Black Out Loud! My Interview with Author Geoff Bennett

0:00Welcome to Karen Hunter's Awesome. And in this space, we have conversations that very few people have. I love nuance, but more than nuance, I really like to think deeply about the conditions that we find ourselves in every day. And this is what this space is all about. So come on in, leave your judgment, and your close-bodiedness at the door, open your heart, open your mind, and come on in, and challenge yourself to think more broadly. Hope you enjoy. Let me welcome to the show. You've seen him before. If you are watching PBS, especially, he is a Peabody award-winning journalist, co-anchor and co-managing editor of PBS News Hour, and he's also a contributor to NBC News, and he has a book that's all about the laughter, actually. And when I saw him out there talking about it, I said, I want to have him on the show because how did he do this?

1:00How did he do this? It's called Black Out Loud. Black Out Loud. And laughter is resistance in this time. Let me welcome Jeff Bennett to the Karen Hunter Show. Hi. Karen, it is so great to be with you. First of all, thanks for all you do to push the culture forward. I deeply appreciate him. A big fan of yours and it's great to be on your program. Oh, thank you. Thank you. It's always weird when I hear that because, you know, I've been doing this for a minute in various different places and never thought about people actually sleep listening. You know, I know people listen because they call up, but it's not something that I've been focused on. So it's nice to hear. And I never know who's listening. Friends of mine went to Belize recently and they were out at a resort, fancy resort, and it was like one other black couple. The brother wanted to, you know, they were talking to whatever and the guy had on a global majority t-shirt. And he sent me a picture. I'm like, you're all the way in another country. The only other black family there has on a global majority t-shirt, which is my brand,

2:01you know, and I was like, wow, wow. So thank you. Yes. It's resonating. Yes. It's penetrating. I was actually surprised that you did this book because when I see you, you guys are all butted up. You're very professional. You're very, you know, you know how y'all, and I was like, what does Jeff know about comedy? So what? Break it down. You become the author of Black Out Loud. I have been kicking around this question for about a decade. Well before I got the book contract to write this book, and it's funny you mentioned that because when I was shopping this book, the first response I got from a major publishing house is, we want to be in business with you. We don't know why you'd write this book, why not write a political book. Well, there are a number of reasons for that, but I'll get to those. But this question that I've been kicking around was, how was it in the 1990s that you had all of these iconic black TV shows on air at the same time, but at the same time part of this is key because it wasn't like there was a single breakout hit that really bore

3:03the burden of representing all of black America. I say that in air quotes because we know that that can't be done. But instead you had everything from a different world to fresh prints to Martin to living single. You had Arsenio who's the king of late night. You had in living color. How did that, how did all of that happen? What were the business decisions that led to it that really unlocked the creative explosion of black cultural creation in that era? So that was what I wanted to unpack. I also knew that it would give me an excuse to call up all the people I grew up watching. So just last week, for instance, I did an interview with Sinbad, which for me was a big deal. I grew up watching him. Yeah, I went to Morehouse. He taped a comedy special at Morehouse. That was my dad's favorite comedy special to the point where the VHS tape broke because he watched it so many times. So that was the genesis of the idea. How did this happen? And what did it mean for black folks watching it? And for really all of America who might not, let's say, have any black friends, but every

4:07night, maybe multiple times a night, if they're watching more than one of those shows, they would have these very specific entry points into black life and experiences they might not have otherwise encountered. So that was the idea behind the book. I love this entree into this particular time as a way to talk about a lot of other things. I grew up, of course, a little bit older than you, but the only person I saw on television who looked like me was Diane Carroll, Julia, not Diane Carroll and Dynasty. By the time she got the dynasty, it was on in poppet. But Diane Carroll and Julia and her little son, Corey, I was like, uh, in Trappurjan, MD, you had like a black doctor on the air. I was like, yes, you know, but we, and then came, of course, to Sesame Street and electric companies and zoom and so, you know, as a young person, you got to see young people engage with muppets and puppets and things. But that glory era with living single Martin, living color, it was Cosby first kicked it

