You all know how black humor started? It started on slave ships. Cat was rowing and dude says, "What you laughin' about?" And he says, "Yesterday I was a king."

Pryor frames “black humor” as a survival strategy forged under extreme historical trauma. By placing the origin on slave ships, he links African American comedy to the brutal dislocation of enslavement, where laughter becomes a way to endure the unbearable and to assert a remaining shred of selfhood. The punch line—“Yesterday I was a king”—compresses a whole history of stolen status and identity into a single bitterly comic reversal. The humor is “black” not merely in subject matter but in its function: it exposes the abyss between past dignity and present degradation, using wit to name pain that might otherwise be unspeakable.