and How to Be Secular. His writing appears in The Washington Post, MSNBC, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and elsewhere.
Berlinerblau applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, Can We Laugh at That?: Comedy in a Conflicted Age, with the following results:
If you opened to page 99–first of all, thank you, I really appreciate your interest–you’d be in the thick of a discussion about the French comedian Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala. What a fascinating and unsettling character he is! For more than two decades running he has been making jokes about Jews and the Holocaust. Page 99 reviews some of that material.Visit Jacques Berlinerblau's website.
Page 99 would give you some indication of what this book is about, namely jokes that set the world on fire. But it would not really give you a sense of the scope, depth, and dare I say, majesty, of the arguments contained within We Can’t Laugh at That: Comedy in Conflicted Age. Sorry Ford Madox Ford (OMG is that really his name?) but your test just kinda sux. What my 99th page doesn’t reveal is the word-and-thought-defying complexity of the free speech tensions that comedy ignites in the digital age. FMF, my thesis is that some tectonic shift is taking place in the domain of free speech and for whatever reasons comedy calls attention to that shift (and exacerbates all of its attendant tensions).
This is a book about how jokes lead to outrage, cancellation, deportation, mass violence and even geopolitical conflict. Whether it’s Dave Chappelle lighting up the trans community, Vir Das denouncing India’s ruling BJP party, or Zimbabwean comedian Samantha Kureya mocking the brutality of her government, the responses to such quips are fast, digital and furious. They also raise some really difficult questions about free speech and how much of it we can allow in a digitally interconnected world where some people don’t “get” the joke
--Marshal Zeringue
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