This origin story of stand-up comedy in the United States begins with eighteenth-century Black signifyin’ performances by working-class immigrants and African Americans in northern marketplaces and those enslaved on southern plantations. These earliest comedic performance traditions spawned blackface minstrelsy, the first distinctly American form of comedy. The lineage of white performers appropriating Black performance tropes as well as Black and Asian performers being forced to perform in ways that satisfied racist white imaginings of the Other connects comedic entertainment to the racial caste system of the Antebellum era to contemporary protests – on stage and off – against racial injustice today. From blackface minstrelsy to vaudeville, to comedians hustling in the Borscht Belt and Chitlin Circuit and in dive bars on the east and west coasts, to the 1980s comedy boom and arena comedy today, this chapter traces the history of stand-up comedy from the early Republic to the twenty-first century.

August Wilson’s 1996 “The Ground on Which I Stand” speech was not without its detractors. Perhaps most striking to some about the speech was its lack of acknowledgment of the existence of the theatrical “Chitlin Circuit,” which has been producing performances by, about, for, and near Black people and communities since the early decades of the twentieth century. This chapter contemplates the relationship between Wilson and the “Chitlin Circuit,” highlighting resonances and divergences between their aims and ambitions.