5:09off on Thursday nights where we all had to be glued to the television. That was another thing. We didn't really have too many options. You know, you had two, four and seven, maybe 11 if you, but those were the channels, right? Did you watch CBS, ABC and NBC and we were all watching the same thing and going to school the next day and talking about it and living color to snaps and whatever. My goodness. Blaine and Antoine. Which one around the world? Oh, my God. Which would be canceled today. They could not do men on film today at all, but it had us. David down Greer said that. So I interviewed a bunch of these folks for the book and he made the point that there's no way in the world. Well, back then, if you watched it and you were upset, you had to write a letter to the network and good luck finding the address to send that letter to and good luck, anybody on the receiving end, opening it and reading it. Now everybody has so agreed about every little thing and they can tweet and do whatever they want on social media. So it's a completely different dynamic. And the other thing is, you know, of course there had been black folks on TV before the 90s. Good times. Sanford and son. Jefferson.

6:10Jefferson. Right. What made the 90s so different was that you had black folks at the center of it in the writers rooms, as showrunners, as producers, and it was a business decision. So I interviewed Barry Diller who created co-founded the Fox Broadcasting Network and folks should know the Fox Broadcasting Network and Fox News. These are two different things. So Fox, when they showed up on the scene, Barry Diller said what NBC, CBS and ABC were putting on in terms of primetime entertainment. They were basically indistinguishable and he knew that Fox had to be different. And the way to be different, he had this idea was to skew younger and to skew urban. We know what urban means. So the first pilot he got, because word had gotten out in Hollywood. The first pilot he got was for a show called Not the Cosby Show because the producers knew that Fox had to be something other than what was on NBC, ABC, CBS. Not the Cosby Show eventually became married with children. So when they found success with married with children and Simpsons and cops, really this

7:13kind of countercultural figure, that's what opened up the lane for Akeen and I every way and to put his entire funny family on TV and created an entirely new pipeline, a talent pipeline for sketch comedy because the talent pipeline for sketch comedy at that time was really just for SNL. So he had to go out and find the David Allen Greer's and the Tommy Davidson's and the Jim Carries of the world and create that show. And it wasn't just the jokes as we all remember, it was the music. It was the fashion. He had the fly girls. He had Rosie. J-Lo. J-Lo. That's where we get J-Lo. Yeah. That's where we get Carrie and Anaba. The list goes on. So I always felt like none of these folks got the credit for the work that they did. And they certainly, no one had ever looked at the totality of what that era meant, looking at all of those key shows. So that's what this book does. And as a journalist focusing on that era, I knew that I couldn't just believe it at the 90s to really understand the arc of black comedy in this country and understand what it does. You have to go back to the beginning.

8:13In the beginning of black comedic performance in this country is menstrualcy and vaudeville. So the book traces its origins all the way there too. And Richard Pryor, of course, who also had, and Flip Wilson. I had a Flip Wilson doll that was Flip Wilson on one side and Geraldine on the other. So I was like, you know, Flip Wilson had Nipsy Russell. There were people who people don't even know today, who actually had like TV shows, like variety shows. Yeah. Flip Wilson was huge. First black comedian to host a major network variety show. The flip Wilson show becomes a huge hit in the early 1970s. The Geraldine character. If anybody has ever heard the phrase that double made me do it, that's where it came from. It was the Geraldine character. And he really helped normalize black entertainers as mainstream TV stars. He did that. There's a joke that he tells. People can go YouTube. It's about a baby on a train, just Google Flip Wilson legendary baby train joke. And that joke, he told that joke on the Johnny Carson show way back in the day and had the

9:15entire studio audience to include Johnny Carson cracking up. He was one of a kind. Yes. Yes. Bennett, more house man, Adrian and Nubia said, hey, Nubian, shout out to my freshman dorm, R.A. and more house Jeff Bennett, always been such a down-to-earth smart guy. You were an R.A. resident me too. We got so much in common. I was like, wait a minute. You're birthday's the day after mine. You're from Jersey. You were an R.A. I was an R.A. That's so crazy. Yeah, we might be cousins. Yeah, we might be cousins. We probably are. Well, we all cousins, actually, all of us. That's right. Because we all come from the same lady in Africa. But here we are. I was thinking about this book from the lens and I'm grateful that you did it because the reality is, in many ways, Fox and UPN and WPIX built its audience on the backs of Black people and then abandoned them after they got enough of the eyeballs to then go get the advertising dollars they didn't need us anymore. Has that kind of been the story arc as well of they used us, menstrual fee, used us.

