I am Not Sidney Poitier relies primarily on the joke of the hero being named by his mother “Not Sidney”, a pun that amounts to a “negative” identity or an identity in negation and difference, but that thus opens up a reflection on names and naming. An irreverent reference to (un)naming and to being called out of one’s name, or even to Homer’s “No name”, the text indeed stages a cynical twist on African American nomination and its troubled history. In the wake of Erasure, it explores once again the relationship between language and being, being and meaning, as it revisits the major films in which Poitier starred and simultaneously gestures, among others, towards Ellison’s Invisible Man and Melvin Van Peeble’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and their picaresque plotlines. The corrosive humor relies on constant wordplays and non-sequiturs and a foregrounding of the letter in the dialogues. It also rests on the comic portrayal of characters, such as Ted Turner and Jane Fonda, America’s cultural icons par excellence. Percival Everett “himself” (?) plays the part of a Professor of nonsense in an autofictional mise en abyme of his own writing and authorship. I will focus in this paper on the proper name, an existential emptying out of what stands for identity and uniqueness, here functioning as a sign (of negation) in the “signifyin” chain. While debunking Hollywood’s use and abuse of the magical Negro, Not Sidney addresses the philosophical definitions of nonsense and negation, the fraud of self-identity, and tests the limits of narrative coherence.