Rebecca Wanzo has written an important book whose significance for humor studies extends beyond the funny and satiric examples that she explicates along with a greater number of dramatic ones. Her analysis focuses on often grotesque, racist exaggerations that convey moral or political judgment by ridiculing Black Americans’ deviation from a norm of attractive realistic representation of white Americans. She demonstrates not only how such stylized images express biased civic and political norms but also how African American creators have appropriated them as a tool of resistance across a wide range of print genres including editorial cartoons, comic strips, genre comic books, alternative comix, and auteur graphic narratives. Like most comics scholars, Wanzo takes for granted that popular culture draws from wellsprings of social significance, but her sophisticated approach to citizenship discourses owes much to Lauren Berlant's The Queen of America Goes to Washington City.Wanzo's methodological premise that meaning emerges from all components of representation—plot and dialogue, to be sure, but also facial and body language and panel and page composition—makes her explications of individual caricatures and cartoon panels particularly instructive for textually oriented readers who see images as transparent adjuncts to dialogue or captions, especially when the latter invite a laugh, rather than as constituents of narrative meaning. (Mieke Bal's concept of visual essentialism in “Visual Essentialism and the Object of Visual Culture” deserves attention from these readers.) With its title's echoes of Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream of an America that judges people “not by the color of skin but by the content of their character,” The Content of Our Caricature demonstrates the centrality of comic materials to American rhetoric, verbal and graphic, in dramatic as well as risible contexts.Humor figures most prominently in the first two and last two chapters, which treat comic and satiric uses of grotesque caricature (and its rejection) in funnies, editorial cartoons, comic books, and alternative comix from the end of the nineteenth century. The two middle chapters and coda concern caricature in dramatic narratives featuring historical Black leaders and superheroes. An eight-page color insert augments the sixty-one black and white illustrations that anchor her discussions within the chapters. Together the analyses showcase Wanzo's interpretive method as she defines “the wide visual vocabulary of black racial caricature” (30) and outlines the canon that it constitutes. A chronological approach in each chapter supports her claims for a long-standing representational politics of caricature, but I found myself distracted by the shifts from artist to artist, era to era, and often genre to genre as new biographical information, historical details, and expressive contexts appeared every few pages. Mixing genres within a chapter strengthens Wanzo's claim that caricature functions as a key formal element of Black comic art across genres, yet the variety can bury the lede. Nonetheless, The Content of Our Caricature presents compelling examples and often stunning insights; readers both new to comics criticism and familiar with its scholarship will find great value in her methods and analyses. And her conclusion that the identity standpoint behind the viewer's gaze matters as much as that of the creator's has great significance for humor studies across all media.Presenting examples by white and Black artists in many print genres, the introduction, “A Visual Grammar of Citizenship,” explores how the incongruities of comic caricature can expose and challenge America's racist status quo through the role that “visual culture plays in selling, disavowing, and romanticizing national belonging” (3). This chapter offers the most utility for undergraduate courses on American humor, rhetorical criticism, comics, or American cultural studies more broadly, as Wanzo outlines ways that imagery, panel composition, and historical context combine to subordinate or exclude Black Americans from citizenship. This segregation arises from explicit contrasts between the “white world” and “black world,” as G. H. Dancey framed the 1910 Jack Johnson-James Jeffries boxing match for Melbourne Punch, and informs imaginary comic dramas across the history of American print cartoons, in which the very excesses that turn representations into caricatures limit black figures’ participation in the citizenship narratives in which they appear. Wanzo observes that “white characters [claim] the center of racial narratives” (17), if only through a hegemonic white gaze. Indeed, she argues, Barry Blitt's infamous New Yorker cover “Fistbump: The Politics of Fear” (2008) demonstrates the degree to which context can make all the difference. Sans caption, the image projecting the GOP lie of the Obamas’ un-/anti-American radicalism