SOURCE: Bennett, Barbara. “Introduction: Southern Laughter and the Woman Writer.” In Comic Visions, Female Voices: Contemporary Women Novelists and Southern Humor, pp. 1-15. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998.

In the following essay, Bennett explores the role of humor in Southern literature, particularly as it relates to women writers, focusing on the idea that humor offers a challenge to the status quo.

Laughter I declare to be blessed; you who aspire to greatness, learn how to laugh!

—Friedrich Nietzsche

Being humorous in the South is like being motorized in Los Angeles or argumentative in New York—humorous is not generally a whole calling in itself, it's just something that you're in trouble if you aren't.

—Roy Blount

Dorothy Allison has described herself as “sharp, squint-eyed, determined, too caustic, stubbornly hopeful and occasionally funny as hell.”¹ Allison's final phrase is perhaps the most unexpected, coming from a writer who...