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Images of Richard Pryor

Black Humor Reflections on an American Tradition

 Launch Media

ABOUT 

  • ABOUT Glenda Carpio

    Glenda Carpio teaches African and African-American studies and English at Harvard University. Her book, Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery, was published in 2008. She is currently working on a book tentatively entitled Ambivalent Alliances: Black and Latina/o Fiction in the Americas. A former teacher in the Teach for America program, she was recently awarded tenure at Harvard and received its Abramson Award for Excellence and Sensitivity in Undergraduate Teaching. Profile

  • ABOUT Gerald Early

    Gerald Early is the director of the Center for the Humanities and the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters at Washington University in St. Louis, where he joined the faculty in 1982. He is the author of several books, including The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture (1994), which won the 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. Profile

  • ABOUT Werner Sollors

    Werner Sollors earned his doctorate from the Freie Universität Berlin and holds the Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Chair as Professor of English and Professor of African-American Studies at Harvard University, where he joined the faculty in 1983. His books include Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (1997). Profile
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Black audiences and black people in general have always found the popular stereotypes of themselves to be quite funny—in certain contexts.       

Recorded on November 14, 2009.

Scholars Gerald Early and Werner Sollors join forces with Glenda Carpio, author of Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery (2008), for a discussion examining the rich and radical tradition of black humor, satire, and wit. Together they explore how comedy has been used to confront the injustices of slavery and racism in America. Early and Carpio illustrates the discussion with clips of Bill Cosby and Wanda Sykes.

Presented in partnership with the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Above: Photographs of Richard Pryor.

Teachers' Guide

The Chicago Humanities Festival has prepared a teachers' guide for this program. Download the Study Guide for this program now!

Tags

African-American humor, satire, radical tradition, black humor, Bill Cosby, Wanda Sykes

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