Critical Race Humor in a Postracial Moment: Richard Pryor’s Contemporary Parrhesia

Abstract

Racial truth-telling becomes a difficult project given the current sociopolitical context that privileges postracialism and neoliberal individualism. Critical race humor, however, remains a public and popular discourse where people not only speak but also engage powerful racial truths. This article presents critical race humor as a contemporary form of parrhesia, or frank and courageous criticism. As a critical practice, parrhesia resonates with tenets of critical race scholarship and critical communication scholarship. Using the truth-telling comedy of the late Richard Pryor as a case study, this article suggests that critical race humor could be understood as parrhesia for our time. Moreover, critical race humor as a form of public pedagogy might provide people with the skills and habits of thought necessary to think critically about and transform racial knowledge and reality.

KEYTERMS:

• critical race theory
• humor
• parrhesia
• rhetoric
• Richard Pryor

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This article emerges from the author's dissertation chaired by John Louis Lucaites. Previous versions of this article have been presented at the National Communication Association Annual Convention and the Rhetoric Society of America Biannual Summer Workshops. I thank Susan Jarratt, Chuck Morris, Katherine Mack, Kristen Hoerl, Casey Kelly, and Kristin Swenson for their feedback and insights during the development of this article.