Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life is a 1930 play by American authors Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston.

The process of writing the play led Hughes and Hurston, who had been close friends, to sever their relationship.

Mule Bone was not staged until 1991, when it was produced in New York City by the Lincoln Center Theater.

The play begins in Eatonville, Florida, on a Saturday afternoon with Jim and Dave fighting for Daisy's affection.

Elder Childers, representing Dave, says Samson used a donkey's jawbone to kill 3,000 men (citing Judges 18:18),[2] so the hock bone of a mule must be even more powerful.

The contest ends when it becomes clear that Daisy expects her man to work for the white people who employ her.

They wanted to write a comedy about African-American life that didn't consist of racial stereotypes.

They decided to base the plot on a folktale which Hurston had collected in Florida during one of her anthropological field trips.

In January 1931, Hughes learned that a copy of Mule Bone, bearing only Hurston's name, had been sent to the Gilpin Players, an all-black theater company in Cleveland, for their consideration.

[19] Reviewing Mule Bone for The New York Times, Frank Rich wrote that it was "an evening that can most kindly be described as innocuous".