Representing the Intolerable: Black Humor from Selected Stories in Edward P. Jones’s All Aunt Hagar’s Children

Scholars have described in detail how Edward Jones’s works depict lucidly the lived experiences of African Americans in the United States. They have, however, skipped describing elaborately some of the textual strategies resorted to in his creative representations, especially in his description of the common quotidian intolerable tragedy amongst the middle- and low-class city dwellers in the America of his works. One of his key strategies, particularly evident in his short stories, is the use of dark humor. This is a humorous style involving the sprinkling of some amusing remarks over a depressing (racial) leitmotif, state of affairs or some existential event being described and by which he derides and undercuts the seeming ideals of his immediate society. Black humor, as De La Vars argues, is “the sort that finds its materials in the worst traits of humanity” (105), the basest of human capabilities and the most agonizing of human woes. Its meaning may exceed perfunctory humor to include an ironically tragic tale. This essay purposively selects three short stories by Jones first published in The New Yorker from the collection, All Aunt Hagar's Children (2006), and analyses prime examples of dark humor. Because dark humor emanates from the circumstances of hurting people in a stinging society, Jones in deploying it passes the textual subject’s agitation, this torturing human condition perceptible as the intolerable, to the reader.