Dave Chappelle’s Clayton Bigsby skit helps to understand what transgressive humor is, as well as running the risk of reproducing racist stereotypes. Transgressive humor is repeatedly described as uncomfortable laughter, which is a large majority of the types of laughs that are produced in this skit. The character is a blind black guy who has, by some weird instance, has been raised to be as if he were a white supremacist. The skit is a mockumentary of some type of primetime news feature, and follows Bigsby to his book signing where he finds out he is actually black. Bigsby is ruined, and even divorces his wife, who is white, because she was a n* lover. This is not the only occurrence of that word in this skit, and it is completely filled with stereotypes against black people, coming from the only black character in this skit. …show more content…
Haggins quotes Chappelle saying, “I was doing sketches that were funny but socially irresponsible. I felt like I was deliberately being encouraged and I was overwhelmed. It's like you are cluttered with things and you don't pay attention to things like your ethics"(Haggins, 243). What Dave says here is exactly why this is transgressive humor. Even he himself was not quite comfortable with the content he was creating, and yet he still did it. Although this skit produces uncomfortable laughter, it effectively gets inside the stereotype to send its message across. If Chappelle were to have tried to stay objective from the subject, I do not think the same laughs would have been