10:16How Joseph doesn't exist without us, then we get Abbott and Costello and the freaking our gang, spanking them and, you know, arena and buckwheat. You use us to build, build a brand and then, you know, you either denigrate us or you discard us. Yeah. And it's a, it was a business decision and that's why in the early 2000s, you see, you see two things. One, the advent of reality TV, which undermines sitcom television. But then you have networks and the advertisers decide that they feel like they can basically make more money with a different demographic, that the younger, slash, black audience on which these networks were built, that that wasn't enough. Now, of course, I would argue that's certainly not true as it just as a business case that's not true. But that, that was what happened. And so you have a show like living single, the real, the real blueprint for friends and that's not me saying that that's people connected to both shows saying that the whole,

11:17the whole, the friends as an ensemble cast and then we sort of see their high jinks and they've really never leave their apartment. That, that model is what established friends, they have their whole scenes, their whole scenes side by side, their friends stole from, oh, living single, their whole scenes. Absolutely. At their height, the cast of friends was making $25, roughly $25 million in episode. This is back when TV, they were doing 22 episodes a season. I don't have to ask the question, do you think the cast of a living single was making $22 no? $25 million in episode. No way. And Erica Alexander, because I interviewed her for the book, she said worse than that. They had so much success on that show that when that show ended, and the way she put it really resonated with me, she said that Hollywood wasn't prepared to absorb them. That there was no net, there was no next offer, there was no next thing waiting that these actors were told, oh, well, you had success on that show, but you can't replicate that on another show or they were tight cast, like Karen Parsons, who played Hillary Banks.

12:21I interviewed her as well and her stories in this book. Same thing with Julia White, who played Steve Merkel or Alfonso Rivera, who was on a fresh prince. There were so many reasons these folks got in Hollywood as to why they're success across the board. Their mainstream success was not enough, and these were top-rated shows. I mean, for decades, it was, Cosby Show was number one, cheers was number two, a different world was number three. Now, what's interesting about that is, Kadim Hardison found out that they were all underpaid when he did White Man can't jump, and Woody Harrelson told him how much he was making on cheers, and Kadim Hardison was like, I've never even heard of money that astronomical. And there has always been this double, and we know this to be true, there has always been a double standard of discrepancy. Some reason as to why we're not paid, we're not respected, that in a way that is not commensurate with our work. So what do we do about it, and shout out to Janet and Nubia, I forgot about I Spy, I forgot about the Mod Squad, I forgot about those shows, I mean, you know, but we were so desperate

13:24to see any version of ourselves, and fortunately with Mod Squad, Clarence Williams III, and I Spy with Bill Cosby, they played whole human beings, they weren't menstruals at that point. No, they weren't, and Bill, we get to talk about Bill Cosby, because in the book what I do, I separate Bill Cosby's creative work and the Cosby show from the crimes that he was accused of and served time for, which are monstrous. You have to hold those two truths at once in order to talk about that era. There is no 90s resurgence, there is no golden age of 90s sitcoms without the Cosby show. And there certainly is not, I would argue, you wouldn't have a Secretary of State Colin Powell, you wouldn't have a President Barack Obama, were it not for the work that the Cosby show did in normalizing images of black folks as successful, as smart, I mean, we all know this to be true, but mainstream American needed to see that in their home Thursday night

14:24after Thursday night. But Bill Cosby, he becomes really the first breakout star, breakout mainstream comic star, high on respectability, high on clean comedy, to your point it was very intentional about the work that he did in those early sitcoms, because in many ways as he viewed it, he wasn't on the front lines of the civil rights movement in the way that so many of those freedom fighters were, but he was fighting a different kind of civil rights fight in Hollywood in mass media, in culture, and as we know that it's so vitally important. Bringing on Alvin Pousant to make sure that he was hitting all of the right notes on that psychological level with us and showing us to that point, there were always rumors that the reason why Cosby got him up, and full disclosure, Cosby drug people, he admitted to drugging people, we're not litigating, we're not re litigating, only reason why he caught

