ABSTRACT
Whether in mento, ska, reggae, or dancehall, innovation, competition, and humor have been key pillars of the performative enterprise of Jamaican music. Humor and innovation have operated as signposts of creativity, appeal, and proliferation. This paper analyzes the significance of humor in Jamaican music, highlighting innovative schemes including versioning and clashing as performance modes in three genres—dancehall, reggae, and ska. Humor has been part and parcel of competition, crisis, speech patterns, and discourses on the body, natural disasters, social commentary, as well as coping strategies. In character, humor operates as a Janus-faced performance mode, piercing, poignant, and as mask, even concealing crisis. Using a broadly cultural studies approach, this paper establishes new ways of thinking about Jamaican music and deepens analysis of the affinity Jamaicans have to humor.