struck many as realistic rather than ironic, and it discomfited even sophisticated viewers despite the comic excess of detail—the US flag burning in the fireplace, Michelle's Black Power getup, and Barack's Muslim garb, with the portrait of Osama bin Laden looking on. Wanzo sees in the controversy an instance of how the white gaze can limit Black figures’ access to narratives of citizenship, but it also prompts the key questions of her study: “What happens if we look at a racist representation and imagine that the image might be inviting us to think about black liberation instead of dehumanization? Can the racist caricature be used in aesthetic practices of freedom?” (25). The five chapters that follow insist, “Yes!”Chapter 1, “‘Impussanations,’ Coons, and Civic Ideals: A Black Comics Aesthetic,” explores antiracist deployments of racist caricature by North American cartoonists across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Wanzo begins with a strip from George Herriman's short-lived Musical Mose (1902) before turning to his modernist classic Krazy Kat (1910-44). In considering the interpretive significance of attributing Krazy Kat to a Black artist (because Herriman's birth certificate labeled him “colored”) rather than a white one, Wanzo sides with ambiguity. She might have aligned him with African American culture through the strip's trio of Krazy, Ignatz, and the Offica Pupp, a group that parallels the Signifying Monkey tales’ monkey, elephant, and lion, but instead she points to the strip's ongoing comic attacks on language and Western logic as posing the problem of meaning in society. Its solution is humor. Wanzo ends the chapter with examples of a third approach: appropriating and reversing ridiculous images in order to reframe the Black body for both comic and dramatic contexts. Through parody of the blaxploitation aesthetic in Bitch Planet (2014-17), for example, writer Kelly Sue DeConnick and (Canadian) artist Valentine DeLandro celebrate “the black nonnormative body” (59) through the comic excess of hyperbolic plots and characterizations. Such work illustrates the power of caricature to personify—and challenge—the social forces that deform Black citizenship. By demonstrating caricature's plasticity for varied political and rhetorical uses, Wanzo illuminates the continuum between dramatic and comic rhetoric while modeling the tension between formalist and critical analysis.Two middle chapters further showcase Wanzo's ability to probe the social and political significance of Black caricature in dramatic contexts. Chapter 2, “The Revolutionary Body: Nat Turner, King, and Frozen Subjection,” details the challenges that conventions of heroic representation have posed for historical accounts of Black leadership across 150 years, from Thomas Nast's panoramas to contemporary editorial cartoons and graphic narratives by Kyle Baker and Ho Che Anderson. In her account, American rhetorical traditions frame Black action as dangerous, Black supplication as reverent, and Black leadership as static because social norms of status, beauty, and justifiable political action reflect the heritage of European imperialism. Not that fictional narratives have an easier time portraying Black leadership, as Wanzo's analysis of superhero portraiture makes clear in chapter 3, “Wearing Hero-Face: Melancholic Patriotism in Truth: Red, White & Black.” There she introduces the concept of melancholic patriotism, “an affective disconnect” between love of the United States for its promises of democracy and distress over its exclusion of Black citizens from those promises—poles in a dissonance symbolized in American visual culture by the uniforms that are smartly displayed by soldiers in family photos, on the one hand, and that are depicted as tattered, like their citizenship, on the other, in editorial cartoons and tales of Black Captain America.Chapter 4, “‘The only thing unAmerican about me is the treatment I get’: Infantile Citizenship and the Situational Grotesque,” focuses on the child protagonists who align the funnies with literary humor and turns the genre's well-worn conventions on their head. Wanzo examines how the aesthetic of cuteness that informs the ironic wisdom of white youths morphs in the context of African American childhood. Whatever their struggles, the cute white kids of Little Orphan Annie (1924-2010), Peanuts (1950-2000), and Calvin and Hobbes (1985-95) do not worry about school desegregation, as do the Black kids in Ollie Harrington's Dark Laughter (1938-56); police shootings, as in Brumsic Brandon Jr.'s Luther (1968-86); or political hypocrisy, as in Aaron McGruder's The Boondocks (1996-2006). In body and mind, these boys perform the juvenile version of melancholic patriotism, their experiences damning the state from the pages of daily newspapers. Wanzo goes on to show how Black girls, from their platforms in alternative comic books, seem even more distanced than boys from ideals