“Dolemite Is My Name,” the Signifying Monkey and the Black Comedic Tradition

Today, the based-on-real-life comedy Dolemite Is My Name premiered on Netflix.

The film, set in 1970s, follows struggling performer Rudy Ray Moore (played by Eddie Murphy) who moved from Arkansas to chase show business in LA. Down on his luck, Moore goes for broke in his quest for stardom by taking on the jive-talking, raunchy and outrageous alter ego “Dolemite.”

I don’t want to spoil the film’s plot too much, but in many ways, the character Dolemite is a metaphor for the Signifying Monkey—a character rooted in West African mythology, carried with enslaved people to America and transformed into African American folklore.

Though the specific details may differ depending on what part of the country it’s told, the story goes as follows: the Signifying Monkey hurls insults at a lion (telling him he is merely reporting what an elephant was saying about him). The lion confronts the elephant and gets his clock cleaned. Though the lion gets payback on the Signifying Monkey in the end, it’s a story of wit, cleverness and wisdom. It also highlights the African American Vernacular English tradition of “double talk.”

History and linguistics scholars date double talk back to Africa, but in the American context, it stems from the Black slave experience. Enslaved people had to be good at “acting” to survive their captivity—appease slaveowners’ temperament; smiling when they were demoralized, playing dumb when they were anything but; saying “Yes Suh” when they wanted to, in Dolemite’s eloquent phrasing, fuck a muthafucka up.

It was also way to express emotions and send messages without the slave-owners knowing what they meant — “bad meaning good,” singing about the Israelites escaping from Pharaoh to symbolize them running away from the plantation; the overseer, laughing at the story of the ugly and fat lion, but being the only person who doesn’t get that the joke’s on him.

When Dolemite says “Dolemite is my name, and fuckin’ up muthafuckas in my game!”, the cursing and raunchiness is transgressive, but not just a rejection of conventional politics of respectability—it’s a push back on an anti-black society that dictates his every move, his daily schedule, how he can or can’t express…