Growing up in the 1980s and nineties, PBS Newshour co-anchor Geoff Bennett found himself immersed in a groundbreaking era of Black sitcom entertainment. The enormous popularity of “The Cosby Show” and its status as the top-rated show on television lead to the “Cosby” spinoff “A Different World” and the Fox network-driven explosion of Black talent in shows like “In Living Color,” “Living Single” and “Martin.” Bennett was able to see positive characters that were, more importantly, created by Black creatives.
Now forty-six, Bennett has taken a look back through the history of Black comedy in America stretching from the early days of vaudeville through that nineties sitcom heyday with his new book “Black Out Loud.” As he prepares for an appearance at noon on September 13 on the Digital Realty stage at the Printers Row Lit Fest, Bennett takes the time to discuss the motivations and journey behind the tome.
“The book really began with the lingering sense of curiosity for years in which I’d been thinking about the television landscape I grew up with. And then the one question that kept resurfacing was how did all of these shows—’Martin,’ ‘Living Single,’ ‘The Fresh Prince,’ ‘In Living Color,’ ‘Family Matters’ and ‘A Different World’—how did all of that exist at the same time?” explains Bennett. “Not as isolated breakthrough hits, but simultaneously overlapping, competing and cross-pollinating. And as I started doing the research, I realized this wasn’t really a coincidence, it was really a convergence. It was this rare moment when you had talent and timing and cultural urgency all lined up.
“I’ve covered national politics for all of my career of more than twenty years now, and I’ve also covered the culture, and cultural coverage is sometimes waved off as it’s soft or secondary. But I think culture is where identity is formed, it’s where power is negotiated and it’s where a society really tells the truth about itself. And so that was the reason why I wanted to dig deeper into the cultural impact of these sitcoms. The real impact of comedy is as a tool for social change.”
Bennett is thrilled to be presenting his book in Chicago, because the book covers the fact that the Windy City has long had an outsized impact on Black comedy culture. As he notes, “it’s a city with an extraordinary comedy tradition and an extraordinary Black cultural tradition. And where those two traditions meet, you get amazing comics like Bernie Mac. ‘Black Out Loud’ the book is ultimately about what happens when Black artists are given the freedom to be fully themselves. And Chicago has produced some unforgettable examples of that.”
As he was writing the book, Bennett realized that he could not tell the story of the nineties fully or responsibly without tracking back to how Black comedy got there. The book starts in the minstrelsy and the vaudeville era. Bennett found that “even in the brutal constraints of minstrelsy and segregated stages, you could see Black performers were developing coded language and double meanings, a way to build a rapport with an audience.
“Many of those audiences happened to be white. And the strategies that were born under oppression really became the foundation for other breakthroughs. So you can’t really understand fully what happened in the nineties and just the range of creative expression without fully appreciating and understanding that lineage. So that struck me in doing that research and learning those stories.”
Geoff Bennett
While “Black Out Loud” explores the reasons for the success behind each of the aforementioned series, it also tackles the thorny dichotomy between Bill Cosby as a tremendously positive cultural source and his “monstrous” criminal behavior offscreen. And while Bennett was able to meet and interview many of the key players of the era, including Martin Lawrence, Robert Townsend, Debbie Allen, Tisha Campbell, Keenan Ivory Wayans, Marlon Wayans, Quinta Brunson and Arsenio Hall, he was most excited to interview Sinbad about his time on “A Different World.”
Ultimately, Bennett has come to realize that the cultural zeitgeist shared by these groundbreaking series was a product of a very special time—one that may never be duplicated.
“I think it has to do with a broader shift in the way people consume media. It’s much harder now. The ecosystem that existed in the nineties that allowed for all of those sitcoms to exist and flourish, not just the sitcoms I covered in the book but in general, it’s harder now,” concludes Bennett. “The monoculture is gone. In the nineties, twenty million people could be watching the same episode on a Thursday night and be talking about it the next day.
“Today, audiences are fragmented across platforms and there’s more opportunity in some ways, but there’s less shared experience. And the part of what I write about in the book is that shared experience is cultural power. And there’s so many reasons why there’s less social cohesion today. But I would suggest that one of the main ones, the chief reason is because we’re not watching the same things. We’re not listening to the same things. People live very much in their own silos, and that is reinforced. And we see that everywhere in our politics, and in people’s social lives.”
Printers Row Lit Fest takes place September 12-13. Geoff Bennett will appear on the Digital Realty stage on September 13 at noon.
