NIGGER MINSTRELS BECOME THE GREAT AMERICAN TRAILER PARK MUSICAL

By Jerry D. Rose

Black minstrel parodies on the lives of African-Americans, once called “nigger minstrels” were originated in America in the 1830s and were still going as I was growing up a hundred years later in rural southern Oklahoma. These were traveling “musicals” featuring stories, songs and dancing that displayed, for the benefit of white audiences, many of the stereotypical depictions of blacks that came to be featured as well on such radio shows as Amos N Andy. In our community there were almost ONLY whites (Protestant ones), and the occasional traveling minstrel, along with donkey basketball games, were about the only available entertainment beyond the Christmas plays and other “community programs” at the local consolidated rural school.

Such minstrels and other racially-stereotypical entertainments have not, for the most part, survived the societal acts of political correctness that have required people to clean up their acts about their humor, even making jokes privately circulated somewhat over the margin of acceptability in polite social circles. Since minstrels were especially so popular in the south, and as “red neck” audiences might be thought of the core of their appreciative audience, it is ironic to note that rednecks themselves have become targets of satire in recent popular culture: from the “humor” of Jeff Foxworthy to such theatrical productions of the show I saw last night in Gainesville, Florida, “The Great American Trailer Park Musical.” (GATPM) I want to comment on the content of the play I saw, the reactions of the audience to it, and the nature of the people who made up that audience.

GATPM is an unabashed satire on lower class southern life styles, the themes of which could be taken out of any of Jeffworthy’s “You May Be a Redneck If” books. A brief capitulation of the plot will show this. Set in the nearby (to Gainesville) town of Starke (home of the state’s principal penitentiary)—other locales have, I believe, been selected for performances in other regions—at the Armadillo Acres Trailer Park, it features 3 singing and dancing female residents who are a kind of Greek chorus to narrate the story of the show. This story entails the experience of another couple who live in the park having had their child kidnapped from them as a baby, followed by the mother’s lapse into a 20-year funk of asexuality and fear of leaving the premises of their house and her husband’s wandering away in search of other female companionship, This is conveniently provided by a pole dancer on the run from a threatening boy friend from up North, and the suffering husband and she soon hook up. The boy friend duly arrives in pursuit of the pole dancer and threatens to kill her and the husband until there’s a moment of realization that the boy friend is in fact the long-lost kidnapped baby. (This all gets pretty Gilbert and Sullivanish.) There are reconciling hugs and kisses all around, until one of the three chorus girls points out that the boyfriend and his father have both slept with the pole dancer, this being the “big joke” of the plot in that it illustrates the incestuous sexual tendency that Foxworthy and others ascribe to the southern life style.

The show is so amusing that it was hard not to laugh which, as a civil libertarian watching a category of people being derogated, I should not have done. (I think of a story of a standup comedian touring in New Hampshire, whose people are known—-stereotypically?—for their laconic and non-expressive behaviors. The comedian went through his whole routine and got not a single laugh. As he was about to leave in despair, a farmer came up to him and said: “You know, you’re really a very funny fellow, we could hardly keep from laughin.” And there’s the rub of ethnic humor or that which targets any other minority: blond and little moron jokes, etc. As Freud notes in his essay on wit, there tends to be an aggressive or put-down component of wit, which usually has a “butt” which is not pleasant if one happens to be one of the butt category. Still, as the aforesaid civil libertarian, I tried hard not to laugh or, more exactly, my amusement was tempered by the realization that it was being enjoyed at the expense of other human beings.

I want finally to make a sociological observation on the character of the audience. Although Gainesville Florida is in the deep South and has plenty enough of people with lower class southern life styles, this was not necessarily the composition of the audience who attended this show. Gainesville is, of course, home of the University of Florida and has a relatively higher class of population compared to much of the surrounding areas.

I went to the show (free) as an usher, and the house manager in charge of the ushers, giving us our instructions, told us we should be on the lookout for “drunks” and other disorderly people who tried to come to the show, which was not unusual, considering our “clientele.” Without her saying this, I think we expected maybe people would wheel up to the Hippodrome State Theatre on motorcycles wearing leather jackets, drunk and with their girlies in tow, loudly demanding to be admitted to “this here show.” If we expected that, nothing could have been farther from the truth. The audience was your “typical” nearly-all-white “respectables” that attend shows in other theatres in this “college town” with which I have been associated. Like most of such respectables of Gainesville, they were probably Obama fans, impressed with Obama’s own “cultured” behavior and his disdain for the black version of the white redneck. In other words, they were white middle class people needing to be reassured of their own respectability. It’s just that Obama (like his friend Professor Gates) specialized in lecturing to his down-and-out black brethren; while the white folks expressed the same feelings of superiority to the poor among them in the format of laughter.

So the more things change…. Have we really moved so far from the smug superiority that lay behind the nigger minstrels of the 1830s? Or have we simply altered the form of that superiority without altering its content?

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Jerry D. Rose is editor of The Sun State Activist