Good black girls aren’t supposed to be funny. Bad, sassy, preternaturally sexual black girls are. Of course, this is a false dichotomy, but it’s one that has dictated black women’s narrow entrance into comedy for more than a century. This limiting cultural expectation might be why so many Black women comics until Whoopi Goldberg had to create acts and personas implicitly and sometimes explicitly associated with the three Ps (pu**y, promiscuity, and prostitutes) to achieve success. Highly successful entertainers such as Gladys Bentley and Moms Mabley created nightclub acts that were as much erotic blues as they were comedy routines. As raucously sexual as each of these comediennes performances were for their time, with Bentley being sexually suggestive toward the women in her audience and Mabley regularly extolling the sexual virtues of younger men over older men, none have come close to the foul mouth sexual antics of Aunt Esther or the daughters who’ve succeeded her.  

 

LaWanda Page, better known as Sanford and Son’s comically pious “Aunt Esther,” was a fire-blowing stripper when comedian Redd Foxx discovered and recruited her into comedy in the late 60s. While Foxx’s dirty comedy albums were rightfully stamped “for adults only” long before the parental warning labels were an industry standard, Page’s dominating 1970s albums easily eclipsed Foxx in detail, grime and salaciousness, besting the nastiest mouth in comedy. In vast contradiction to the church woman she played on TV, Page sung dirty limericks about anal intercourse, provided step-by-step instructions on cunnilingus and fingering (of males!), and told XXX versions of the set-up/punchline jokes that ruled before Richard Pryor’s storytelling comedic approach forever changed the game. From telling titles like Pipe Layin’ Dan, Mutha is Half A Word, and the gold-selling Watch It Sucker, with sistah girl sass Page carried the comedienne torch further than Bentley and Mabley into a male dominated realm of sexual empowerment and subsequent financial success that other black comediennes have since used as a blueprint for success. From Millie Jackson to the Queens of Comedy (Mo’Nique, Sommore, Ms. Laura Hayes, and Adele Givens), being a successful comedienne meant being something no white female comic ever had to be: sassier, rougher, and more sexually provocative than any man could muster.

 

But, at what cost?

After five comedy albums of nearly identical material, the novelty had worn off and Page’s own star appeal had declined by the mid-80s. Then, other rising black female comics, like Whoopi Goldberg, Phyllis Yvonne Stickney, and Second City’s Nancy Giles, were trying to inject a cleaner, more sophisticated kind of Black womanist comedy into the mainstream, one that didn’t rely on sex or exaggerated sass for appeal. Mostly satirist and monologists reared in theater, these women were in many ways “good black girls” who told jokes that appealed to largely white audiences, but who often got the cold shoulder from black audiences conditioned to want their comediennes’ dirty. Some comics such as BET Comic View regular, Chocolate, reportedly left traditional Black standup for Christian comedy, disgusted by the industry’s enduring sexism and the Black audience demands for sexual comedy by female comics. Apparently, sass-free “good girls” weren’t welcome by Black secular comedy fans, creating more fault lines for original Black comediennes to navigate on their road to success.

 

Conversely, the paradox for Black comediennes is that mainstream success usually only comes after winning a Black following and then toning down the hyper-sexualized elements of an act to cater to white comedic expectations. This much revisited path is what we see Mo’Nique and former radio jockey Wendy Williams tread down as they test Wanda Sykes, Loni Love, and Frangela’s road into televised fame. Even Aunt Esther had to don a “good girl” mask 30 minutes a week to hit. Accordingly, the LaWanda Page of pop culture will forever be known as “Aunt Esther,” and not as the erotic preacher on Preach On, Sister, Preach On who infamously exclaimed “Can I get an amen for the c*m!”

 

These confusing cultural rules for black comediennes may be changing, but at a cost of large black audiences. New comics like Retta, Aysha Tyler, Leighann Lord, Marina Franklin, and lesbian comics like Sykes and Karen Williams are rising with comedy that is broader in topic and scope with significantly less neck rolling, and earning devoted white followings to boot. Yet, for Black comediennes seeking hometown acceptance, the racialized ceiling of cultural expectation endures. Black comediennes feeling the tug of “bad girl” demands by the Def Comedy crowd are real and plenty: these are women still haunted by the ghost of that other Aunt Esther.