronger, more easily controlled Equisapien workforce becomes merely a matter of efficiency. More recently, in a truly bizarre and horrifying twist of life imitating art, the Los Angeles Police Department is investigating Hammer, the actor portraying Lift, for an alleged rape, while rumors of a sexual fetish involving cannibalism swirl around him as well. Hammer's life itself has turned into a satiric performance of the belligerent, controlling, unfeeling character he plays in the film — a character who tricks Cash into taking the "fusing catalyst" that turns people into Equisapiens and who threatens him at gunpoint to sign a contract. Hammer's career, however, has taken far more of a hit than that of his character, but we shall see how swiftly Hammer, heir to the Arm & Hammer fortune, finds a pathway to public forgiveness.3
Between the Lift's amorality and the Equiapiens, the film might seem absurd and farfetched . . . until it's not. WorryFree clearly resembles institutions we are familiar with — a plantation, a prison, a company town, a sweatshop, a factory. Today, corporations like Amazon aren't forcing warehouse workers to wear matching jumpsuits and live in prison-like barracks or to sign lifetime contracts or to forfeit their wages in exchange for housing and food.4 But corporations like Amazon and Google often operate like company towns, and exploit cheap labor abroad, and rely on contract laborers in the United States, and reward their equivalents to Power Callers with free gourmet meals, a fitness center, beach volleyball, and the like. Uber and DoorDash praise the gig economy for its supposed flexibility but don't talk about the permanent state of precarity it produces by profiting from a workforce that labors without health insurance, sick days, or unions. Sure, these corporations are not tricking unsuspecting men into participating in lab experiments that turn them into human-horse hybrids, but largely unfettered scientific entrepreneurship already poses real risks to a society in which ethics are an afterthought in the march to scientific advancement and more profitable business models. With this context in mind, the Equisapiens seem less preposterous, for Riley's vision is grounded in the familiar, the everyday, the ugly bits of capitalism that so many have grown accustomed to.
Riley's whimsy and his flights into the absurd ironically ground his film in the lived realities of actual workers and consumers because they are just familiar enough. When we catch glimpses of our world in the film, we can see with greater clarity how the harm that Riley makes so explicit pervades our world, too. The billboards and TV commercials for WorryFree, like Cash's white voice, resemble advertisements we see that promise us a life of ease and luxury, whether through playing the lottery or buying a new car. But WorryFree billboards sell a life of ease through enslavement, and they trade in a racism that pathologizes Blackness. The billboard that says, "Show the world that you are a responsible babydaddy. Sign Your Family Up for WorryFree Now," has a Black man sitting on a couch, holding a remote in one hand and a forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor in the other. The racist modes used to trap the most vulnerable are less obvious in many of the advertisements we see in our everyday lives, but Riley moves the subtext into the text, rendering the worst exploits of racial capitalism legible. Our billboards might not goad poor Black people into signing contracts that consign them to a lifetime of servitude, but the intent of these ads is often the same: promising a lifestyle structurally unavailable to most and trapping the most vulnerable among us instead.
Through absurdity, clever exaggeration, and strategic moments when Riley briefly lifts the satirical mask, he reveals both the horrors of racial capitalism (through the monstrous creation of a half-human, half-horse workforce) and the revolutionary possibilities of collective action (through an Equisapien uprising led by a newly Equisapien Cash who comes for Lift at his home). Riley recognizes that the underlying problem confronting those working to inspire radical change is that some things have become so deeply entrenched that, to jar the rest of us into recognizing this brutality, a turn to the absurd is necessary. The film ends before the revolution truly begins, leaving us to imagine our own collective "freedom dreams," to borrow a phrase from Robin D. G. Kelley's beautiful book of the same name, and to envision for ourselves what it means to be truly free.5
Audiences have often denuded radical satires of their radicalism, misconstrued their commentary, or not taken them seriously, especially satires that levy radical critiques and make you laugh. Sorry to Bother You maneuvers around these perils, not by summoning new, more clever expressions of sarcasm and irony but by occasionally naming these critiques explicitly and gently mocking those who need a punchline explained to them. After rejecting Lift's proposition to become a false leader of the Equisapiens (what Lift calls "the Equisapien Martin Luther King Jr." who will actually help WorryFree control the Equisapien workforce), Cash appears on several TV shows to expose the scandal that WorryFree is developing a human-horse hybrid workforce — that WorryFree is kidnapping and experimenting on men.6 He implores the public to call their congressmen. He urges the public to protest these inhumane practices. In response, Lift embraces the scandalous revelation as innovation, and the company stock skyrockets. Journalists describe the Equisapien experiments as "new scientific achievements" and extol Lift as a "genius CEO." Congress gets behind the "human enhancement" program as well. Protest becomes reduced to a meme, a viral moment, a joke, and a costume — hollow gestures that are inadequate to the task of uprooting systems of oppression. Cash returns to his comrades in the union apologetic and shamefaced about selling them out once he ascended to the ranks of the Power Callers, and he is frustrated by the nonresponse most people have to these shocking revelations about Equisapiens. Squeeze responds, "If you get shown a problem but have no idea how to control it, then you just decide to get used to the problem." By identifying the source of this complacency, Squeeze nudges Cash into action, prompting him to hatch a plan to stop the Power Caller scabs, who are protected by heavily armed private security guards, from crossing the picket line at RegalView. Riley, too, jostles his viewers ever so slightly out of their comfortable positions of inaction to (hopefully) replace apathy with resistance in the face of seemingly unmovable power.
