Dr. Robin R. Means Coleman (MeansColeman) and journalist Mark H. Harris (blacula) teamed up to write a text on everything old and new in Black horror: The Black Guy Dies First. Check out BrookeKnisley's interview with the authors:
Dr. Coleman and Harris were kind enough to squeeze time into their busy pre-book launch schedules to chat with me, individually, about the legacy of comedy in Black horror.I wanted to start with the history of “the spook” because that’s still very much ingrained into Black representation within a lot of horror movies. I came of age in the ’90s/early-2000s, soThe spook, as a stereotype, has been around for a long time.
It’s kind of portrayed nowadays as a swaggering type of persona, a bravado kind of approach—but it’s still based in fear. On one hand, it’s smart because they’re not going towards this scary sound. They’re not going to go and get themselves killed. But on the other hand, it does feed into the decade’s old stereotype of Black people being superstitious and scared. And that’s one of the things we unspool in the book.
Now, what’s really uncomfortable about the trope is that it often turned racist—more so than what I’ve already described. They very much played on racial inferiority, and they stuck. You’ll see those kinds of images appear even outside of the horror genre, on the big and the small screen, in comedies and advertisements.where a character looks down a dark staircase and just says, “Nope.
Because in those earlier movies, the trope wasn’t just Black people—the white characters all remained present, charged forward, and did the problem solving. The spook character was spooked; it isn’t just the boogeyman in the basement—it’s every noise, every sound—they jump with fright over rugs. That’s very different from what we see in these more recent films that are really talking back to those stereotypes.
But if Dave Chappelle was in that moment of thoughtfulness, of carefulness and care, and thinking about the ways in which his creative practice impacted the lived experiences of others, then we wouldn’t be experiencing this period, that he has fully leaned to, of transphobia. There are moments where we need to ask our artists to consider that., I didn’t expect to laugh during it. You had the chapter on comedy, but there are comedic listicles in here, and those lists are really funny.
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