No Laughing Matter

Preface—Adrian W. B. Randolph • Introduction. No Laughing Matter: Visual Humor in Practice and Theory—David Bindman • Carnivalesque and Grotesque: What Bakhtin’s Laughter Tells Us about Art and Culture—Kobena Mercer • PART 1. ENCOUNTERING HUMOR: RACIAL, NATIONAL, AND ETHNIC STEREOTYPES • Bartolomeo Passarotti and “Comic” Images of Black Africans in Early Modern Italian Art—Paul H. D. Kaplan • “If You Tickle Us, Do We Not Laugh?”: Stereotypes of Jews in English Graphic Humor of the Georgian Era—Frank Felsenstein • James Gillray, Charles James Fox, and the Abolition of the Slave Trade: Caricature and Displacement in the Debate over Reform—Katherine Hart • The Other Within—Allen Hockley • Material Culture, Slavery, and Governability in Colonial Cuba: The Humorous Lessons of the Cigarette Marquillas—Agnes Lugo-Ortiz • PART 2. RACIAL HUMOR AND THEORIES OF MODERN MEDIA • Fake Nostalgia for the Indian: The Argentinean Fiction of National Identity in the Comics of Patoruzú—Ana Merino • Passing for History: Humor and Early Television Historiography—Mark Williams • Comical Conflations: Racial Identity and the Science of Photography—Tanya Sheehan • PART 3. PERFORMATIVE COMEDY AND RACE • Laughter as Performance: Some Eighteenth-Century Examples—David Bindman • Bittersweet Blackness: Humor and the Assertion of Ethnic Identity in Eleanor Antin’s Eleanora Antinova—Cherise Smith • Traveling Humor Reimagined: The Comedic Unhinging of the Western Gaze in Caribbean Postcards—Sam Vásquez • Springtime for Hitler Every Year: Dani Levy’s Hitler Comedy My Führer (2007)—Veronika Fuechtner • Contributors • Index