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129 INTRODUCTION: WHAT COULD POSSIBLY BE RACIST AND FUNNY? We shall best understand the origin of the pleasure derived from humor if we consider the process which takes place in the mind of anyone listening to another man’s jest. He sees this other person in a situation which leads him to anticipate that the victim will show signs of some affect; he will get angry, complain, manifest pain, fear, horror, possibly even despair. The person who is watching or listening is prepared to follow his lead, and to call up the same emotions. But his anticipations are deceived; the other man does not display any affect—he makes a joke. It is from the saving of expenditure in feeling that the hearer derives the humorous satisfaction. —Freud, Character and Culture When it comes to cartoons, Sigmund Freud’s description of humor as the invocation of affect and its diversion speaks well to the existential horror we call the gag. Especially in the short subjects that fairly defined American animation until 1937, and still thereafter provided its bread and butter, life is an eternal cavalcade of pain. Bodies twist, stretch, explode, melt; they are crushed by anvils, pianos, giant mallets, whole buildings; they are sliced and diced by razors and knives . . . and through it all we laugh. Why is it that, faced with such horrific violence and fierce torment, we are amused, tickled, jollified? And why have cartoons in particular linked that mayhem to other degradations—of race, of gender, of sexuality, of ethnicity—harmonizing social and physical violence? Of the rude shocks that ’toons have taken on our behalf, the brutality of racism is one of the worst. Although the earliest days of American animation were 7 “Who Dat Say Who Dat?” Racial Masquerade, Humor, and the Rise of American Animation Nicholas Sammond 130 Nicholas Sammond relatively equal-opportunity in their racism—caricaturing with gusto Africans, African Americans, Chinese, Mexicans, Scots, Jews, Irish, Germans . . . and so on, the parody of Africans and African Americans, tied as it was to the vicious histories of slavery and segregation, offered a particularly virulent insult to human dignity and to human bodies. Persons of European descent could look forward to eventual assimilation into a generic American whiteness, and those of Asian descent might be afforded an uneasy accommodation as hardworking, clever, and inscrutable in the eugenic hierarchies of the day (and in more recent racial fantasies). Other ethnic and racial stereotypes have been subsumed slowly in a process of grudging and gradual inclusion, and this has only added further insult to the injury of ongoing white-black racism.1 This difference is not of degree but of kind, and cartoons have continued to be a place where the cruelty of stereotypes has found fertile ground for the expression of that distinction. Following Freud’s logic, the humor of racist cartoons, based in the turning toward and then away from this history of horrible violence, should be hysterical. Well, it sometimes is. Whether in the antics of Bosko the Talk-Ink Kid, or in the parody of Harlem night life, Swing Wedding (1937), brutality is visited upon black bodies, which are physically assaulted or suffer the symbolic violence of grotesque caricature. And yet this violence is in service of the laugh, and in their manic pacing, jokes, and visual ingenuity these cartoons can provoke laughter. The racist stereotypes that inform this sort of cartoon emerged from a specific iconographic lexicon and have circulated as commonplace expressions of contempt that dismiss the harm they express as ultimately harmless: in cartoons no one bleeds, and no one dies. It’s all good fun. The intense affect of racism, instead of evincing either vicious malice or utter horror, is turned aside into a joke, a double-take, a gag, a disavowal. Those gags, as they feed into larger systems of structural and institutional racism, have contributed to human suffering. Still, according to Freud, the affect that informs them, however brutal, may be converted to more felicitous laughter. Yet we generally agree that this laughter is inappropriate and that this conversion does nothing to blunt the racism itself. A historical understanding of race—if not common decency—requires that good people decry this sort of racism and censure their own laughter if they are amused. And since many different people, even the intended objects of these jokes, sometimes find them funny, we are left with another question: can good people see these cartoons as simultaneously racist and humorous...

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