Sterling Brown’s Laughter Out of Hell

Abstract

Brown’s sense of humor provides guiding principles for real-world action while making the Black tradition of private anti-racist laughter public. Brown examines the violence of traditional superiority humor in poems like “Sam Smiley,” in which Black laughter is silenced by lynching. Rather than simply rejecting such humor, Brown gives readers alternatives: his anti-hierarchical approach in the “Slim Greer” poems inverts Bergson’s logic, making humor a precondition for empathy. The partial resemblance we see between ourselves and the object of laughter can teach us to recognize our commonality even with our enemies. For Brown, the ethical underpinnings of art lie in artists’ awareness of contingency, complexity, and the subjectivities of unlike others. Empathic humor turns laughter from a zero-sum game to a game everyone can win by rejecting not just racism but hierarchical thinking as a whole. Brown shows how empathic laughter can reframe our knowledge of other people and upend the way we systematize that knowledge.