A Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2009

Description

Reassessing the meanings of "black humor" and "dark satire," Laughing Fit to Kill illustrates how black comedians, writers, and artists have deftly deployed various modes of comedic "conjuring"--the absurd, the grotesque, and the strategic expression of racial stereotypes--to redress not only the past injustices of slavery and racism in America but also their legacy in the present. Focusing on representations of slavery in the post-civil rights era, Carpio explores stereotypes in Richard Pryor's groundbreaking stand-up act and the outrageous comedy of Chappelle's Show to demonstrate how deeply indebted they are to the sly social criticism embedded in the profoundly ironic nineteenth-century fiction of William Wells Brown and Charles W. Chesnutt. Similarly, she reveals how the iconoclastic literary works of Ishmael Reed and Suzan-Lori Parks use satire, hyperbole, and burlesque humor to represent a violent history and to take on issues of racial injustice. With an abundance of illustrations, Carpio also extends her discussion of radical black comedy to the visual arts as she reveals how the use of subversive appropriation by Kara Walker and Robert Colescott cleverly lampoons the iconography of slavery. Ultimately, Laughing Fit to Kill offers a unique look at the bold, complex, and just plain funny ways that African American artists have used laughter to critique slavery's dark legacy.

Features

• Offers an entire reconsideration of the practices and purposes of African-American cultural humor
• Provides a lucid example of how to expand the horizons of humor studies, an under-theorized field in much need of the kind of rigorous critical attention that Carpio pays to her subject
• Takes an interdisciplinary approach, moving between media and aesthetic traditions: from nineteenth-century literatre to late twentieth-century theater, from stand-up comedy routines to paintings and museum installations
• Offers a controversial pairing of humor with slavery
• Ambitious in scope, examining slavery's legacy in the new millennial politics of representation
• Analyzes the tenacity of stereotypes, showing how artists attempt to think through them

Reviews

"One of the most groundbreaking critical studies of black humor in recent memory."--Daphne A. Brooks, Princeton University

"Glenda Carpio has written a marvelously compelling and seminal study of the rich and radical tradition of the uses of black humor, satire, and wit to confront even the most painful aspects of the African American past. This is a delightfully original contribution to the historical and literary scholarship about slavery."--Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard University

"Within this theoretically rich and fundamentally interdisciplinary project, Glenda Carpio uses the laugh as both a subject of study and a methodology for analyzing texts ranging from visual art and popular culture to literature and theater. Her book takes a most innovative and insightful approach to the question of how the legacy of slavery continues to resonate within the African American cultural imaginary."--Harry J. Elam Jr., Stanford University

"Laughing Fit to Kill lives up to the challenge of confronting some of the most outrageous contemporary black humorists and their impious versions of 'the historical memory of slavery.' Glenda Carpio's book is daring, exciting, provocative and also often funny."--Werner Sollors, Harvard University

Product Details

304 pages; 35 halftones; 6-1/8 x 9-1/4; ISBN13: 978-0-19-530470-1ISBN10: 0-19-530470-5

About the Author(s)