ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ...

egregious essences of blackface puppetry, but even those brush strokes were marked by
the stamp of racially contigent exaggerations.
To some extent, comedy permits these racially contingent exaggerations; to some
extent, it mandates them. One can perhaps excuse the grotesque minstrel-derived
blackface puppets of the Proctors, Munger, or the creators of the Jubilee Singers, with the
argument that comedy always dismisses any need to adhere to “reality,” since humor
demands exaggeration beyond “reality” in order to achieve comic effect. Certainly the
categorical distinction circulated by McPharlin and shared by many puppeteers mandated
the utility of minstrel clows for comedic action.
However, the steady development of more realistic, less exaggerated blackface
essences throughout the history examined in this dissertation, suggests that there was a
deliberate use of exaggeration to achieve comic effect. When puppeteers like Sarg,
Bufano, Brown, and Chesse’ produced less exaggerated blackface essences, their artistic
practices coincided with a self-conscious commitment to serious and/or realistic puppet
drama. Sarg developed a new controller and new construction methods to increase the
realistic details of human behavior that could be mimicked by puppets, and adopted a
body of epic dramas. Bufano designed magnificent puppets for unconventional
productions. Chesse’ insisted on high- quality, dramatically rich puppet productions, and
despaired of those puppeteers whose variety clowns and crude fairies perpetuated the
myth that puppets are children’s fare. Even Brown attempted to capture, with a degree of
photographic realism, the human face, whether representing Albert Einstein or a
blackface character. Unlike Sarg, Bufano, or Chesse’, Brown’s plays are definitely
comedies. However, though Brown adopted the dialect exaggerations of minstrelsy, he
237