Will performers lose their mojo?

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on November 12th, 2008

Jonathan Takiff of the (PHL)Daily News called SHECKYmagazine.com HQ last week to get some background and a quote or two for a piece on how standup comics and musicians might be affected by last Tuesday’s election results.

Not all artists will “lose their mojo” Takiff writes. Some, he argues, will actually benefit.

While concerns about political correctness might tie some comedians’ hands now, opportunities could be opening for others. As Maher put it the other night, “Comedians are afraid of laughing at anything with a black person in it.”

But two shows hosted by black comedians debuted in recent weeks– D.L. Hughley Breaks the News on CNN and David Alan Grier‘s Chocolate News on Comedy Central. Recent SNL alum and 30 Rock regular Tracy Morgan said that black comedians who don’t have Obama material will be “out of the loop.”

“White comedians have got to roll the dice, baby. And if you get into a fight, then you get into a fight, because you know how black people are going to feel about Obama.

“If you go down that road, you better be funny.”

Of course, if we go down any road, we had better be funny. Morgan makes sense, but he errs in one fundamental way– Do we “know how black people are going to feel” about the president-elect? There is already disenchantment with him. The presidential “honeymoon” is always breathtakingly short-lived, regardless of the chief executive’s party affiliation or margin of victory. (And, as more than one artist has reminded readers in a half-dozen articles over the past six months, our leaders “always f*ck up.” Are they cynical? Maybe. Or… they’e cynical and they have a passing knowledge of history– two handy and essential qualities that some of the standups who’ve been interviewed seem to be sorely lacking.)

We got a charge out of a quote from a Penn English professor who said that an Obama impressionist, in order to succeed must “dig much deeper” than Fred Armisen and “satirize (Obama’s) performance of the ‘cool black man’… and can grasp the essentials of ‘black bourgeois respectability.'” This guy has a future as a manager!

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