Artie Lange's Failure and Richard Pryor's Genius: New Research Details How White People View Blacks as Being "Superhuman"

Artie Lange, comedian, and former co-host on the Howard Stern Show, recently told a joke that involved a slavery fantasy, plantations, whipping, masturbation, and sex with ESPN’s Cari Champion, one of their TV personalities who happens to be black and a woman.

Lange was heavily criticized for this attempt at “humor”.

His effort at humor through the mocking of how black Americans were targets of systematic rape and torture during centuries of chattel slavery was a failure on all accounts: it revealed no deep truth, pointed no light on matters little discussed, and there was no self-sacrifice or vulnerability on the part of Lange because he failed in this instance to make himself (and his failings) the fulcrum on which the comedic revelation could turn or pivot.

I am an unapologetic fan of Howard Stern. As such, I am a fan of Artie Lange. Unfortunately, his joke about white on black rape during chattel slavery has put that “relationship” in peril.

I know Artie Lange in the sense that he is a fellow traveler of sorts.

Of course, I do not “know” Artie Lange the individual. But, I know him in the sense that I feel and “get” his life story, upbringing, and generational experience growing up in the Northeast, from a working class background that was tenuously clung to by his family, pain about the injury suffered by his father, and making promises to his mother about her future prosperity while hanging out at diners in New Jersey.

Lange, in his own way, also helped me to survive one of the darkest times in my life some years ago. I am known to have depressive moods while I dance with the dark and the morbid, trying to make sense of my life trajectory. As I was tempted to take one step too close to surrendering to those impulses, Lange’s autobiography Too Fat to Fish pulled me back.

For that I am indebted to him.

Because I am a fan of Artie Lange I reached out to him on Twitter. To my surprise he responded. I told him that he should just be contrite, to apologize for a joke gone wrong, and that there are many people, like myself, across the color line, who support his career and are concerned about him as a person. All Artie Lange needed to do is to own his mistake and bad behavior; we are human; not all of our art–or in this case–jokes are going to be winners.


Artie’s first response was contrite and honest. There seemed to be a certain amount of direct honesty and vulnerability to it. Several tweets later, Lange explained that he is a comedian and that he can’t be limited by concerns about “offending” people. I was and remain disappointed. Based on his recent appearance on the Opie and Jimmy radio show, and buttressed by the tweets of his overwhelmingly white fans and supporters, Lange has put on a shield, one emblazoned with a slogan that he is standing up against “political correctness”. His racist jokes are an act of free speech. Moreover, somehow his fans and defenders believe that Lange is working in the great tradition of Richard Pryor, showing no fear about making the public uncomfortable.

Defiance of “political correctness” on matters of race and racism are an effort to reinscribe white privilege and white supremacy as the default position(s) from which the feelings of non-whites about white racism must be judged and assessed. As such, there is no “offense” unless a white person determines that one has taken place.

The excuse-making claim that Lange and other white comedians are simply working in a genre known as “frat boy humor” are banal: offense for the petty sake of offending is the lowest form of comedy; it is empty; it is childish; and when done by white comedians who are discussing matters of race, the ultimate goal is for them to play with white racism in a cowardly way.

White comedians’ “fun” with racism is black and brown people’s pain. Men’s “fun” with sexism and rape are women’s pain. It is only a profound divide in a sense of shared humanity that makes such humor acceptable.  

As in this case, Lange and others who work in the frat boy style of comedy are protected from taking ownership of their racist behavior. And in the most grotesque moments, he or she who tells racist and white supremacist jokes can retreat to the alcove of white victimology, a safe space where they can find comfort that somehow they have been wronged by overly “sensitive” non-whites, “liberals”, and “social justice warriors”.

Artie Lange’s white slave rape sex fantasy debacle is an unintentional reminder of Richard Pryor’s genius wit and wisdom. Pryor is deployed by Lange and his defenders because in their flat and lacking in nuance perspective, the former was 1) black, 2) told “offensive” jokes, and 3) was the greatest American comedian of the modern age.

“The black guy did it too so it must be okay” is a standard colorblind racism talking point, one that is often summoned whenever a white person commits a racist act.

Those who channel Richard Pryor in order to defend Artie Lange do not understand that Pryor “offended” his audience as a way of making them see a deeper truth. Pryor was great because he stood before the public, his soul and heart naked, in order for them to see his ugliness, pain, vulnerability, sadness, love, confusion, joy, and complexity. Pryor suffered. His humor was an act of parrehesia. Pryor told the truth. His commitment to telling the truth through comedy was a way of fighting his personal–and America’s societal–demons. Pryor’s vulnerability would eventually lead to his death.

Pryor the comedian was a master social critic, one with an almost preternatural gift for speaking truth to power. One of Richard Pryor’s most insightful routines was the skit called “Super Nigger”. There, he offered up blistering insight into racial stereotypes, black vulnerability, the cool pose, soul, and white racism.

In another life, Richard Pryor would have been a gifted university psychologist or sociologist.

The recent article, A Superhumanization Bias in Whites’ Perceptions of Blacks by Adam Waytz, Kelly Marie Hoffman, and Sophie Trawalter reveals that white Americans hold a deep subconscious belief that African-Americans possess superhuman powers and are somehow a “race” that is apart and separate from the mere mortals who comprise White America.

Waytz and his colleagues detail how:

New research suggests that whites think of blacks in general as superhuman, or at least more so than whites. And this bias may have implications far outside the wide world of sports. 

Adam Waytz of Northwestern University and Kelly Marie Hoffman and Sophie Trawalter of the University of Virginia report the results of several studies on this subject in an upcoming issue of Social Psychological and Personality Science. In one experiment, white Internet users were shown a white face and a black face and asked to decide: 

1) Which person “is more likely to have superhuman skin that is thick enough that it can withstand the pain of burning hot coals?”2) Which person “is more capable of using their supernatural powers to suppress hunger and thirst?”3) Which person “is more capable of using supernatural powers to read a person’s mind by touching the person’s head?”4) Which person “is more capable of surviving a fall from an airplane without breaking a bone through the use of supernatural powers?”5) Which person “has supernatural quickness that makes them capable of running faster than a fighter jet?”6) Which person “has supernatural strength that makes them capable of lifting up a tank?” 

Blacks were selected 63.5 percent of the time, significantly more than whites. The only two items that did not differ significantly were the ones about reading minds (52 percent blacks) and falling from a plane (54 percent).