9 - Performance and play in speech communities

Summary

Chapelle:I’m not saying I don't like police. I’m saying I’m just scared of them. Some times we want to call them too. Somebody broke into my house once – but I didn't want to call the police, Uhhh uhhh. [My] house was too nice! And in a real nice house – they'd never believe I lived in it!Police:“He's still here! Thump! Ohhh my God! Open and shut case Johnson! I saw this once before when I was a rookie. Apparently this ni**ga broke in and hung pictures of his family everywhere. Well…let's sprinkle some crack on him and get out of here.”

(Dave Chapelle 2000)

In 2000, when Dave Chapelle performed a comedy routine depicting his imagined arrest by police who thought he had broken into his own house and hung photographs of his family on the wall, those outside of the African American speech community may have thought that it was a brilliant comedic representation of police abuse, but an impossible one. Yet nine years later, the Cambridge, Massachusetts police arrested Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. for breaking and entering his own home – with pictures of his family and one of himself alongside Nelson Mandela on the wall!