Paul Beatty’s ‘The Sellout’

African-American satire has been alive at least since the first black slave made fun of her putative masters and their manners. In that moment of mockery, the cakewalk was born, but this parody had a catch: The slave owners loved it. They mistook the dance for a poor imitation rather than a dark mirror. One of the first homegrown national fads to go global, the cakewalk anticipated the paroxysms of twerking that would follow, whose late adopters like Miley Cyrus might be forgiven for missing the deep irony in the form’s black origins.

In print, black satire made its way into the 20th century through works like Langston Hughes’s “The Ways of White Folks” (especially the transcendent story “Slave on the Block”), George Schuyler’s “Black No More” and much of the folk tales and tomfoolery recorded and recast by Zora Neale Hurston during the Harlem Renaissance.

There were those who saw this satire without the least bit of humor. Richard Wright’s scathing attack on Hurston as a retrograde writer set a pattern not of discourse but of dismissal. It would take the 1960s, the reckonings of the Black Arts movement and the efforts of Alice Walker to reappraise Hurston — and to elevate satire as a form of protest. ­Cecil Brown took up Hurston’s folk humor in fiction and nonfiction (one of his books featured, for good measure, a giant black middle finger); Mel Watkins would go on to write a definitive book on black humor; and Charles Wright, the author of the 1960s novel “The Wig,” became a cult hero to those who like their racial romps postmodern and Flip Wilson-funny. In the end, it turned out that everyone just wanted to be Richard Pryor.

Into this rich tradition Crip-walks Paul Beatty. First known as a poet and whom audiences back in the day might know from a classic MTV poem spot, he has written three other comic novels and edited the terrific “Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor,” whose ­cover boasts a watermelon slice in lieu of a smile. All that should be a tip-off that ­Beatty is interested in skewering the popular (or at least cutting it into bite-size slices). On MTV, he essentially recited a Your Mama joke.

“The Sellout” is more a Your Daddy joke. At its heart (if satire can be said to have one) is the narrator’s relationship with his dead father; with his father’s cronies and frenemies; and ultimately with Dickens, his Los Angeles hood that has been “disappeared”: “There was no loud send-off. Dickens didn’t go out with a bang like Nagasaki, Sodom and Gomorrah and my dad” (killed by police). This tragedy is milked for comedy, in the tradition of the blues, and Dickens takes on a character much like the novel itself — borderless, outrageous, filled with crazy characters we are not so much meant to believe as be bombarded by.

The book opens with a prologue, which takes the beginning of Ellison’s “Invisible Man” (“I am an invisible man. No, not some spook. . . . ”) and spoofs it beyond ­belief, taking decades of stereotypical characters and putting them on display in the Supreme Court. In those hallowed halls, the narrator sparks up some weed before his attorney Hampton Fiske ­argues the case in broad comedy daylight. (Our narrator has been charged with trying to reinstate slavery in his home and segregation in a local middle school.)

I thought often of the 1990s appointment TV “In Living Color” when reading the novel; Beatty takes the same delight in tearing down the sacred, not so much airing dirty laundry as soiling it in front of you. “The Sellout” isn’t a book for the fainthearted — though not exactly for the lighthearted either.

From the prologue the book turns to Dickens, “an agrarian ghetto,” where folks raise livestock and the narrator’s sociologist father raises him as a race ­experiment (“40 acres and a fool”). Stereotypes tap-dance along until we get to Hominy Jenkins, “the last surviving member of the Little Rascals.” In his desperate search for recognition (it would seem he was always on the cutting room floor), Hominy becomes less holy fool — like Eddie Murphy’s Buckwheat on “S.N.L.” in the 1980s — than unholy terror. After the narrator saves Hominy’s low-fat bacon, Hominy pledges himself to the narrator as his slave.

Indenture serves as both parody and relief for Hominy: He offers himself as a human footstool or stands stock still like a lawn jockey — after enduring so much racism and mistreatment, it would seem, why not make it literal? For Hominy’s birthday the narrator rewards him by resegregating the Dickens city bus. (No wonder he jokingly calls himself “the Kim Jong-un of ghetto conceptualism.”) The biggest joke is that few notice the sign at first, and when finally a white person enters, it turns out later she’s been hired by the narrator to provide Hominy the pleasure of relinquishing his seat.

