This paper examines the sudden commonality of blackface theater, or siyah-bazi,in public spaces across Iran during the Pahlavi era. While minstrelsy originally began as a mimicry of enslaved black eunuchs and was generally limited to the privacy of the royal court, blackface theater expanded rapidly in the mid-twentieth century and was entrenched as a type of folk theater across various forms of media. The timing of the minstrelsy’s popularity in Iran is particularly interesting and strange: it spread in the decades after abolition in 1929, when Iran’s history of slavery was being actively erased in the public sphere. The narrative around siyah-bazi, a practice that emerged directly out of the racial hierarchies of slavery, was eventually reconceptualized as a folk practice independent of its sordid past. Even though the blackening of one’s face, the accented pidgin Persian, the simple clothes, the sexualized plotlines, and the classed roles all directly came from impersonating interactions between enslaved peoples and their slavers, siyah-bazi was merely presented and accepted as a satirical tradition of political and social commentary. This paper investigates how siyah-baziduring the Pahlavi era developed from a niche royal form of entertainment to print, theater, and televised programming with a national audience. Through an examination of satirical magazines, memoirs, and, of course, the plays themselves, this paper contextualizes the history of siyah-bazi and minstrelsy in Iran as one that both maintained the racial legacies of slavery while erasing explicit references to it.