Senses of humor: joking etiquette in African American literature at the turn of the century

African American humor in part borrowed its vocabularies, forms, and thematics from contemporaneous debates about Black respectability politics, which sought to improve Black social conditions by performing bourgeois notions of propriety. In that sense, African American humor was informed by the same social processes that courted New Negro values of exemplarity, collectivity, and intelligence. Black literature criticism and African American historiography has often stressed the anti-humor dimensions of uplift work at the turn of the century. This project reveals that Black writers used humor, particularly irony, to model New Negro values (“good sense”) and distance themselves from the specter of minstrelsy. By using humor theory to delineate respectability discourse’s ideological and aesthetic features, I reclaim subtlety as an overlooked feature of Black art and performance, fundamentally shifting how we understand Black racial uplift work. Ultimately, I argue that Black humorists used irony to index cultural anxieties about Black representation for both intraracial and interracial readerships amid the development of an emerging Black American middle class.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference