A Seductive and Tainted Utopia: The Dark Comedy of ‘Negrotown’

In Comedy & Its Depths/Racial Fictions, Racial Realities

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY UC BERKELEY

"Negrotown,” one of the great sketches of Key & Peele’s four-year tenure, begins with a depiction of an everyday urban hellscape. Keegan-Michael Key walks, head down, through a dimly lit brick alleyway swathed in a chiaroscuro of brown and red. He passes a homeless man (Jordan Peele) in tattered clothes, sprawled on the ground beside his shopping cart, next to a dumpster. Peele asks Key for money; Key, not much better-off, has none to give.

The familiar scene turns nerve-wracking when the red and blue lights of a police car suddenly flood the alleyway. An archetypal police officer — white, male, middle-aged — emerges from the car and begins to accost Key in a clear case of racial profiling. He calls Key “sir” to create the illusion of respect, but this is nothing more than a formality. When Key asks the officer what he has done wrong, the officer becomes unnecessarily hostile — “There is no reason for you to get upset, sir” — then pulls out his gun and arrests him with the ironic declaration, “You had your chance.”

But what “chance” did Key ever really have? The officer’s racism here is hardly veiled. Rather than guiding him into the police car, the officer slams Key’s head against the car door. Meanwhile, the dissonant chords of the musical score drive home the pathos of the moment as the sketch’s baseline truth is established — America is a hostile and inhospitable place for black people.

Then, as if by magic, this reality vanishes into thin air. As Key staggers from the force of the blow, the homeless Peele, who we learn is named Wally, walks up and heartily announces: “Alright officer, I’ll take it from here!” Deferring to Wally’s judgement, the officer releases Key to go with him, and the two leap through a magical portal to an alternate dimension called Negrotown.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rg58d8opQKA

The scene is transformed from a dark hellscape to a candy-colored utopia where African Americans can find a true home. While Negrotown is an aesthetically appealing fantasyland, the sketch’s complexity lies in how it makes us believe and disbelieve in the utopia all at once. Negrotown is enchanting to those who live within it, but is also enlivened by deeply racist stereotypes. The sketch is self-satirizing, underscoring how improbable a true utopia for African Americans is.

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While the tune of the titular song of “Negrotown” is cheery and upbeat, Wally’s character evokes a dark history of minstrelsy. Wally’s cartoonish performance alludes to blackface productions called minstrel shows that began in the 1830s and quickly became the most popular amusements in America, laying the foundation for mass entertainment at large.

Essential to blackface minstrelsy was a white performer with a face covered in burnt cork, the illusion of gigantic red lips, and a clownish three-piece suit. In this costume, the white performer modeled what was thought to be “black” behavior: wild eyes, primitive mannerisms, and a wide smile that consented to constant humiliation. Though minstrel performances died out in the 1940s, they set the framework for dehumanizing stereotypes that persist in Hollywood and white America.

Wally’s character speaks to the racist roots of American entertainment and how that racism evolved through the twentieth century, just as slavery evolved into Jim Crow apartheid and, later, the prison-industrial complex. Wally begins as the stereotypical destitute black man, but in Negrotown, he recalls another stereotype — the harmless, jovial Magical Negro.

One reference point for his performance is Disney’s Song of the South (1946), in which James Baskett performs the role of Uncle Remus with fantastical cartoonishness that matches his animated counterparts. Wally’s theatrical eccentricity and perpetual smile draw from the repertoire of Baskett’s Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah spectacle of blackness, and it’s no coincidence that he also speaks with a distinctly southern accent.

What makes Wally’s character comic, surprising, and unsettling all at once is how he plays with the caricature of black minstrelsy while actively playing it out. As Key probes Wally with questions about the strange world of Negrotown, Wally grows increasingly frustrated: “Now be quiet while I sing,” he says, followed by, “Shut up while I finish the song,” and ultimately, “Can a n**** finish a song? I mean, can a n**** finish?”

Any divergence from the script leads Wally to break from his Magical Negro persona; it’s as if he’s warning Key, with hostility masked through joking, not to dig too far beneath the surface. Negrotown is a dreamscape, and if one were to interrogate the circumstances of its existence and reveal centuries of racial trauma, the beautiful illusion might be dissolved.

