A POETICS OF LAUGHTER

Black humor is misconstrued as nihilistic and apathetic because critics fail to recognize that its political activism is taking place through a philosophically radical laughter, rather than a satirical humor.  Close attention is usually paid only to the first principle of black humor, its cultivation of a moral and aesthetic flatness.  This flatness, on its own, perpetrates the same violence as the bomb, the terror of political and physical annihilation is recapitulated as a narrative strategy.  Black humor’s project falls into view when we begin to interpret these flattenings not as apocalyptic ends in themselves, but as fertile terrain for the creation of an errant laughter. This laughter extends out beyond the text and infects the reader, teaching a new mode of engaging with the world based on an “enjoyment of relation” rather than an “ontological obsession with knowledge.  Calling upon the laughter that spills over the borders of texts, a readerly laughter, as evidence for a poetics of Relation may seem theoretically crude.  Perhaps it seems so because it is impossible to map, it is infinite and noncalculable, existing beyond the texts in embodied, desirous communities that form, however momentarily, around them.  It is precisely in these unmappable zones of readerly laughter that resistance against the universalizing, annihilating maxims of a Western-Christian cosmology becomes possible.  These communities of laughter, like the Bokononist karass, are continually in creation across multiple times and spaces.  Both fugitive and boundless, opaque and anti-cognitive, this laughter undermines existing systems of knowledge and mastery, and instead embodies the principles of a new ontological framework, a poetics of Relation.