Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Right To Offend: The Black Comedy Revolution’ On A&E, How And Why Black Jokes Matter

Just in time for Independence Day, Kevin Hart executive produces a two-part documentary on the history of comedy from the perspective of Black Americans. How have comedians struggled to have their voices heard, how they’ve balanced the desire to be funny with the need to become activists socially and politically, and how a small number of them opened the door for generations to follow them.

RIGHT TO OFFEND: THE BLACK COMEDY REVOLUTION: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: The first thing we see is a warning card, reading: “This is the story of how black comedians deliberately used humor as a tool to call out discrimination and fight for social change. It includes frank discussions on racism, racial violence, offensive language, and suggestive dialogue that may be distracting for some viewers.” That’s followed by Kevin Hart, seated, telling us: “The role of a black comedian today is not the same of yesterday.”
The Gist: Episode 1, “The Revolutionaries,” focuses on comedic pioneers in Black comedy, among them Dick Gregory, Richard Pryor, Moms Mabley, and Redd Foxx.
There’s a brief recap of the early days of comedy onstage, on the air and on film, including the initial rise of blackface through minstrel shows, how the first Black vaudevillian comedians emerged out of blackface and proved innovative from the start (turns out the very term punchline comes from Charlie Case, who used his arms when he spoke and punched the air to punctuate jokes!), and how radio and film stars such as Amos ‘n’ Andy and Stepin Fetchit perpetuated damaging stereotypes before Gregory broke through the chitlin circuit and the color lines in the early 1960s.
We see how Gregory found himself thrust into the civil rights movement and eventually took a more activist approach both on and offstage, and also how Gregory’s early TV success opened up that medium for several other Black comedians, Foxx and Mabley chiefly among them.
There’s talk about Foxx’s “party records” and how the offensive language on them freed up Richard Pryor, once he decided to stop mimicking Bill Cosby to appeal to the mainstream White audiences. Yes, there’s discussion of Cosby’s legacy as the non-threatening Black comedian who broke through, too, although it’s now couched with what we all know about the contradictions in Cosby’s personal life.

The first half of this documentary series gets into the 1970s, when there was a push-and-pull on Black comedians, exemplified by how Norman Lear’s Good Times covered heavy social issues while also reducing star Jimmie Walker to a “Dyn-O-Mite” catchphrase, how Garrett Morris felt sidelined for much of his time in the original cast of Saturday Night Live, and how Pryor’s SNL episode and fledgling sketch show turned heads.
And there’s lots of talking heads in the doc: W. Kamau Bell, Alonzo Bodden, Dr. Todd Boyd, Wayne Brady, Kevin “Dot Com” Brown, Michael Che, Louis Chude-Sokei, Tommy Davidson, Michael Eric Dyson, Wayne Federman, Andre Gaines, Nelson George, Christian Gregory, David Alan Grier, Tiffany Haddish, Michael Harriot, Steve Harvey, Bambi Higgins, Lil Rel Howery, DL Hughley, Norman Lear, Darryl Littleton, Daryl and Dwayne Mooney, Garrett Morris, Mark Anthony Neal, Kliph Nesteroff, David Peisner, Russell Peters, Elizabeth Pryor, Rain Pryor, Donnell Rawlings, Tony Rock, Amber Ruffin, Allison Samuels, Scott Saul, Amanda Seales, Sherri Shepherd, Bob Sumner, Eddie Tafoya, Robin Thede, Kenan Thompson, Joe Torry, Aisha Tyler, Jimmie Walker,  George Wallace, Marsha Warfield, Katt Williams, and Tony Woods.

What Documentaries Will It Remind You Of?: Kevin Hart also EP’d an award-worthy documentary last summer on Dick Gregory, while Whoopi Goldberg presented a great doc a decade ago on Moms Mabley for HBO, and there’s further documentary rabbit holes you can go down regarding Richard Pryor. For a look specifically at the hip-hop comedy of the 1990s, there’s Phat Tuesdays on Prime Video. For a historical look at the genre as a whole, though, you’d have to go back to Robert Townsend’s Why We Laugh, which debuted at Sundance in 2009.
Our Take: Hart might make for an unexpected face to front a documentary like this, seeing as his claim to fame has relied for the most part on pleasing as wide an audience as possible. He’s not tops on your lists when you think of comedy revolutionaries. Then again, perhaps that’s exactly why some would argue putting his voice, his face, and his EP stamp on this, to put such a historical film in front of as many eyeballs, and especially those who might be most turned off by the very notion of a black comedy revolution.
We have yet to see Hart pivot quite like Pryor did in the late 1960s.

But it’s fascinating to see how history repeats itself even in comedy, as well as how threads get pulled. When Gregory famously debuted on Jack Paar’s Tonight show, he opened by sitting on a stool and telling the audience: “When they say this show contains living color, you better believe it.”
In Living Color, indeed.
Early in the doc, an academic, Louis Chude-Sokei, intones: “Every gesture onstage, every sound, has a history. Things that are possible now are possible because they were impossible before, and people took on that impossibility and stretched it. How that happened is an important story to tell, and I believe that’s what you’re trying to do here.”
Sex and Skin: Not applicable.
Parting Shot: Zoom in on Richard Pryor’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Sleeper Star: Although the first part of this doc focuses on the comedic “revolutionaries” from the 1960s and 70s, whenever Katt Williams gets cued up to talk about them, he commands our attention. Williams sounds even more revelatory when he’s asked in part two to weigh in on his contemporaries, perhaps because we’re so used to seeing his high-wire, high-energy stand-up, that when he’s seated and in a cool, calm, demeanor, he’s even more memorable and worth listening to.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Now two years removed from the renewed Black Lives Matter protests in streets across America, it’s about time we were reminded that comedians aren’t just observers or philosophers, but sometimes more importantly the voices we need to hear to remind us of the plights of those among us who don’t enjoy the same rights as the rest of us.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.

Watch Right to Offend: The Black Comedy Revolution on A&E