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Even after a rise in gay and Black representation and production on TV in the 1990s, the sitcom became a \"generic closet,\" restricting Black gay characters with narrative tropes. Drawing from 20 interviews with credited episode writers, key show-runners, and Black gay men, The Generic Closet situates Black-cast sitcoms as a unique genre that uses Black gay characters in service of the series' heterosexual main cast. Alfred L. Martin, Jr., argues that the Black community is considered to be antigay due to misrepresentation by shows that aired during the family viewing hour and that were written for the imagined, \"traditional\" Black family. Martin considers audience reception, industrial production practices, and authorship to unpack the claim that Black gay characters are written into Black-cast sitcoms such as Moesha , Good News , and Let's Stay Together in order to closet Black gayness. By exploring how systems of power produce ideologies about Black gayness, The Generic Closet deconstructs the concept of a monolithic Black audience and investigates whether this generic closet still exists.

Since slavery, African and African American humor has baffled, intrigued, angered, and entertained the masses. Rolling centers Blackness in comedy, especially on television, and observing that it is often relegated to biopics, slave narratives, and the comedic. But like W. E. B. DuBois's ideas about double consciousness and Racquel Gates's extension of his theories, we know that Blackness resonates for Black viewers in ways often entirely different than for white viewers. Contributors to this volume cover a range of cases representing African American humor across film, television, digital media, and stand-up as Black comic personas try to work within, outside, and around culture, tilling for content. Essays engage with the complex industrial interplay of Blackness, white audiences, and comedy; satire and humor on media platforms; and the production of Blackness within comedy through personal stories and interviews of Black production crew and writers for television comedy. Rolling illuminates the inner workings of Blackness and comedy in media discourse.

Taken together, the articles in this special issue refocus attention from the image on the screen to the ways queerness is produced within the culture industries, paying close attention to the ways image production is inextricably tethered to notions of the mainstream. As I have stated elsewhere, my aim is not to demean the excellent textual analyses that bring a variety of theoretical paradigms to bear on LGBTQ texts and characters (Martin, \"Scripting Black Gayness\" 650). However, a focus on the production of LGBTQ imagery, the ways queers produce their own media both within and outside the \"mainstream\" culture industries, and the ways queers work as oppositional readers of texts and paratexts illuminates a separate set of empirical practices for which analyses of the text alone cannot account. This special issue hopes to expand the types of research questions and texts within the field of queer media studies and production studies.

This article draws attention to The Wiz (Sidney Lumet, 1978) as the first Black-cast blockbuster and reassesses its significance to issues of Black media production, reception, and distribution. With a focus on press reviews, this article uses what I am theorizing as racialized media reception to understand The Wiz's historical and industrial import beyond its $23 million budget for Black and white reviewers and moviegoers. Providing an analysis of reviews from both the Black and mainstream presses, archival production documents, and documents about the film's distribution, this article argues that film reviews, as cinematic paratexts, helped to structure consumption and shaped the narrative of The Wiz as a failure.

[...]related, it helps illuminate how offline forms of humor, particularly those invested in maintaining the status quo, are imported into online spaces. [...]RompHim provides an ideal opportunity to examine the ways humor functions when black masculinity, (homo)sexuality, and fashion collide. [...]the text associated with the image functions to invert gender norms. The refrain that it's \"just a joke\" seeks to obscure the serious business of humor within digital spaces. Because of its spreadable nature, dismissing the humor around the RompHim elides the ways such jokes and images are deployed in the service of upholding the boundaries of hetero-masculinity, to the exclusion of the queer other.