SOURCE: Weisenburger, Steven. “What Was Black Humor?” In Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel, 1930-1980, pp. 80-121. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1995.

In the following excerpt, Weisenburger explains that many intellectuals viewed black humorists as writers who had wasted the force of their words with overuse of the same banal sentiments they sought to satirize. Instead, Weisenburger feels it is important to reevaluate the place of black humor in the field of American literary studies, placing it in context with other postmodern movements.

Not many years ago the Black Humorists were rogue talents trampling the conventions of narrative art, snorting at the degradations of Eisenhower's big sleep and Kennedy's New Frontier, and trumpeting nothing less than “a new sense of reality.” Then, in a trice, they had broken through to respectability. Hailed in May of 1964 as “the one genuinely new postwar development in American literature...