Entertainment

You've surely heard of laughing until it hurts. Perhaps you've even had to laugh to keep from crying.

But what about Laughing Fit to Kill? The phrase, a motif in the 19th-century fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt, speaks to the charged combination of humor and violence in comedy directed against and created by African-Americans. And now it's the title of a provocative new book by Glenda E. Carpio, a professor of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University who specializes in humor and the legacy of slavery.

Laughing (Oxford University Press, $19.95) is a thorny, fascinating and complex study of black artists – writers, comedians, painters – who use humor to redress the horrors of slavery and its ghosts that linger in the public imagination.

Comedy Central, NATHAN HUNSINGER / DMN

The author says comedy by Richard Pryor (left) and Dave Chappelle exposes the absurdity of racial stereotypes.

At the book's core lies an array of stereotypes and demons that the featured artists conjure in order to confront racism and slavery through dark humor. In the hands of the seven artists under consideration – the 19th-century fiction writers Chesnutt and William Wells Brown, the modern comedians Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle, the visual artists Kara Walker and Robert Colescott, and the playwright Suzan-Lori Parks – these stereotypes can be as potent and pliable as they are offensive.

"You're playing with fire when you raise the demons of racism with stereotypes," says Ms. Carpio by phone. "You can take a polemical approach and try to argue against stereotypes, but you don't really raise the demons when you do that. You talk about them on the surface. But the demons live anyway, whether you bring them or not. The great risk that the artist takes is to say, 'Let me be the conjurer that has a measure of control.' "

But that control can come with a price.

In the chapter "The Conjurer Recoils," Ms. Carpio looks at Mr. Pryor and Mr. Chappelle, both of whom she identifies as "conjurers" who breathe mischievous life into some of the more grotesque racist stereotypes in order to expose their absurdity and clip their claws.

As she writes of Mr. Pryor, "He invariably grounds his humor in the harsh realities of American racism and reveals how it perpetuates the ideologies of slavery." He also developed a bad freebase habit and famously set himself on fire – giving literal life (and near death) to the "playing with fire" metaphor.

In the case of Mr. Chappelle, who played characters including a blind, black white supremacist and the milkman for the all-white Niggar family on his hugely popular Chappelle's Show, the conjuring also came with a double edge. Confronting, among other things, the reality that racist viewers missed the irony of his conjuring, Mr. Chappelle walked away from his show and left $50 million on the table.

"The demons can have commodity value," says Ms. Carpio. "Staring at 50 million dollars because you've conjured up these images must be so disorienting. You're either bought off or you're killed off. These are some of the risks that being a conjurer entails."

Ms. Carpio saves some of her most trenchant analysis for Ms. Walker, who currently has an exhibit, "Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love," at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Ms. Walker's most famous work uses silhouettes, once a genteel art form of the Victorian age, to depict grotesque and uncomfortably funny stereotypes of slavery and the antebellum period.

"She looks at the various contortions of the black body without actually using bodies," Ms. Carpio says. "Some art that signifies on the distortion of the black body continues to use the body itself, but to me that just reproduces the distortions. It doesn't create enough distance for us to critique the distortions. It just re-enacts them. The silhouette is not a representation of the body. It's a representation of how the body blocks light. That gives us an out, but at the same time her images are so explicit that we don't have an out. We see but we don't see. She creates all of these binary oppositions."

It's a dangerous business, ripe for misunderstanding. Ms. Carpio's hope is that readers peel back the layers of stereotypes in order to understand their power. "I hope people will question their knee-jerk reactions to these stereotypes and think about how these artists use them," she says. "And I hope people will think about these stereotypes in a complicated way, and also ask why these stereotypes are so seductive."