TV REVIEWS : ‘Mo’ Funny’ Pays Fine Homage to Black Comedians

“Mo’ Funny: Black Comedy in America,” which airs at 9:30 tonight on HBO, strikes a nice balance between featuring a historic all-star lineup of African-American comedians, letting them show us what made them great, and reporting on the conditions that hemmed them in.

It gives us a clear-through line from the 1920s to the present, pausing to acknowledge such breakthrough talents as Lincoln (Stepin Fetchit) Perry, Pearl Bailey, Dick Gregory, Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor, and showing Sinbad, Keenen Ivory Wayans and Martin Lawrence as conscious beneficiaries of an older struggle.

If some of the jokes are necessarily dated, a lot of them are edged with the wariness and pain characteristic of the black experience in America.

If “Mo’ Funny” lacks anything, it’s in the critical acknowledgment that, at some basic level, talent is uncategorizable. Of course, racism has been the common denominator of ruin and despair for a lot of lost and obscure performers, but all these talents showed intriguing shifts of power and angles of self-expression, besides being funny.

You see it in the way Rochester handles Jack Benny, or the way Flip Wilson gives attitude in Geraldine’s dress, or the way the late Robin Harris’ act, which seemed so rough on the surface, was actually nuanced and considered. Also, if all humor, as Malcolm Muggeridge once observed, is in bad taste, it doesn’t follow that tastelessness, which is the current norm, is automatically funny.

But that’s for a lot of the younger comics to ponder. “Mo’ Funny” gives them, and us, their wonderful pedigree without any of the deadly self-pity that characterized a similar program called “A Laugh, a Tear” in 1990.