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  • Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery
  • Kathryn K. Stevenson
Carpio, Glenda R. 2008. Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery. New York: Oxford University Press. $74.00 hc. $19.95 sc. 287 pp.

In Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery, Glenda R. Carpio recalls that African American humor begins as a “wrested freedom” rooted in survival—“the freedom to laugh at that which was unjust and cruel in order to create distance from what would otherwise obliterate a sense of self and community” (4). Turning to late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century artists—including novelists, comedians, painters—Carpio focuses her study on the “post-soul,” stereotype-centered work of “powerful conjurers in African American culture” who “transform stereotypes into vehicles for black humor and use them to illuminate the reach of slavery’s long arm into our contemporary culture” (23). Artists like Charles W. Chesnutt, Richard [End Page 216] Pryor, Ishmael Reed, Kara Walker, and Dave Chappelle invoke the stereotypical figures of slavery to “transform, subvert, and transfigure” them, an effort, Carpio maintains, that “evolves directly out of the culture of slavery” (23).

The risk of conjuring such potent stereotypes, which Carpio describes as a “volatile artistic gambit,” is that they will be reinforced, a risk that raises one of the book’s central questions: “can stereotypes be used to critique racism without solely fueling the racist imagination?” (15). Carpio suggests they can. Eschewing the “language of trauma,” the artists in Carpio’s study “expose the murderous and ridiculous effects of slavery in the present” in order to highlight how a system of stereotypes remains, ready to be resuscitated in the service of particular political agendas at different historical moments (13). Artists conjuring slavery-produced stereotypes do so in order both to chart continuity between past and present configurations of black Americans and to disrupt it: “They inhabit the images, exaggerate them, and dislocate them from their habitual contexts” (13). Acknowledging that humor is not a traditional form of lament, Carpio treats black American humor as an expression of the grief inherited from the irreparable damage of slavery, an attempt to redress slavery, and a commitment to radical social transformation, and she sees her study as an intervention in an academic climate that underestimates African American humor, largely by failing to delve into its complexities.

Carpio’s chapters offer close readings of the work of different artists, usually two per chapter, and each chapter highlights how their work intersects with a broader African American tradition and elaborates the attendant controversies. The strength of her study lies in her willingness to address artists whose work is often so controversial as to divide critical opinion, and to offer detailed analysis of a work’s layered and nuanced treatment of stereotypes while succinctly elaborating the historical backdrop to which the stereotypes refer. In her analysis of Richard Pryor’s comedic album Richard Pryor, for instance, Carpio contrasts Pryor’s humor with the Freudian model in which humor “occurs through the masking effects of jokes” which helps release energy and relieve inhibitions: “Pryor’s humor neither relies on jokes nor does it mask aggression or exposure; rather, it relishes both, following the tradition of signifiying, of playing the dozens and toasting” (87). Providing a theoretical framework—albeit one of departure—and referencing Pryor’s humor within a broader African American tradition, Carpio goes on to interpret Pryor’s performance as an “exposure of the simultaneously static and performative aspects of stereotypes” to make the point that such stereotypes are both “shared cultural fantasies” and “scripts by which people live, die, and kill.” Pryor thus draws attention to a “humor of incongruity” in which “one body holds mutually opposing ideologies,” so “celebrat[ing] the body’s freedom [End Page 217] to perform rather than be defined by stereotypes” (87). This analytical moment is representative of what readers can expect of Carpio’s work: a theoretical framework, attention to historical confluences and departures, and provocative reflection that resonates with current inquiries in African American studies and literary analysis, and race discourse and sex and gender theories, as well as...

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