SOURCE: “Simplifyin': Langston Hughes and Alice Childress Re/member Jesse B. Semple,” in Langston Hughes Review, Vol. 15, No. 1, Spring, 1997, pp. 37-48.

In the following essay, Turner compares the history and nature of Langston Hughes's Simply Heavenly and Childress's Just a Little Simple in order to gain insight into the “complex nature of Black comedic representation.”

Dream-singers all,—                     My people. Story-tellers all,— My people.                     Dancers— God! What dancers!                     Singers— God! What singers! Singers and dancers Dancers and laughers .....Loud-mouthed laughers in the hands of Fate. 

(Hughes 1995, 27-8)

For African Americans, comedic representation on the stage, in film and in television often elicits a myriad of complex reactions. At the core of the problem are the nearly sixty years of commercial minstrelsy (1830s—1890s) during which more than one hundred professional Blackface minstrel troupes and untold numbers of amateur groups mocked Black bodies, gestures and folk mores on stages across...