Some say satire (and comedy in general) sucks us in with the sugar of humor, but then, often, hits us with the bitter medicine of a serious issue. The more I look at, read other people’s interpretations of, and think about, Kevin Hart’s routine known as “My Mom Let Me Cuss,” the more complex it becomes, rendering the theme promoted in its title to the margins compared to the human drama that is occurring here; it’s not just about his mom giving him permission to cuss. In analyzing it a little deeper, however, I am aware that I could be stripping it, robbing it, of the very humor that captured my interest in the first place.
In this first-person short story, or piece of flash (non)-fiction, there are 3 main characters---Kevin, the teacher, and his mother; we could add a 4th choral figure (his fellow classmates). Which of these characters, if any, is the most sympathetic? Kevin starts by establishing his gadfly ethos. We see him acting up at home. We also see his mother’s ethos, as she punishes him for it. He also establishes his ethos outside the home as “class clown” in school, beloved by his fellow students for his charisma and wit, and perhaps an iconoclast who is skeptical of authority in general, or at least of this particular teacher.
From the teacher’s perspective, his actions are clearly disrespectful, “acting up in class.” We don’t know if the cause of this acting up dates back to the first day of school with this particular teacher; because he acts up at home too, one could assume that Kevin came into his relationship with this teacher with that attitude fully entrenched as a character trait. So it’s possible he was a difficult student from jump, and one can understand why the teacher would want to blame his mother for not successfully beating it out of him. But it’s also possible that the teacher lacked the ability to reach her students, or that her curriculum was full of lies that students are justified in being skeptical about (“Columbus discovered America; Lincoln freed the slaves,” etc), which, contextualized, could help justify Kevin’s actions more.
In a sense both the mother and teacher agree that young Kevin is a trouble maker, yet the teacher seems to make assumptions about the mother based on Kevin’s behavior (or perhaps the color of his skin), and this sows further division and discord. When the teacher uses Kevin’s body to send a message to the mother, is this a justifiable action, both in content (the message itself), and form (the particular method she uses to do this)? In the process, she makes Kevin an unwitting pawn in a battle between teacher and mother, as they both end up blaming each other for his lack of discipline. His mother’s response-in-kind, as it were, not only uses Kevin’s body as a middle man, or pawn in this power struggle, but also his mind and his mouth. We may wonder about her motivation in doing this
We may also wonder about the teacher’s lack of courage, or helpless desperation in her inability to discipline Kevin, that leads her to go over his head as it were and confront the mother; you could also say that her very gesture of stapled note reveals both a fear of Kevin and of his mother. In this context, the mother’s response to the teacher can be seen as a sign of solidarity with her son—“I may be harsh on you at home, but I got your back and will defend you in school (as long as you keep your grades up).”
Even if that is one of her motivations for letting him cuss the teacher out (knowing how he loves to cuss), she nonetheless puts Kevin is a very difficult position. As I watch him pacing around his room, trying to rehearse for his big performance in school, aware that he’s playing to 3 different audiences—1) the teacher; 2) his cheering fans, his fellow students; and 3), implicitly, his mother, I feel great sympathy and empathy for young Kevin. He’s put into a difficult situation in between these two matriarchal authorities from above, in addition to his own peer group. It’s a lot to navigate, and difficult to digest how to handle it in one night, as he comically searches for the right tone (the tone in which cuss words are spoken matters as much as the word---take, for instance, the difference between “fuck you” and “fuck you”—the first sounds more dismissive and angry, while the second sounds more hurt and vulnerable, at least to my ears)
As he meets his friends the next morning, it’s clear he still is uncertain about how he’s going to deliver this message: “I got stuff on my mind.” No, that seems cold and unsocial. Uncertainty meets confidence. Okay, try braggadocio. “It’s going to go down.” Wing it, improvise. Chris Rock says Comedy is, in contrast to recorded music, an art you have to practice in public in front of a live audience. Learn by doing, in a cathartic burst of reckless abandon, or defiant performance relishing the pleasure of uttering forbidden words (that probably wouldn’t be so intrinsically fun if they weren’t forbidden) in so-called civil society: air out the tension (like Martin Luther King’s “boil”) screw code switching! Screw double consciousness. Learn by the big fat mistake. Oops, 76 cuss words! Teacher’s obviously displeased, so is his mother. Again, the two authority figures agree about this more than disagree. Is Kevin doing them a service by bringing them together, against a common target: him!) But, guess what, his fellow students are pleased!
What happens next? Will the teacher and the mother confront each other directly and not use him as a pawn? Does it matter? It’s just a bit. Kevin is more permissive to his own daughter than his mother was to him about cussing. If his mother had let him cuss more at home, maybe he wouldn’t have to cuss in class? I am curious if the movement to legitimize ebonics, or what is called black vernacular, makes more allowances for the legitimacy of cuss words as a useful tool in conversational discourse among most races. But it’s still not clear to me if Kevin’s piece is primarily satirizing the teacher, the mother, or his own youthful self, or perhaps all three.
9-16-21
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