Where Charles Chesnutt’s Ethnic Humor Meets the Racial, Graphic Stereotypes of Puck Magazine

ABSTRACT: This article applies mask, blackface, and “signifying” theories from Rafia Zafar, Henry Louis Gates, Eric Lott, and Rebecca Wanzo’s work on “the content of our caricature,” to Charles Chesnutt’s appearances on Puck ’s “funny” pages. I revisit his Puck stories, yoking them, in turn, to adjacent graphic humor exhibiting increasingly complex (though not more egalitarian) stereotypes. While some Chesnutt stories trade in base, offensive stereotypes about disfranchisement and economic exploitation, others enact “meta-minstrelsy”: recreations of blackface conventions that call attention to the medium’s inauthenticity—its quality of being reducible to inky blackness, the same, superficial medium graphic caricatures traded in. A third group of stories—unfairly ignored as uncanonical “anecdotes”—show Chesnutt allying with ethnic Hebrews and Germans to critique such issues of stratification and nationalism as enfranchisement and citizenship. Puck graphically “colors” Chesnutt’s work in regrettable stereotypes about ethnic and racial Others, but comic, periodical spaces enable cultural critique, to which Chesnutt had no other access in “serious” eighteen-eighties periodical venues as an openly African American author. Only in Puck , only as a joke, only so long as his “race” went unknown to the editors, could Chesnutt join in Puck ’s ethnic humor. Only at the intersections of periodical editorship and aspiring authorship, of ethnic humor and graphic arts, could Chesnutt and the artists of Puck trade in mutually reductive stereotypes, while also mocking privileged readers’ self-aggrandizing prejudices, in Puck ’s graphic-art renditions of shifting democracies.