When Leslie Jones performed her update sketch on SNL she took a brilliant kamikaze leap into America’s pile of racial brain manure and, despite emerging covered in some of the very shit she was working to lampoon, she resurfaced as a fearless truth-teller. Telling the sort of family secrets that we as black Americans find uncomfortable at best, and a traitorous at worst.

If you haven’t seen it, watch below.  If you have, scroll onward…

So, you didn’t find it funny? Well, who says you should?

I would ask this, quoting Heath Ledger’s Joker, to my fellow black people “Why so serious?”

I admit that as a former stand-up comedian, and current black person, I held my breath as Leslie leapt head first into into a pool of racial swill to flail about in the sewage of American racism, slavery and black self-hatred. For me it was breath-taking, disturbing and at times… funny. Yes… at times… funny.

But there are only a few of us black folk who saw any humor in this comic’s pain. The comments online have mostly been negative. The “coon” word has been thrown around by outraged and well-meaning black people. The notion that “rape and slavery can never be funny” has been shouted from keyboards. And I agree. Sort of…

Actual slavery, rape and racism are not funny. However, commentary on slavery, rape and racism can be. But funny is subjective. There were many who did not get some of the jokes in my film Fear of a Black Hat when I screened it for them prior to its release, including one editor who removed a whole scene I had to reinsert! One that does in fact deal with… gasp… slavery!  See it here.  It was funny and one of the more quoted scenes of the film.  Had I listened to these voices of fear some of the best laughs in the film would have been left collecting dust on the cutting room floor. Fortunately, when it played at the Sundance film festival, those audiences got it.  We even got to add screenings.    Thankfully I trusted my instincts, which are all a comic has to go on.

But what if the audiences had agreed with my earlier viewers?  I’d have a different career I suspect.  But the point to be made is this: comedy is subjective.  Its comedic potency always at the mercy of the experiences, circumstance and fickle mood of the viewer.

So in regards to Leslie Jones’s SNL sketch, I can’t argue the case that it was funny and the world should see it as such. A joke explained ceases to be a joke.  But I can argue the value of the sketch. Its right to exist. And why I applaud Leslie Jones for her choice to perform it rather than chastise her. And I can make that argument in four words: she told the truth.

All comedy deals with truth in some way. The greater and more painful the truth, the more dangerous the comedy. Seinfeld doesn’t do dangerous comedy. His truths, funny as they are, are observations of the mundane. Louis CK… sometimes dangerous. Richard Pryor… nearly always dangerous. The three years I spent working on Chappelle’s show I saw dangerous comedy up close. For examples look here and here.  Dave was brilliant and fearless. I often said to people who would complain about the time it took Dave to come to set, “You try going on stage naked. Then why don’t you lift your testicles and show the world whatever odd growth or mole might be under there.” To me that was how personal, revealing and dangerous Dave’s comedy could be. It showed the truth we didn’t like to talk about, admit to, or see.

Dangerous comedy deals with truth in unapologetic fashion.

And I must say, after watching Leslie’s update sketch several times, I see nothing there that is a lie. I see nothing that is not real or honest. In fact it was more culturally honest than Eddie Murphy’s Buckwheat, Velvet Jones or Mister Rogers characters. The honesty in those sketches, funny as they were, came from white America’s attitudes towards black people: pimps, clowns, ghetto citizens. The honesty in Leslie’s sketch comes from how we as black people view ourselves: our fear of social acceptance, our various degrees of self-hatred (not hers, ours) and the broader human need for love and companionship that transcend race entirely.

So again, black people, to quote Heath Ledger’s Joker, “Why so serious?”

Why the backlash? Because it didn’t make you laugh? Fair enough. But did it reveal a truth? Did Leslie Jones bravely step out in front of the world and reveal some part of her scarred, fragile, naked humanity that was too painful for us to see? I believe that is where the real backlash comes from. Seeing unwanted truth. Why? Because truth can be ugly. And comedy can be as ugly as the truth it reveals.

So what was the truth of the sketch?

Honestly, as a black man who believes he is progressive in his blackness, it’s painful to acknowledge. Leslie Jones’s truth is that she is not the aesthetically appealing fantasy girl of most black men. In fact given her situation as she presented it, she is not even a convenient “pretty enough” distraction. (If she is your fantasy my brothers, stand up; be counted. Better yet, give the girl a call.) And with that said, how many black men would even say Lupita Nyong’o is their ultimate fantasy? Or their “most beautiful person”? Some black men surely would, or am I just being hopeful? It is painful to even ask the question.

And yet, the truth to that question is what the sketch is about. It’s not about rape or slavery. It is a sketch about the need and longing for companionship of a black woman who feels excluded from a loving relationship with a man of her own race. Rape and slavery are mere props. Suggesting she would accept rape and slavery to achieve companionship is only using the comedic convention of going to an extreme to make a point.

That point was made, even if you didn’t laugh. Which is fine, because comedy isn’t always about laughter. It can be ironic, satiric, sardonic and probably some other “icks” that reveal truths, however painful, with or without a laugh to follow. Our reaction to the sketch may say more about us as viewers than it does about Leslie as a performer. Her honesty was on the screen. Painful, funny and confrontational as it was. Not a coon show, a brave look at a dark (pun unintentionally intended) place we’d rather not address.

So, can we be as truthful? Was it the issue of slavery that made you uncomfortable? Or was it the ugly truth that our perceptions of black beauty are still so limited that one of our own would satirically suggest the horrors of slavery would at least allow her to feel valued, loved and sexually relevant to one of her own, that made you upset? This is not a “setback” as some have called it. It’s a wake up call. The truth… if you can face it.