1. The Signifying Monkey
Will Get All Over You
Deep down in the jungle so they say
There's a signifying motherfucker down the way.
There hadn't been no disturbin' in the jungle for
quite a bit,
For up jumped the monkey in the tree one day
and laughed,
"I guess I'll start some shit."

2. As the African American toast cited
above clearly shows, a trickster figure
such as the Signifying Monkey enjoys
stirring up trouble for its own sake. All
trickster figures, however, are rather
wise too. Perhaps they know that
laughing at trouble (and even creating
trouble just to laugh) has a special kind
of transformative power. Tricksters can
level the playing field in a flash and
make it possible for burdened and
uptight people to suddenly feel
lighthearted and playful. Tricksters show
up in the folklore and creation myths of
a number of cultures worldwide, including
African, Haitian, Native American (or
American Indian) and African American.
(Hanuman, for instance, is a sort of
Hindu trickster figure. You can read
about him elsewhere on this site.)

3. The Trickster Tale
Trickster tales are a type of folktale in which
animals are portrayed with the power of speech
and the ability to behave like humans. The
dominant characteristic of the trickster is his or
her ingenuity, which enables the trickster to
defeat bigger and stronger animals. A variant of
the trickster tale is the escape story, in which
the figure must extricate himself from a
seemingly impossible situation. Closely linked to
the rhetorical practice known as "signifying,"
trickster tales generally serve satirical or
parodic purposes by poking fun at various types
of human behavior. In African and African
American trickster tales, the trickster figure is
often a monkey, a hare, a spider, or a tortoise.
One of the first African American writers to
present the trickster figure in literature was
Charles Waddell Chesnutt. His story "The
Goophered Grapevine," which appeared in the
Atlantic Monthly in 1887, features a white
northern couple who move to the South and
meet former slave Julius McAdoo, an adept
storyteller. McAdoo regales the Northerners with
"conjure tales," or supernatural folk tales,
designed to entertain them and influence
decisions they are making. Chesnutt's conjure
stories are often tragic, providing indirect

4. commentary on the injustice and cruelty of the
slavery system.
The trickster figure has been adapted to
modern literature by a number of black writers.
For example, Ashley F. Bryan's books for
children The Adventures of Aku (1976) and
The Dancing Granny (1977) feature Ananse,
the spider-trickster. Louise Bennett has written
several books about the adventures of the
same figure, whom she dubs Brer Anancy.
Ishmael Reed has taken the adaptation a step
further in his character PaPa LaBas, the voodoo
trickster detective in his mystery parody The
Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974).
[Excerpted from The Essential Black Literature Guide, by Roger M. Valade III, in
Association with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Visible Ink
Press, 1996.]
The Trickster as Masking Device
Africans themselves assume humor exists
everywhere, even in the highest levels of
existence. In Yoruba belief, two of the principle
gods are comic figures. The supreme god,
Oludumare, instructs Obatala, the god of
laughter, to create the earth, but the latter
gets drunk on palm wine and, as a result,
botches the job, producing, among other

5. things, albinos and hunchbacks (Awoonor
71ff.). Esu-Elegba, in many ways the most
important deity, operates as agent between
God and humans, thereby playing the same
role as the trickster does around the world,
particularly coyote and raven of the North
American Indians but also Brer Rabbit and his
cronies. Like most of them, Esu, famous for his
ravenous appetite (especially for sex), his
wandering, his vanity, and his unpredictability,
delights in transgressing boundaries of all
types. He and all other African tricksters,
including the Signifying Monkey and Anancy
the spider, figure in endlessly varied plots and
possess a playful unpredictability (Edwards
156). Often, as an African American toast
suggests [see above], a trickster starts trouble
for the sake of it. ... Humor, however, does not
necessarily operate in a positive manner, and
various ethnic groups have always used humor
to cast aspersions on others, particularly
through stereotyping. Many of the stereotypes
of African Americans that existed in (Zora
Neale ) Hurston's day unfortunately remain
with us even today, albeit in muted form.
During the nineteenth century and the early
twentieth century, however, they constituted a
veritable staple of American culture. This mode
of racial representation very directly presented
black people as naive, childlike, and just plain