of national citizenship. Raquel Ervin/Rocket of the Icon (1993-97) superhero series embodies the severing of Blackness from the body politic in her role as female counterpart of Batman's sidekick Robin. Yet Raquel/Rocket (and creators Dwayne McDuffie and Mark D. Bright) turn political dissonance into comic incongruity in dialogue and image, including in scenes of her struggle to squeeze her belly into her powerbelt, her pregnancy marking her as a superhero who has violated the rules of childhood innocence and her Blackness obscuring the conventional sign of the superhero who comes to the rescue. Such examples of “situational grotesque,” Wanzo concludes, use “black infantile citizens … [to] push audiences to remember, as opposed to improbable white child ideals that encourage the nation to forget” its failures (169). This chapter should change how scholars think about (and teach) the funnies: Wanzo's expanded canon of this demotic genre and her analysis of its most enduring narrative convention challenges the idea of the child eiron as the emblematic American.Chapter 5, “Rape and Race in the Gutter: Equal Opportunity Humor Aesthetics and Underground Comix,” the last full chapter (a coda, “To Caricature, with Love,” treats Black Panther), takes on transgressive joking in the countercultural environment of alternative comix. Students of insult humor in stand-up comedy and film will find Wanzo's analysis of the mode particularly valuable because it demonstrates a continuity among comic media and genres in which standpoint is key. In a variation on Freud's triangulated tendentious joke, the equal-opportunity insult joke relies on a persona that is itself a caricature while also targeting the butt: “The object of the humor is ostensibly the abject and grotesquely insulting humorist, but the object of the character's joke is still ridiculed” (174). Chapter 5 traces that process in comics variously filtered through white and Black gazes to create a “dystopian affective mode” that exposes “the ridiculous, ugly, and grotesque in everyone” and implicates everyone in “the national ‘joke’ of perverse racialized, gendered mythologies” (175-76).Wanzo's core move here contrasts the racist countercultural representations of white comix giant R. Crumb with those of his Black contemporaries Larry Fuller and Richard “Grass” Green. Crumb is an excellent choice for this comparison, as Wanzo ties his racist caricature to his socially and artistically transgressive aesthetic in two iconic examples from Zap Comix: the distorted white men of “Keep on Truckin’” in issue 1 (1968) and the far more exaggerated native African woman of “Angelfood McSpade” in issue 2 (1968). The former erases Blackness; the latter overdoes it. Wanzo valiantly pursues possible antiracist ironic or satiric readings of “Angelfood” in the context of Crumb's other work before concluding that his gaze as a white subject excludes him from full participation in postracial joking because he never indicts anti-Blackness but rather “hails nonblack readers” (187). I agree, but think that a stronger argument would have highlighted the continuity among the racist hyperbole of “Angelfood,” his comically abject self-portraiture, as in “The Pleasure Is Ours, Folks” from issue 2 of Snatch (1969), and his racist representations of black figures in Harvey Pekar's realistic American Splendor (1978-2006), all of which stand in contrast to his more restrained figures in his Book of Genesis. Expressing homage through hyperbolic racism exposes the anti-Blackness of Crumb's view.The balance of chapter 5 argues that the meaning of insult tropes is different when the artists’ Black gaze conveys the world they portray. The pornographic narratives of Fuller and Green invite readers to identify themselves with a stock comic protagonist, Big Black Dick, thereby placing the Black gaze at two points of the triangulated insult joke. Fuller's White Whore Funnies (1975-79) challenges white readers to admire the Black male of racist sexual fantasies and the white women who serve as their comic fetishes in a fantasy mode that frames forbidden desires as constrained agency and citizenship. “If subjects are located by desire,” Wanzo notes, “white women and black men are situated here as escaping the parameters that position them as always responding to or serving white male subjects” (197).Rebecca Wanzo's ability throughout this book to find pleasure and humanity, along with significance and humor, in the abject and transgressive graphic imagery of American racism matches the challenges and import of her subject. She has redefined who and what matters in print cartoons and related genres. With incisive connections between characterization and commentary, theorizing and interpretation, The Content of Our Caricature deserves attention from scholars of American humor in all media, but especially in print. I recommend it for personal libraries as well as institutional collections.