This dissertation defines and theorizes the Cinematic Black Social Cut (CBSC) as a critical framework for understanding how Black cultural expression, rooted in vernacular performance, sociality, and historical memory, is translated into cinematic form. Emerging from the aesthetics of Black communal life, the CBSC mobilizes five Black social rhythms: Call-and-Response, Signifyin(g), Deadpan Expression, Improvisation, and Ratchetness. This rubric anchors a methodology for analyzing how Black performance reclaims cinematic space as a site of resistance, theory, and cultural memory.

At the center of this study is Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip (1982), which serves as a prime example of standup comedy and as the CBSC’s founding cinematic mutation. Pryor’s extensive body of work in film and television positions him as a pivotal figure whose performances shaped how Black standup operates on screen. Co-written with longtime collaborator Paul Mooney, himself a key architect and engineer of Black cultural satire across film and television, Live on the Sunset Strip exemplifies how Pryor reframes standup as cinematic insurgency, linking testimony, trauma, and subversive aesthetics. Drawing from a long tradition of Black performance, the film’s interruptions, tonal dissonance, and direct audience address reveal the Cut as style and theory-in-practice.

From this foundation, the study traces the Cut’s evolution through Pryor, Eddie Murphy, and Tiffany Haddish. It examines Murphy’s Delirious (1983), highlighting its tension between cinematic polish and comedic fugitivity, and Haddish’s She Ready! From the Hood to Hollywood (2017), where the Cut is reframed through gendered embodiment and digital-era spectacle. Drawing from Black Studies, performance theory, sound and media studies, and aesthetics, this project positions Black standup comedians as vernacular intellectuals, cultural theorists whose work performs, archives, and critiques race, representation, and visual culture. The Cinematic Black Social Cut emerges as a theoretical and methodological intervention that rethinks cinematic form through rupture, vernacular knowledge, and Black social performance.