The Gift of Laughter / Man Has No Nature / Minstrel Man

From Jessie Fauset to José Ortega y Gasset to Langston Hughes...

“The medium through which the Black actor has been presented to the world has been that of the ‘funny man’ of America. Ever since those far-off times directly after the Civil War, when white men—and colored men too—blackening their faces, presented the antics of plantation hands under the caption of ‘Georgia Minstrels’ and the like, the edict has gone forth that the Black man on stage must be an end-man.”
—Fauset

“Here, then, awaiting our study, lies man’s authentic ‘being’—stretching the whole length of his past. Man is what has happened to him, what he has done. Other things might have happened to him or have been done by him, but what did in fact happen to him and was done by him constitutes a relentless trajectory of experiences that he carries on his back as the vagabond his bundle and all that he possesses.”
—Ortega

In passing, one pauses to wonder if this picture of the Black American as a living comic supplement has not been painted in order to camouflage the real feelings and knowledge of his white compatriot. Certainly, the plight of the slaves under even the mildest of masters could never have been one to awaken laughter. And no genuine thinking person, no truly astute observer, looking at the Negro in modern American life—even now—could see him as a mere aid to laughter. That condition may be variously deemed hopeless, remarkable, admirable, inspiring, or depressing; it can never be dubbed merely amusing.
—Fauset

“Man is a substantial emigrant on a pilgrimage of being, and it is accordingly meaningless to set limits to what he is capable of being. In this initial illimitableness of possibilities that characterizes one who has no nature, there stands out only one fixed, pre-established line by which he may chart his course: only one limit—his past.”
—Ortega