Riley strategically places these instructive moments, making it plain to reflect his recognition that making satirical content legible can be challenging, especially when levying radical critiques of social injustices that are often taken for granted. He even includes a playful dig at viewers who don't quite understand his art. Once Detroit hears from Cash about WorryFree experimenting on the Equisapiens, she and some other leftist guerilla artists install a larger-than-life paper-mâché figure of Lift sodomizing a horse outside the company headquarters. One onlooker says, "I have absolutely no idea what this is about." Another offers, "Maybe it's saying that capitalism dehumanizes them?" Detroit, who happens to be standing right there admiring her work, responds, "Maybe the artist is being literal. Maybe WorryFree is turning workers into horses." Still not fully getting Detroit's drift, the second passerby asks, "And literally fucking them?" This funny little exchange captures the artistic dilemmas that satirists like Riley confront. Satire invites multiple levels of meaning and, by design, flirts with slipperiness, misdirection, and doublespeak in the ironic spaces it creates. Though the paper-mâché horse was wearing a sign that read, "WorryFree is Turning Workers into Horses," the onlooker remains confused. Riley all but winks into the camera to say, come on, man.7
In occasionally saying the quiet part out loud, Riley protects his politics from becoming obscured or distorted. And yet, the bursts of joy, the whimsy, the laughter, the surreal, and the gags on screen keep the film light. This lightness doesn't diminish the seriousness of what he is talking about. Rather, the lightness underscores that love and joy are a critical part of struggle.
Mari N. Crabtree is an associate professor of African American Studies at the College of Charleston. She is working on a new book project about the pleasure and political utility of deception, guile, and humor in the African American cultural tradition.
References
- Riley also gestures to the satirical by casting surrealists, dark comedians, and satirists like Patton Oswalt, David Cross, and W. Kamau Bell.[⤒]
- Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007), 6.[⤒]
- Michael Levenson and Azi Paybarah, "Police Investigate Sexual Assault Allegation Against Armie Hammer," New York Times, 18 March 2021. [⤒]
- When Cash tries to sell some books to a woman whose husband has stage four cancer, she apologizes and says she has no money because of the hospital bills. Cash, ashamed for being a vulture and yet looking at the sales script, sees, "Make any problem a selling point," and responds, "It's interesting that you say that, Mrs. Costello, because book number five in the Insight series is all about wellness, how to stay healthy—on your own, without even going to the doctor, so—" and then she hangs up. Recently, the CEO of Whole Foods, John Mackey, parroted this neoliberal notion that a healthy lifestyle does more to reduce the costs of a broken health care system than universal health care—an idea he first floated in 2009. John Mackey, "The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare," Wall Street Journal, 11 August 2009, Also, the irony of purchasing Riley's film on Amazon to write this essay was not lost on me.[⤒]
- Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002).[⤒]
- The first show on which Cash appears is I Got the S#*@ Kicked Out of Me! Contestants like Cash get beaten up, swim through a tank of hyena urine, jump into a vat of raw sewage called "the shit tank," and endure other humiliating spectacles for the amusement of the show's 150 million viewers. This humiliation and violence as entertainment is reminiscent of shows like Wipeout, The Real Housewives franchise, Jackass, Ridiculousness, or even the children's show that coined "getting slimed," Double Dare — shows that expose the utter callousness and cruelty to human suffering cultivated by US popular culture but also the frivolity of our tastes in entertainment in a time when racial capitalism, environmental devastation, and repressive political regimes are on the rise.[⤒]
- Riley's little jab at the less ironically inclined is reminiscent of something late-night talk show host Conan O'Brien used to do when a joke in his monologue didn't quite land. Though the self-deprecating comedian usually aimed derision at himself, in these instances he would pause and pretend to condescendingly explain to his audience, "that's funny because . . . " O'Brien balanced his playfully mockery of his audience for being dimwitted by also panning his own poor delivery of a joke.[⤒]
