“Half a wit is better than none”: Race, Humor, and the Grotesque in Fran Ross’s Oreo

ABSTRACT:This article focuses on race and humor in Fran Ross’s satirical novel Oreo, about a half-Black, half-Jewish young woman named Oreo, who goes on a quixotic quest to find her absentee father. I argue that Oreo blends high and low forms of comedy, the intellectual and the grotesque, into a complex and irreverent sense of humor that highlights the absurdity of racial and gender hierarchies. I demonstrate how the novel uses representations of animated, mechanized bodies as a site for much of its comedy and as commentary on the racial and gender politics of its moment. The novel’s comedic sensibility finds its parallel in Oreo’s hybrid identity, which allows her to traverse boundaries and situates her as a cyborg-like figure that resists being sexualized, discriminated against, or humiliated. Ross takes these issues up further on the level of form and aesthetics, creating a carnivalesque world in which racial stereotypes are inverted and structures of power are destabilized. In the end, Ross’s simultaneous mastery and bastardization of the comedic form of the satirical novel destabilizes the rigid binaries typically associated with race, gender, and comedy.