The Oscar Nominee Cord Jefferson on Why Race Is So “Fertile” for Comedy
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 29 January 2024
⏱️ 28 minutes
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Summary
The writer and director Cord Jefferson has struck gold with his first feature film, “American Fiction.” Nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay for Jefferson, the film is winning praise for portraying a broader spectrum of the Black experience than most Hollywood movies. It’s based on the 2001 novel “Erasure,” by Percival Everett, a satire of the literary world. And Jefferson, who began his career as a journalist before branching out into entertainment, has long seen up close how rigid attitudes about what constitutes “Blackness” can be. “Three months before I found ‘Erasure,’ I got a note back on a script from an executive” on another script, Jefferson tells his friend Jelani Cobb, “that said, ‘We want you to make this character blacker.’ ” (He demanded that the note be explained in person, and it was quickly dropped.) Jefferson hopes that his film sheds some light on what he calls the “absurdity” of race as a construct. He finds race “a fertile target for laughter. … On the one hand, race is not real and insignificant and [on the other hand] very real and incredibly important. Sometimes life or death depends on race. And to me that inherent tension and absurdity is perfect for comedy.”
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| 1:03.5 | When a director's first feature film is nominated for the big award at the Oscars, Best Picture, |
| 1:08.9 | that's always something to take note of, and that is certainly the case with the movie American Fiction, |
| 1:14.1 | which is written and directed by Corr Jefferson. It was nominated for four other Oscars as well. Before making the film, Cord Jefferson had a real career |
| 1:20.7 | as a TV writer, early on with Larry Wilmore's Nightly Show on Comedy Central, then working on |
| 1:26.6 | the Good Place, Succession and many more. |
| 1:30.1 | He began, though, as a journalist. He contributed to The Root, the New York Times Magazine, |
| 1:35.5 | and particularly Gawker. And that's how he got to know the New Yorker staff writer, Jelani Cobb. |
| 1:43.5 | Court Jefferson and I met almost 15 years ago when we were both part of a list serve for black writers. |
| 1:50.6 | And we've kept in touch over the years, encouraging each other's work and keeping tabs on what we were up to. |
| 1:58.4 | In 2019, he was a writer for Watchman, |
| 2:01.5 | which was one of my all-time favorite television shows. |
| 2:05.3 | And even though I've known him for many years, |
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