ABSTRACT
Humor is a primary mode of Charles Simic’s poetics, perhaps the primary mode. With humor, Simic holds together the various uncertainties with which his poems wrestle. The bloodbath of history and the near-powerlessness of the individual in history’s wake recur as subjects throughout Simic’s poetry. The stories from his childhood that Simic often recalls in his autobiographical writing and the darker tones present in many of his poems reveal the way humor for Simic has grown out of a need to temporarily assuage metaphysical tension through comic release. The humor of “Night Picnic,” as in so many of Simic’s poems, results in a discomforted snicker rather than a guffaw. Simic generates the brand of humor through ambivalence or unease, an approach to humor which most often results in an uncomfortable laugh. Simic’s poems of humorous sensuality transgress the socially constructed boundaries that distinguish actual desires from “proper” behavior and speech.
