Our panel has married more traditional texts to other literary modes. And, though we reference theorists who explain why we laugh, like Genette and Attardo, the papers are not restricted by one theory. Rather, based on a corpus where the comic occupies a prominent position, we discuss the comic potential of: the quotidian, rural/urban contradictions, the overturning of stereotypes, and others. A common motif is humorous narrative technique.
Literature on Africa tends to be characterized by various manifestations of what Helon Habila has termed “African poverty porn.” In short, the English insult “May you live in interesting times” is (self) imposed on works published on Africa. It is for this reason that in “May You Live in Boring Times,” James Hodapp reads Marguerite Abouet’s graphic novel Aya of Yop City. He will show how representations of boredom elude many African narratives. The right of African characters to wallow in a world not constantly on the brink of disaster has largely gone unaddressed. This has meant that dark humor, gallows humor, and other ways of finding humor in difficult circumstances has dominated discussion of humor in African literature and media. Aya of Yop City, on the other hand, features banal fare such as such teenage love, social awkwardness, office politics, and beauty contests while occasionally addressing weighty issues. Moreover, the book uses its hybrid form to poke fun at the foibles of this banal life with particular attention to sight gags that lean on visual misrepresentation and misdirection as well as on biting gossip of everyday trivialities. Ultimately, this paper will examine the humor at that core of Aya as fairly lighthearted, to argue that quotidian humor allows the text to explore an often-overlooked element of African literature and life.
Building on Jim’s observations about refreshing sources and treatments of humor, Adwoa Opoku-Agyemang will show how the content of a story can be overshadowed by its humorously irreverent narration. In “‘J’accuse’: Intertext as Comic Narration,” she will demonstrate how storytelling is harnessed differently by some African writers, who create humor not necessarily to contest or satirize, but for reasons that defy conventional notions of utility. They therefore turn the most dramatic episodes into comedy. Adwoa explores Alain Mabanckou’s Verre cassé to show how the writer, though he presents weighty issues, mocks typical approaches to those subject matters. Specifically, Verre cassé is an intertextual treasure that constantly references a wide range of classic texts through its narrator’s voice. Beyond establishing a link with readers, the allusions serve to lighten what, at heart, should be an unfunny plot. The paper will examine the ways in which the novel turns both Western and traditional African classics into comedy by refusing to privilege one canon over another.
In “‘Crazy Rich Asians for West Africa’: Humor and the Transnational Consumption of Ethnicity,” Romy Rajan will present another dimension of amusing narration in Peace Adzo Medie’s His Only Wife (2020). The story follows a Ghanaian woman and her proposed marriage to an expatriate, with the difficult path to the wedding forming the plot. However, more important is the use of tropes from Hollywood romantic comedies – the rich groom, his “difficult” mistress, the female protagonist new to urban ways, and the groom’s conservative family provide comic relief. More significantly, these character types are mediated through what the novel advertises as “Ghanaian culture.” Romy will argue that such a mediation serves two purposes: Besides ensuring the novel’s popularity in the West, turning the novel into a Ghanaian rom-com also allows for the packaging of ethnicity for consumption by an international readership. Through exaggerated and static conceptions of rural Ghana that are legible as broadly “African,” the novel employs humor to consolidate ethnic differences even as it asserts Ghanaian membership in a global capitalist economy. It comes as no surprise that one review calls the novel a “Crazy Rich Asians for West Africa.”
Humor is very present in the different techniques we touch upon, as well as in a certain pleasure that, probably, no technique could fully qualify. Pushpa Acharya will be our presider. Bearing in mind the richness of our topic, Pushpa promises to be strict about limiting each presentation to a maximum of twenty minutes, so as not to rush the fifteen-minute discussion.