By this point you have either made peace or war with the book’s style, which, beyond the profane, becomes slightly predictable in its similes — not in what is said exactly but in the way things are always three or four other things. “Hominy is no source of pride: He’s a Living ­National Embarrassment. A mark of shame on the African-American legacy, something to be eradicated, stricken from the racial record, like the hambone, Amos ’n’ Andy, Dave Chappelle’s meltdown and people who say ‘Valentime’s Day.’ ” There are more mentions of the N-word than on a Sigma Alpha Epsilon field trip. But like early Richard Pryor, Beatty seems to wish to take the word out of the shadows, or from those today who euphemize it as “nigga,” as if pronunciation is destiny.

Or is he merely trying to make an American classic, like “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” which inspires some of the book’s most hilarious passages? A member of the father’s group, the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals, has rewritten a version of “Huck Finn” in which he has replaced “the repugnant ‘N-word’” with “warrior” and “slave” with “dark-skinned volunteer.” The retitled book is “The ­Pejorative-Free Adventures and ­Intellectual and Spiritual Journeys of African-­American Jim and His Young Protégé, White Brother Huckleberry Finn, as They Go in Search of the Lost Black Family Unit.” (My favorite reworked ­classic by this character, who becomes integral to the court case that frames the book, may be “Measured Expectations.”)

In the latter, more meditative half of the book, the narrator cautions against ­being offended: “If I ever were to be ­offended, I wouldn’t know what to do. If I’m sad, I cry. If I’m happy, I laugh. If I’m offended, what do I do, state in a clear and sober voice that I’m offended, then walk away in a huff so that I can write a letter to the mayor?” From its title on, “The Sellout” so clearly and gleefully means to offend that any offense taken suggests we aren’t as comfortable with race or ourselves as we wish to be.

This gap of course is where satire makes its home. If poetry, per Lucille Clifton, means to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, satire says one out of two ain’t bad. “The Sellout” sometimes does this not by being funny but by being too close for comfort. It remains so ­outrageous, in fact, that you can’t even get comfortable with the narrator, who will seemingly say anything. But do we recognize that he is wearing “a mask from our own collections . . . the happy mask we ­carry in our back pockets, and like bank robbers whip out when we want to steal some privacy or make an emotional getaway?”

Beatty’s novel breaks open the private jokes and secrets of blackness (one of which is that Being Black Is Fun) in a way that feels powerful and profane and that manages not to be escapist. In the book’s most compelling sections, it starts to ­consider the sacrifices necessary for survival: “We’re the black moths in that classic evolution photo, clinging to the dark, soot-­covered tree, invisible to our predators and yet somehow still vulnerable. The job of the swarthy moth is to keep the white moth occupied.”

Beneath the proliferating references to the Marx Brothers and Abbott and ­Costello lurks another book: one about California itself. This is, we’re regularly reminded, a California story, one of prospecting and migration and pain, set in that place old maps once depicted as cut off from the mainland. “To this day, when the census form arrives in the mail, under the ‘RACE’ question I check the box marked ‘Some other race’ and proudly write in ‘Californian,’ ” the narrator tells us. California is a state of mind, in which the ­resegregation of a school might somehow make the ballot as part of a progressive measure. The wildness of this West feels especially fitting given how many of the best black satirists, from Pryor to ­Ishmael Reed (who gets name-checked), have made their home there.

Beatty’s novel is a metaphorical multicultural pot almost too hot to touch. There’s an interlude on the idea of “sister cities,” and near sublime passages on ­surfing that offer up an alternative to the Dickensian borders the narrator is intent on ­redrawing. But, of course, it’s the all-black context — much as in Hurston’s real-life Eatonville, Fla., or Colson Whitehead’s Sag ­Harbor — that emboldens ­Beatty’s fiction (and the inside jokes).

In the end, the novel reminded me of “Black Twitter.” For every “smdh” I was “lmbao” — if you have to ask what these terms mean, maybe you shouldn’t. If not a classic, “The Sellout” is destined to be a ­really good cult jam. It’s a post-soul ­parody, trying to feel more like the skits between songs than the song itself. And Beatty, a little like your daddy’s radio, mostly skips hip-hop, reckoning more with life before hip-hop went global. He tries instead to go back in time and do what gangsta rap did in protesting ­oppression through its fantasia — ­using farce instead of pretend force. These days, one might be mistaken for the other — though not exactly forgiven.