CAS MT Seminar Series - Inevitable Satirists: Laughter, Fear, and Censorship in Interwar South Africa - Dr Robin K. Crigler (Dickinson College)

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 Inevitable Satirists: Laughter, Fear, and Censorship in Interwar South Africa Humor is a notoriously slippery thing to study. Much is made of the difficulties involved in breaking down jokes and the contextual knowledge necessary to understand the modalities of humor in contexts different from our own—even the words themselves prove deceptive and dangerous. Yet humor remains tremendously revealing—particularly in divided societies. This paper explores one such society—interwar South Africa—refracted through the lens of three authors: an elite woman novelist, a Catholic missionary educationalist, and the first Black satirist to be published in a white South African newspaper.  Through these three cases we see three competing understandings of the purpose of humor, which, I argue, is always intimately related to the production of social boundaries.