Golden girls of comedy introduce black women in all their complexity

The show is deeply rooted in black culture, having been written and acted by an all-female, all-black cast, and is laugh-out-loud funny even to those outside it

In a superlative bit from HBO’s A Black Lady Sketch Show (in India on HotStar), one of the characters reveals, to the horror of her friends, that she does not cover her hair before bed because it makes her head hurt. “Unnecessary pain is an important part of being a black woman, everybody knows that,” one friend shoots back. Another asks, “So no scarf at all? Like a black chick on a TV show written by white people?” This at once reveals one of the finer points of the black experience and the lack of accurate representations of it. The