Black Comedy Online
Deen Ipaye, author of our first prose presentation, “Fela at the African Shrine,” here at kintespace.com inspires today’s Blog entry. In his much appreciated efforts to maintain positive communications here in the kintespace.com, he sent me a link to http://www.negrospaceprogram.com/ back on 7/20/2005. I apologize for taking such a large time to respond—but I am catching up.
This opens up a subject whose time has come. How much African-based comedy is online? I am sure, like many other ‘super Black’ Web thangs, I have written shit in all seriousness that has been taken as a joke by many an ugly teenaged millionaire pretending it’s a whiz kid world—but at least I didn’t do it in all caps! But I am talking about ‘super Black’ Web thangs that fully and deliberately intend to be funny. I am talking about Web thangs that actually offer material for our use online—without charge.
Unfortunately, only two Webs come to mind that meet these criteria—and they make me laugh: pstola.com and pocho.com. I have known about pstola.com the longest (for years in fact) and it never occurred to me to share my discovery with the rest of the world until today. So I can’t get upset with chocolate colored folk habitually and non-consciously forgetting about kintespace.com. I am guilty of the same sleep walking… Most of the people within word-of-my-mouth who would actually appreciate “What you drinkin’ mank?” don’t have access to the Internet. But now there’s Dave Chappelle and the Blog world so who knows…
So yeah: I like the Negro Space Program skit but it’s only one thang. They need a rhythmic track record like pstola.com and pocho.com. Spoofing up Ken Burns deserves a chortle. For non-Black people what’s is most likely funny about this skit is the right-brain juxtaposition of African people and the space program—and the adept use of the word “motherfucker.” For Black people what is funny is the reminder that we people will even try to go to the moon in a jacked up school bus to prove a tactically useless point about the validity of our humanity in the eyes of people who barely even know that they are people with eyes… I would like to have seen a humorous but serious reference to real, live African-descendant astronauts—even Cuban ones—and of course those Afro-nauts capable of funkatizing galaxies from P-funk thangs… “Can I borrow your space ship, man? I’ll give right back.”