ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses comics that are redolent with the "intellectually subnormal," juvenile, antisocial pungency that the term "graphic novel" is meant to disperse. It begins with Art Spiegelman's "Cracking Jokes: A Short Inquiry Into Various Aspects of Humor," a three-page comic that appeared in 1975, more than a decade prior to the widespread use of the term "graphic novel." As Spiegelman's lecture on humor progresses, the line separating analysis of cruel humor from incitement to cruel laughter is increasingly blurred. Yet the antidevelopmental, often antisocial, sensibility of many great comics creators is key to understanding their work. This sensibility is doubtless a cultural inheritance and is located most centrally in MAD Magazine, whose ironic, antiestablishment, yet also self-deprecating stance has been a decisive influence on US comics. Spiegelman is certainly working in the MAD tradition in "Cracking Jokes," but his later work, including Maus, is suffused with the same approach, as is the work of many of Spiegelman's important contemporaries.
