The Efficacy of Humor in Sherman Alexie’s Flight: Violence, Vulnerability, and the Post-9/11 World

Sherman Alexie’s novel Flight (2007) explores the origins, contexts, and consequences of violence and terrorism in the post-9/11 world. Narrated by a fifteen-year-old foster child who calls himself Zits, Flight invites readers into the mind of a disaffected youth who uses both humor and violence to cope with an unjust world. When Zits opens fire in a bank lobby, he becomes unstuck in time—like Kurt Vonnegut’s character Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)—and is transported into the minds of other people also caught in violent circumstances at different historical moments. Alexie uses this body-jumping tactic to widen the social and political framework for understanding the attacks of September 11, 2001, as well as to examine Zits’s personal effort to cope with the violence that threatens to envelop him. Flight juxtaposes individualized and historical parallels to 9/11 in order to challenge simplistic responses to terrorist attacks—responses more likely to escalate than to prevent violence.

As in so many of his narratives, Alexie infuses Flight with humor. Zits uses humor in a variety of ways, primarily to protect and define himself in a dangerous world. For Zits, humor serves as a defense strategy against an onslaught of physical, emotional, and rhetorical threats exacerbated by his marginal status as an “unofficial” Indian (he is not tribally enrolled) and his mistreatment within a broken foster care system. In this respect, Alexie conforms to a common treatment of humor by Native American writers: humor as a sign of strength and survival. In Custer Died for Your Sins (1969), for example, Vine Deloria, Jr., argues that humor allows individual and group survival (167). Kenneth Lincoln describes “the ethnic glue of Indi’n humor” (23), asserting that laughter is good for “exorcising the pain, redirecting their suffering, [and] drawing together against the common enemy” (5). Native American humor is often employed to unify resistance to intercultural violence. In Flight, however, Alexie departs from the notion that humor primarily demonstrates solidarity and strength in the face of racism, signaling a significant shift from his previous uses of humor. In a 2006 interview, Alexie defines destructive humor as “a sign of serious dysfunction, an inability to commit and connect with other human beings.” Alexie’s description applies to Zits, who often uses humor as a “distancing technique” (“Reservation” 164). Rather than helping him bond with others, humor isolates and alienates Zits.

Through Zits, Alexie reexamines the efficacy of humor in the face of personal, cultural, and international violence in a post-9/11 world. In Flight, humor itself approximates violence. Zits uses humor to attack others preemptively; his violent humor often contributes to the cycles of violence that Flight exposes and condemns. When Zits shifts from linguistic assaults to physical terrorism, he encounters (via body-jumping) a series of violent historical contexts that simultaneously mirror his choices and comment on global terrorism today. Through Flight—and humor—Alexie prompts readers to reconsider events like 9/11, challenging them to reject formulaic responses that escalate violence, isolate people, and exacerbate trauma. By exposing the parallels between different types of violence, including some uses of humor, Flight broadens the way that readers think about global violence and fosters understanding between ostensibly different peoples.

This essay will first examine how Flight contextualizes 9/11 (thereby refusing its incommensurability—that is, the presumption that 9/11 is incomparable—and rejecting US exceptionalism), exposes the rhetoric that sanctions violence, reveals the conditions that contribute to violence, and suggests the complicity of all people in historical cycles of betrayal and conflict. The second part of the article will demonstrate how Flight enacts a shift in Alexie’s treatment of humor, moving away from humor as a source of personal strength and potential fellowship toward humor as a rhetoric that approximates violence, isolates individuals, and polarizes communities. Humor becomes a mask to hide behind, a potentially self-destructive substitute for the emotional openness and the attendant vulnerability that lead to healthy human connections in a divisive, chaotic world.

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