Sass: Black Women’s Humor and Humanity

Finley, a stand-up comedian and assistant professor of Africana Studies at Pomona College, debuts with a nuanced and creative analysis of how Black women use sass as a means of “deflection and humanization.” Comprising rhetorical (appraisal, questioning, and provoking) and gestural components (eye-rolling, teeth-sucking, and finger-snapping), sass, which the author characterizes as “a dialogic, intelligible pattern of address... to an assumed superior in institutional or interpersonal settings,” pushes back against power structures and the pressures Black women receive to “stay in one’s place.” Among other topics, Finley analyzes how raunchy humor “functions in the framework of sass” to interrogate white patriarchy, citing a group of protestors who sang Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP”—a “raunchy... Black feminist credo”—outside the White House following Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential defeat and how butch female comics use sass to “deal with their butchness onstage” and compel audiences to “expand their ideas of what Black womanhood means.” Mining a rich trove of examples, including the character Topsy from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, comedian Jackie “Moms” Mabley, singer Gladys Bentley, and contemporary figures including Michelle Obama and Jada Pinkett Smith, as well as her own experiences as a Black comedian, Finley provides an enlightening and rigorous examination of sass as a means of asserting one’s power in an oppressive world. It’s an insightful study of the politics of humor. (Aug.)