Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery (review)

Abstract

Carpio, Glenda R. 2008. Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in Fictions of Slavery. New York: Oxford University Press. $74.00 he. $19.95 sc. 287 pp.In Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in Fictions of Slavery, Glenda R. Carpio recalls that African American begins as a wrested 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-firstcentury artists - including novelists, comedians, painters - Carpio focuses her study on post-soul, stereotype-centered work of powerful conjurers in African American who transform into vehicles for black and use them to illuminate reach of slavery's long arm into our contemporary (23). Artists like Charles W. Chesnutt, Richard Pryor, Ishmael Reed, Kara Walker, and Dave Chappelle invoke stereotypical figures of to transform, subvert, and transfigure them, an effort, Carpio maintains, that evolves directly out of 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 of book's central questions: can be used to critique racism without solely fueling racist imagination? (15). Carpio suggests they can. Eschewing language of trauma, artists in Carpios study expose murderous and ridiculous effects of in in order to highlight how a system of remains, ready to be resuscitated in service of particular political agendas at different historical moments (13). Artists conjuring slavery-produced do so in order both to chart continuity between past and present configurations of black Americans and to disrupt it: They inhabit images, exaggerate them, and dislocate them from their habitual contexts (13). Acknowledging that is not a traditional form of lament, Carpio treats black American as an expression of grief inherited from 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.Carpios chapters offer close readings of work of different artists, usually two per chapter, and each chapter highlights how their work intersects with a broader African American tradition and elaborates 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 while succinctly elaborating historical backdrop to which refer. In her analysis of Richard comedie album Richard Pryor, for instance, Carpio contrasts with Freudian model in which occurs through masking effects of which helps release energy and relieve inhibitions: Pryor's neither relies on jokes nor does it mask aggression or exposure; rather, it relishes both, following tradition of signifiying, of playing dozens and toasting (87). Providing a theoretical framework - albeit of departure - and referencing within a broader African American tradition, Carpio goes on to interpret performance as an exposure of simultaneously static and performative aspects of stereotypes to make point that such 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 celebrating] body's freedom to perform rather than be defined by stereotypes (87). …