“Humor is vengeance.”
by Roanna Gonsalves The first time I heard the line “Humor is vengeance”, something surged in my brain and my body. I understood its outside as well as its inside, the pitter pat patter of its near perfect dactylic feet, the subatomic particles in its electric charge. Hunting it down, I found it in the second part of Paul Beatty’s Introduction to Hokum: An anthology of African American humour (Bloomsbury, 2006). I knew what Beatty meant by “Humor is vengeance.” I’ve channeled his words to explain my own work in The Permanent Resident, a collection of short fiction published in…