ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with humor on macro and micro levels—from individual joking exchanges to comic structures that defy conventional narrative logic through the intervention of the absurd—as a means of interpreting the formal, political and ethical nature of Zadie Smith’s engagement with British multiculturalism. Reading Zadie Smith’s use of narrative humor as central to her engagement with British multiculturalism guards against the kind of divorce of form and content that suggests studying texts “without the comic elements that cushion the effect of disturbing messages”. The chapter is concerned with discussion of Zadie Smith’s three predominantly British novels: White Teeth, The Autograph Man and NW. Defamiliarizing effects enabled through humorous reframing and perspectival juxtaposition are a crucial means of highlighting, and thereby satirizing, the kind of corporate multiculturalism that capitalizes on ethnic diversity for financial gain whilst framing it in patronizing terms evocative of the lie of colonialism’s “civilizing mission”.