15:26a deal, and that's the only reason why it was a gregion that the guy came back and put him on trial for something he had already admitted to, and they cut a deal for him not to be prosecuted, and they prosecuted him, which is why he's out today. He did that, okay, he drugged women and had sex with them while they were not conscious, period. That's what happened over there. However, he did try to buy NBC, and that seemed to be the beginning of the end of the glory days and the pedestal of Bill Cosby, how dare you think that you could, in your studies, Jeff, did you find that any backlash over the audacity of this man to want to buy a whole network? Yes, not only that, but the fact that Felicia Rashad doesn't have an Emmy. Oh my God. Right? I mean, can you name a better comedic actress than her, all the work that she had done? And it was because Cosby had pulled the Cosby show out of contention for Best Comedy,

16:28and there were reasons for that, and the Academy, and trying to teach him a lesson, basically said, none of the people on your show were ever going to be up for an award. So that's part of the new, it's like, you can be successful to a point, right? You can generate all this money for these networks to a point. But there will always be, on the other side of it, some sense of, know your role. And so that has shown up, too, for a lot of these actors and creators and showrunners, which is another reason why I wanted to tell this story, because it's not just about nostalgia. I happen to think the 90s were the best decade in terms of black culture creation, whether it's music, or fashion, or TV, or movies, what have you. My background is in television, so I focused on television, because I thought I'd have an entry point into it, and it turned out that was kind of the case. But it was also that I wanted to make sure that all of the folks who were so responsible in bringing these stories and these shows to the air got their just desserts, really,

17:29and got their flowers and got aspects of their stories documented, and into the public bloodstream in a way that hadn't been done before. We're talking with Jeff Bennett. Blackout Loud is the book. It actually comes out officially tomorrow. Blackoutloudbook.com is where you can go to see more information. History has these rhythms, these rhythms. So it's the 70s, right, if we're talking about music, it's the 70s, disco, that gave us rap, right, I mean, so it was calling response and reggae, whatever. But then it was chic, now rogers, and that good times that gave us sugar hill gang that gave us the whole kind of blueprint for what comes next, that gave us the glory days of the 90s in music, right? So in comedy, it's Jefferson's, it's good times, it's what's happening, it's that's my mama, it's Sanford and Sun, right?

18:30So the 70s, Flip Wilson and Richard Pryor, the 70s gave somewhat of a runway for the 90s to happen. It's almost like Hollywood forgot, oh, this is how normal there, this is how we get rich off the backs of black people, Hollywood is like, oh yeah, that's right, the blacks. Let's go back and do that. Again, do you see the cycle, and now here we are, I feel like in another cycle where we're about to see some things on the horizon, yeah, yeah, I do see that. I mean, I saw parallels between what Martin was doing and what Red Fox was doing, right? It's like physical humor, it's a lot of character work. I mean, that was certainly the case in Martin, um, right, his, his, his, his on Esther was Pam. Right. That's right. That's right. Yeah. I mean, Martin was basically doing theater work with all those characters and stuff. But yeah, that's a great parallel, but, but Red Fox brought edge into America's living rooms. I mean, he never lost the rhythm and the authenticity that made him who he was. And you certainly saw that with Martin Lawrence.

19:32And somebody was telling me the other day that the other thing about those shows was like, don't forget that Gina was a marketing executive. And that, and that Martin was a, was a popular, uh, radio host, yeah, like, yeah, even with like the, the high jinks and all the, the chaos and all the comical stuff, they were, they had high powered careers, like they were, they were career folk, um, which was also important. But back to the whole Sanford and, and Martin analogy, I mean, the comparison, Fred Sanford was, was funny, but he was also stubborn. He, there was, he was a vulnerable man. He, there was a lot of hustling going on. It was a full character on television at a time when black men on TV were flattened into stereotypes. And the same thing with Martin, even though it was like, farcical at times, there was still an authenticity to it. There was a heart to it, the relationship between the, the four of them, the four friends and certainly Gina and, and, and Martin, there was a, um, a real, real warmth there. And what's so interesting to me is the specificity and the authenticity of not just that sitcom with all the 90s sitcoms, that's what made them universal.

