‘Ol Willie Shakespeare wrote: “Ah, the comic, now there’s a dangerous man.” Indeed. And the original true comics were not only dangerous with the words they used, they actually lived their lives in danger, oftentimes daily courting it. This character was the court jester.
Using buffoonery, double entendre and sometimes straight-out mockery, the court jester’s job was to remind the sovereign to not get too big for their britches simply because he or she had had the good fortune of being born into royalty. Kings and queens could occasionally get their heads violently separated from their bodies if they pissed off enough people.
So it was the court jester’s role to point out truths by circulating through the crowd at Court, and while everyone else was sucking up to the monarch, he’s making snide remarks, sometimes just loud enough for the person sitting on the throne to hear them. Of course, more than one court jester lost their head — literally — by going too far with their stage-whispered sly criticisms and mocking witticisms. On some days the ruler just wasn’t gonna play that shit.
Paul Beatty is America’s modern-day court jester. He caustically, demonically, but always humorously, punctures every racial sacred cow, skewers political correctness and leaves our false belief systems (those we Americans simply love to hide behind to escape our brutal history) in shambles. His new novel The Sellout doesn’t take any prisoners, nor does it leave anyone — be they black, white, Hispanic or any other race — much psychic wiggle room. He slices, dices and serves up the truth in the grand tradition of stand-up comics like Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, George Carlin and Dave Chappelle. Nothing and no one escapes his comedic eye and genius, rapier-sharp wit.
His new novel begins thusly:
“This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I’ve never stolen anything. Never cheated on my taxes or at cards. Never snuck into the movies or failed to give back the extra change to a drugstore cashier indifferent to the ways of mercantilism and minimum-wage expectations. I’ve never burgled a house. Held up a liquor store. Boarded a crowded bus or subway car, sat in a seat reserved for the elderly, pulled out my gigantic penis and masturbated to satisfaction with a perverted, yet somehow crestfallen, look on my face.”
Beatty’s protagonist is seated in the chambers of the U.S. Supreme Court, his hands cuffed behind his back, “sit[ting] in a thickly padded chair that, much like the country, isn’t quite as comfortable as it looks.”
The time is the present, and Beatty’s wisecracking, pot-smoking observer of the human condition is having his case heard by the nine final arbiters of justice in the country; his charge — keeping a slave on the plot of land he farms, in Dickens, a small town on the outskirts of Los Angeles. And oh, he also is attempting to bring back segregation into the schools in Dickens — and if you follow his logic (which really isn’t all that twisted after all) you’ll see why his idea makes perfect sense … of sorts.
Dropping pearls of wisdom as frequently as he drops the “N” word, Beatty is totally unapologetic and rarely sympathetic in his myth-busting and often acid-tongued storytelling. But these ain’t just stories he’s telling … he’s speaking universal truths to everyone’s power. Take for example the “N” word … writers cowardly use that euphemism, forcing readers to say “nigger” in their own minds, thus sparing the scribe the embarrassment of doing so, but gaining all of the force and negative energy of the dastardly word. Beatty simply doesn’t buy those kinds of bullshit copouts.
The book closes with a black comic in a black club angrily running a liberal white couple out of the venue, saying, “Get out, this is our thing!” Leaving Beatty to ask thorough his character, “So, what exactly is our thing?”
A good, absurd — and at times difficult — read, but totally worth the effort.
From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com.