6. stupid. Surveys of this tradition in the United
States show how pervasive such patterns were
at every level of society and how they were
related to general patterns of oppression
applied to other ethnic groups and often to
women of all races.
The nineteenth century's appetite for "Negro"
folktales and folk humor proved insatiable,
especially after the Civil War, when new
cultural modes were sought to deal with white
psychological fears caused by emancipation.
Collections of "negro humor," plantation
tradition short stories and novels, and, above
all, the minstrel show and popular stage
productions solidified the image of the "comic
darkie." . . .
American minstrel shows . . . [with white
actors in burnt-cork makeup] . . .
complemented down-home-on-the-plantation
stereotypes with a new one depicting the
gaudy African dandy of New York's Broadway,
"Jim Dandy." As Nathan Huggins has
demonstrated, these "types" were anything
but simple and had little basis in African
American culture. The rough, plain-talking,
"country" Jim Crow figure was obviously an
avatar of white culture's backwoods and
riverboat characters and, I would add, of
"Brother Jonathan"/"Uncle Sam" figures. "Jim
Dandy," by contrast, effeminate, urban, and

7. fast-talking, was Yankee Doodle's parallel and,
in comic opposition to Jim Crow, provided a
smiling mask for the deep struggle between
U.S. pastoral romanticism and onrushing urban
industrialization. In another avatar he became
"Zip Coon," a crafty urbanite who frequently
preyed upon greenhorns come to the city from
"down home." . . .
Dualities were, in fact, the staple of minstrelsy
and signifiers of the genre's ambivalence and
fluidity. Black on white disguise, later
complicated by blacks acting out whites acting
out the part of blacks, was accompanied by
males dressed as females as well. Minstrelsy
often gets dismissed as a vile phenomenon of
American popular culture, but its long-lasting
popularity was partly due to its constantly
evolving nature, its ambiguities, and its
invitation into the world of the ethnic "Other." .
..
Finally, minstrelsy also included "straight" love
songs for both sexes, and handsome leading
men became "matinee idols"; serious themes
such as poverty, family, and race were dealt
with under the mask of shrewd folk proverbs,
riddles, and idiom so the shows went beyond
both humor and stereotypes at times (Stowe
and Grimsted 82-86). Over the years, the
humor gained in subtlety. . . . Even when
authentic material such as the spirituals

8. became the vogue, black performers felt they
had to wear the mask in other ways, especially
in talking about themselves. . . .
Some might castigate Hurston for her
pandering to Godmother [the nickname for
Charlotte Mason, a white woman, who acted as
patron to Zora Neale Hurston and a few other
Harlem Renaissance writers] . ... But we should
be cautious in judging a humor and a cultural
situation that still had the motivation of the
legendary High John de Conquer [another
trickster figure who is featured in stories that
show him outsmarting Ole Massa]. It
facilitated African Americans' survival.
Hurston, like so many other great writers in
the African American tradition, in the body of
her work attempts to provide outsiders with an
inside view of the culture she so loved. But she
knew to do so would take cunning masking
stratagems and enticing devices, and humor
was chief among them in terms of its ability to
promote human understanding. "Cuttin' the
monkey for the white folks" sometimes seemed
worth it. As Janie says in Their Eyes, " 'Tain't
no use in me telling you somethin' unless Ah
give you de understandin' to go 'long wid it.
Unless you see de fur, a mink skin ain't no
different from a coon hide" ... For Hurston, her
culture was mink, not coon, and humor,
masked and unmasked, frequently expressed

9. in such utterances, helped her show the world
the difference.
[Selections from Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston's Cosmic Comedy, by John
Lowe, University of Illinois Press, 1997.]