Laughing Fit to Kill (2008)
Carpio explores written and oral texts from the late twentieth and early twenty-first century that situate slavery as the subject of humor. Such texts reconcile the horrors of slavery with the subject of humor through the tragicomic mode, which associates laughter not with gaiety but with mourning. Carpio argues that Black literature across two centuries has employed humor to probe the brutal history of enslavement in America and its structural reverberations, which extend to the present day.