Black Humor in the Jim Crow Era

Abstract This chapter explores Gwendolyn Bennett’s overlooked contributions to Black humor of the Jim Crow era, highlighting how her stories subvert expectations through subtle, formally sophisticated uses of irony, ambiguity, and dark comedy. Unlike her male contemporaries, whose humor was often boisterous and public, Bennett—constrained by race, gender, class, and literary convention—developed a quiet, ironic form of resistance embedded in the narrative structures of her fiction. Focusing on three short stories—“Wedding Day,” “Life as a Javanese,” and “Ku Klux Klan Rides”—the chapter analyzes how Bennett draws from folkloric traditions like the tall tale and trickster tale while incorporating modernist techniques such as shifting perspectives, unresolved endings, and psychological nuance. Bennett’s humor is not laugh-out-loud; instead, it is “funny” in the sense of being strange, ironic, and deeply unsettling, exposing the ludicrous yet terrifying absurdities of Jim Crow violence and discrimination.