Mel Watkins

Explores how humor in the African American entertainment business has sahped America and African Americans themselves.

A History of African American Comedy

On the Real Side

The Life & Times of Lincoln Perry

Stepin Fetchit

A renowned editor of The New York Times movingly recounts his life, remembers a turbulent childhood as an African American growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, a brother addicted to drugs and violence, and a grandmother who inspired him to reach for the sky. 17,500 first printing.

A Memoir

Dancing with Strangers

Bob Love

Chicago Bulls legend Bob Love was a great basketball player, but his story goes well beyond the court. Love's autobiography is not only inspiring to young athletes, but to any person who is facing adversity. Photo insert.

If It's Gonna Be, It's Up to Me

The Bob Love Story

Dick Gregory

With an historical introduction provided for each chapter, an anthology of African American humor reveals much about changes in American society.

The Best Black Comedy from Slavery to Today

African American Humor

In the late 1920s and '30s Lincoln Perry, aka Stepin Fetchit, was both renowned and reviled for his surrealistic portrayals of the era’s most popular comic stereotype–the lazy, shiftless Negro. Perry was hailed by critic Robert Benchley as “the best actor that the talking movies have produced,” and Mel Watkins’s meticulously researched and sensitive biography reveals the paradoxes of this pioneering actor’s life, from Perry’s tremendous popularity to his money troubles and rowdy offscreen antics. As later generations come to recognize Perry’s prodigious talent and achievements, in Stepin Fetchit, Mel Watkins brilliantly and definitively illuminates the life and times of a legendary figure in American entertainment.

This comprehensive history of black humor sets it in the context of American popular culture. Blackface minstrelsy, Stepin Fetchit, and the Amos 'n' Andy show presented a distorted picture of African Americans; this book contrasts this image with the authentic underground humor of African Americans found in folktales, race records, and all-black shows and films. After generations of stereotypes, the underground humor finally emerged before the American public with Richard Pryor in the 1970s. But Pryor was not the first popular comic to present authentically black humor. Watkins offers surprising reassessments of such seminal figures as Fetchit, Bert Williams, Moms Mabley, and Redd Foxx, looking at how they paved the way for contemporary comics such as Whoopi Goldberg, Eddie Murphy, and Bill Cosby.

Mel Watkins

About

Books

Join the club