The Schizoid Ethics of Black Humor: Southern, Fariña, and Pynchon

The Year's Work in American Humor Studies, 2013

“…Implicitly a rejoinder to this kind of work, Bill Solomon's "The Schizoid Ethics of Black Humor: Southern, Fariña, and Pynchon" returns to this "insufficiently comprehended cultural (and commercial) phenomenon" not for any set of missed moral lessons that these writers tried to teach, but for their exuberant refusal of those and other constrictions: moral imperatives, socially and linguistically constructed identity, all the pressures for making sense in conventional ways and sustaining, for social, racial, or ontological reasons, a consistent and circumscribed self. 68 This is comic subversion of an absolute sort, the kind that off-the-shelf joke analysis in search of incongruities usually can't get near. Relating these three writers to the Beats in their own era and to the no-boundaries anarchy of silent film comedians including Keaton and Lloyd, Solomon celebrates moments when narrators and characters become "other in an undeniably weird way as an affectively intense series of transitions," 69 and as they float away, everything can go over the side of the balloon, all the constrictions that keep us mired in categories, lugubrious analysis and debate, the ruts of what passes for seriousness.…”