Humour in exile: The subversive effects of laughter in Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners and Gisele Pineau's L'Exil selon Julia

This study challenges the common misconception of laughter as simply light-hearted entertainment by exploring its strategic use and subversive effects in two Caribbean novels: Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners and Gisele Pineau's L'Exil selon Julia. Selvon's and Pineau's humorous depictions of the migration to the metropolitan centres of London and Paris after World War II of two elderly female figures, Tanty Bessy and Man Ya, both bring to light and lighten the serious subject matter of Britain's and France's practices of exclusion toward their former colonized subjects. In examining Selvon's and Pineau's use of humour in light of Henri Bergson's theory on the social significance of laughter as a corrective to man's vices and impertinences toward society, this article argues that Tanty Bessy and Man Ya generate laughter at their own expense for the purposes of "correcting" the negative cultural perceptions of the Caribbean migrant population in 1950s and 1960s Europe. This reading of humour uncovers the subversive power of these two seemingly marginalized figures, in turn, serving to overturn and expand upon Bergson's own theory on the normative effects of laughter.