Too Hot for TV: Black Sketch Comedy and the Politics of Crossing-Over

Sketch comedy has long been an important site for the interrogation of representational politics. Particularly, Black American sketch comedy television programs have often operated as subversive vehicles that employ humor as a strategy to challenge racialized anxieties in our nation's social imaginary. This study engages the underexplored history of the Black sketch comedy series as a critical space that elicits, structures, and facilitates the use of humor as a form of resistance to oppressive systems.