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It is the novelists who have proved to be the really fecund and effective black humorists. They are pursuing aims that are very different from the painful psychological insights of John Updike or the detached precision of John O'Hara. But they are not avant-garde experimentalists: however startling their viewpoint, they move their subjects along in supple, readable style. Critic Leslie Fiedler proclaims flatly: " 'Black humorist' fits anyone worth reading today. It's the only valid contemporary work. You can't fight or cry or shout or pound the table. The only response to the world that's left is laughter."
Though racial prejudice is not one of the easiest table-pounding topics to laugh at, Bruce Jay Friedman made it appallingly funny two years ago in his memorable first novel, Stern. The book's pathetic hero is a middle-class urban Jew with round shoulders and "pale spreading hips," who moves his sexy wife and lonely child out to the suburbs.
There Stern finds himself pitted against just about everything, from his do-it-yourself bumbling to the anti-Semite neighbor who knocks down his wife and calls his son a "kike". Author Friedman lets fact blend with fantasy to make Stern at once laughable and very sad both real and wry. Friedman, 34, has a promising talent if it doesn't get trapped by too much sameness of subject. His recent second novel, A Mother's Kisses (TIME, Sept. 4), a caricature of the child-devouring Yiddisher Mama, was funnier than Stern, but a good bit safer and narrower.
Military Jujitsu. Professional patriots have always been fair game for satire but few books have ever given them a lustier Bronx cheer than Joseph Heller's sprawling, farcical Catch-22. Yossarian, the Air Corps bombardier who doesn't want to fly any more missions for the mordantly sane reason that he might get killed, is a comic creation that has already become something of a classic. In typical black-humor fashion, Yossarinan's real adversary is nothing less than the whole mad, mucked-up system, the jujitsu with which the bombardier repeatedly sets the system on its duff is achingly familiar to any veteran. Everybody is out of step but Yossarian—and Heller has the power to make that all too believable, despite the book's unbuttoned artlessness. The danger is that Heller could be a one-book writer who hit it funny and lucky. If his next novel (still two years off) holds the wild power of Catch-22, he may well emerge as the most effective and popularly successful of all the black humorists.