Listen to Moms Mabley’s “Comedy Ain’t Pretty,” (accessed August 9, 2016).Īccording to Box Office Mojo, Friday earned over $28 million worldwide with a budget of 3.5 million. Whoopi Goldberg, “Rollin with Whoopi,” November 11, 2014, (accessed August 9, 2016). See my Pimpin’ Ain’t Easy: Selling Black Entertainment Television (Routledge 2007) for a discussion on the ways blackness and capital operate together in visual culture. See Wanda Sykes, “Stand Up,” (accessed August 10, 2016). Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 318.Īnthea Butler talks about the black church and this shift in her article “The Black Church: From Prophecy to Prosperity,” Dissent 61, no. 4 (2008): 418.Ĭonrad Hyers, The Comic Vision and The Christian Faith: A Celebration of Life (New York: Pilgrims Press, 1981), 150.Īlbert J. Samuel Joeckel, “Funny as Hell: Christianity and Humor Reconsidered,” Humor: The International Journal of Humor Research 21, no. In fact, in a somewhat unrelated way but germane to this particular point, one of the most fascinating and painful aspects of the film 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013) is the usage of Christianity and the insanity of the slaver/raper/owner who also takes on the role of pastor. See for example, Mikhal Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994 and Samuel Joeckel, “Funny as Hell: Christianity and Humor Reconsidered,” Humor 21, no.

Conrad Hyers, Holy Laugher: Essays on Religion in the Comic Perspective (1969).

See for example Peter Berger and Harvey Cox, The Feast of Fools: A Theological Essay on Festivity and Fantasy (1969) and M. Kelly Brown Douglas, Black Bodies and the Black Church: A Blues Slant (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 64. McClain, “The Genius of Black Church,” Christianity and Crisis 2, no. Psalms 126:2, The Holy Bible, King James version.Įvelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church 1880–1920 (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 5.

The Holy Profane by Teresa L. Reed