Funny Bones
Abstract
Judging from the sway of dystopian and (post)-apocalyptic scenarios in contemporary Anthropocene fiction, our concern for climate change and ecological upheaval has been particularly receptive to narrative forms derived from the catastrophic imaginary, with comic modes often getting evicted from the province of environmentalist thought. Chris Flynn’s novel Mammoth (2020) is a notable exception, deploying humor to culturally process loss, (ecological) grief, and memory. Flynn’s use of the conventions of the it-narrative, with a mastodon fossil as the novel’s narrator, brings the scales of megafauna extinctions, imperial expansion, resource extractivism, and de-extinction eschatology into a shared fold of planetary temporality, where the comic register is offered as a medium for rethinking multi-species encounters and (pre)historical acts of aggression. In attending to the political animation of fossils in the narrative, whose stories shuttle across spatial and temporal scales, this paper examines how the novel’s use of humor illuminates the legacies of species extinctions and colonialism, while its engagement with the ethics of de-extinction abates the novel’s satirical sting. In this, