275 CHAPTER 16 African American Humour and the Construction of a Mature Female Middle-Class Identity in Clarence Major’s Such Was the Season Saskia Marguerita Fürst Historically, black women have been typically portrayed in dominant discourses according to the roles of the matriarch, the Black Mammy or the Angry Black Woman, to name a few. 1 Older black women, almost invisible within mainstream print and television culture, 2 are also often featured in stereotypical roles that serve to assist the white characters © The Author(s) 2017 C. McGlynn et al. (eds.), Ageing Women in Literature and Visual Culture, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-63609-2_16 S.M. Fürst (*) University of Salzburg, Erzabt-Klotz-Str. 1, Salzburg 5020, Austria e-mail: Saskia.Fuerst@sbg.ac.at 1 For more information, see Collins (2000) and Harris-Perry (2011). 2 See the study conducted by Judith de Luce in 2001 of 31 common US magazines, which found relatively few advertisements featuring older women and none depicting age- ing black women. See also the fndings of Meredith Tupper’s (2015) study concerning the representation of the elderly in prime time television commercials in 1995 that featured only 0.12% of older African Americans despite their 1% population as of the 1990 US census.