“Negrotown” constructs an aesthetically appealing fantasyland, yet the sketch’s complexity lies in how it makes us believe and disbelieve in the utopia all at once.

Negrotown’s very setting is an ode to old Hollywood and its small, idyllic onscreen towns, from which black people were notably absent. The perfectly manicured facades of Main Street, like Wally’s caricature of blackness, are artificial. And Negrotown is just that — all artifice and fantasy.

In this neo-retro-Hollywood, the previously-segregated Main Street backlot becomes a place where African Americans not only thrive but run the show. Unlike the urban neighborhood where the sketch begins, there are no dumpsters, no ominous brick alleyways shrouded in darkness. Instead of being trapped in a blind alley at night, we walk with Wally through Negrotown’s open streets during a perfectly bright day.

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But Negrotown is more than visually perfect — it’s also a cultural wonderland. The citizens of Negrotown spell out how the bigotry folded into the African American experience — from microaggressions to financial discrimination to state-sanctioned brutality — simply does not exist in this alternate universe. It is within these lines that the comedy of Negrotown unveils itself, making the idea of an all-black utopia all the more unreal and satirical in it and of itself.

“In Negrotown you can walk the street without getting stopped, harassed, or beat,” sings Wally, referring to the police brutality that Key experienced moments before. Teenagers in colorful outfits join in: “You can wear your hoodies and not get shot!”

This line, delivered joyfully and without context, is so tragically absurd that it is darkly comedic — in what world, we are inclined to ask, would a clothing choice mean that you are at risk of being murdered? Of course, America is that world, where Trayvon Martin was shot and killed in his own neighborhood in 2012 by a suspicious “neighborhood watchman” who walked away without any consequences.

“Negrotown” forces us to see how uniquely American the systematic profiling, brutalization, and murder of African Americans is. And by opening the sketch with a scene of racist policing, Key and Peele underscore that racism persists not only because of racist vigilantes like George Zimmerman, but also because it is so thoroughly ingrained within American institutions of power.

Negrotown is a dreamscape, and if one were to interrogate the circumstances of its existence and reveal centuries of racial trauma, the beautiful illusion might be dissolved.

“Negrotown” targets more than the blatant abuse of power by white Americans; it also lashes out at what novelist Zadie Smith calls the problem of “being obscenely loved” by white people who “want to get inside the black experience.” In Negrotown, there are no “stupid ass white people” touching black hair; stealing black culture and “claiming it is theirs”; or looking for a “token black friend” to “get in on the latest trend.”

There’s also no need to worry about the sexual fetishization of black men by white women either, as the women of Negrotown sing: “the strong black men are raining down […] and there are no white bitches to take them away.” This black utopia is untouched by the sins of white America, from degradation to  appropriation.

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In the finale of the “Negrotown” performance, all of the actors, including Key, strike the Black Power pose together, feet parted and fists held high in the hair. Having initially resisted Negrotown as too-good-to-be-true, Key now feels integrated into a community that celebrates a shared identity.

But it’s at this moment of solidarity that the song ends, and a wash of background noise starts to intrude. Everyone hangs in the air for an uncomfortably long moment, frozen in the reverie.

In a painful twist of irony, this is also the moment that Key is brutally checked by reality; he wakes up to find himself again in the company of the policeman, next to the alley where he was originally apprehended. “I thought we were going to Negrotown,” Key pleads. “Oh, you are,” the officer assures as he slams the car door, delivering the final line of the sketch.

The jovial ragtime beat of “Negrotown” starts up again as Key, stunned into disbelief, is driven off to the “Negrotown” of the county jail. Unlike the post-racial myth of the imagined “Negrotown,” segregation continues to structure the United States, and nowhere more so than in the prison system.

As viewers, we come to the bitter understanding that the three minutes in which Key finds himself part of a black utopia were all a set-up for a cruel punchline. If we laugh, it’s in recognition of how ingeniously Key & Peele have allowed us to see the dark absurdity of our own society. We end in the alley where we began, but this time with a newly sharpened sense of how “Negrotown” is not a fantasy at all, but rather an apt term for how America’s history of racism consistently informs the present.