20:35So that's why you have audiences, tens of millions of people cross racially watching those shows, identifying with something in it to bring them back week after week. And that's, that's a business story there too. I mean, these days with all the content creation and the sense that, well, to get the biggest audience, you have to be as broad and as general as humanly possible. No, what you have to do is find your lane and find your niche and be, be specific and authentic and you will find success there. I mean, that is the lesson of the 90s and the lesson of today. And that is exactly what we ride on every single day. We're talking with Jeff Bennett, Jeff Bennett, the book is black out loud. And it's a history lesson as well. You started the book with Billy Kersands, a name that I don't know because you got a step in fetch it and how they make day on Amos and Andy and pig meet Markham and Moms, maybe I know all these people. Billy Kersands, tell us who is he? He was at the start of popular American comedy in the 19th century. And back then, menstrual shows, that was mainstream, that was mainstream fair.

21:39That was mainstream entertainment, entertainment for America. And so you had white performers in blackface creating these grotesque stereotypes of black life. And Billy Kersands, who was a black man, a real dig, I mean, the other thing about the book is there's a full-color photo insert in the book. So you get to see pictures of these folks, which is terrific. Billy Kersands is this dignified brother. And when you see the picture of him, you'll understand what I mean. He was a black performer, the first nationally famous black comedian. And at the time, even black performers had to wear blackface to work, that was just expected that was diminuted of them. And because what he found a way to do was to infuse comedy with his own humanity, with his own dignity. And so in many ways, you see this, and this has been true, where comedy becomes both survival and subversion under this really horrifically racist system back in the day. So he's really working in this core tension between performing stereotypes and then finding

22:43a way to become successful, even as he's doing that work. So I started the book with him because you can't tell the story of black comedy without understanding the menstrual era. And what I tried to do was apply a lens to that era that fit the time. Because it's too easy to look back and say, well, why would he do that? Like, if that was all that was available to him, why would he do it at all? Well, if he wanted to perform and had a gift for acting and dancing and comedy, that's what he had to do. But even that racist structure, he found a way to bring some humanity to it. I mean, to have $250 a week in the 1800s, that man was bringing in bank. He was born in 1842, it says in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was he enslaved? He wasn't. He wasn't. Mother and father had been, but he was not based on my research. 1842, though, that's a full couple of decades before emancipation.

23:44Yeah, that's a long time to be in the sound and not being slain. Like, I'm so curious, I'm so curious about this man that I think there should be some sort of docu-series or some sort of, you know, May for TV. So many of these, yeah, no, so many of these people are worthy of deeper understanding. I want to see a mom's mabily biopic. I would love to see a mom's mabily biopic. You want one like they did with Bessie Smith, the Queen Latifa did. Right, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, because you're right. She did a great documentary on mom's mabily. It was amazing. Yeah. As a matter of fact, this is great. Any surprises, Jeff, in your research, Jeff Bennett is here, by the way, his new book, Black Out Louds. Is this your first book? This is my first book. Okay. Congratulations. Congratulations. Congratulations. Yeah, thank you. The cover alone is this. It will take you back. It's very. It's nice. Let's see, Dick Gregory, I just interviewed Christian. Just amazing. Oh, wow. This is good. So Jeff, you got to come back. We got to talk politics and get you in trouble, PBS.

24:46Love you. Okay. I got to get you in trouble when you come back. All right. Absolutely. Karen, thank you so much. Thank you for listening. At KarenHunterShow.com, at KarenHunterShow on Instagram, at KarenHunterShow on YouTube, and also on Series XM, Channel 126, where talking powers and becomes action Monday through Friday, three to six PM Eastern. And here, of course, share it everywhere till next time. Thank you.