Staging Comedy’s Ends: Minstrel Embodiment in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors

Abstract: This article examines Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s dramatic comedy Neighbors (2010) to explore how contemporary African American engagements with the legacies of blackface minstrelsy interrogate the genre’s stubborn persistence and offer important new approaches to historicizing comedy. A play that stages a live minstrel show for twenty-first-century audiences, Neighbors toggles between outrageous spectacles of blackface caricature and contemporary family drama, constructing a warped reality where the fraught theatricality of blackface overlays and infuses the race relations of everyday domestic life. I show how Jacobs-Jenkins uses this mashup of theatrical genres to cultivate a historical consciousness in and of theatre. By delineating the coercive bodily repertoires that perpetuate racist comedy, the play draws out the past in theatre’s present to theorize minstrel comedy’s failure to end. I argue that Neighbors insistently implicates its audience in the production of blackface entertainment, developing a critically resistant practice of comic historiography that disrupts complacent progressive histories of the minstrel show’s ostensible decline. The play’s historiographical interventions, I suggest, offer fresh insight into comedy’s form and function. By crafting a play with multiple endings, Jacobs-Jenkins reconfigures the classical definition of comedy as a genre that ends in the conservative restoration of the social order. In so doing, he turns blackface performance into a reflexive tool that deconstructs its own histories of reproduction. Neighbors thus harnesses the political fallout of comedy’s failure to end by carving out a new critical stance from which to examine the vexed histories of US comic entertainment.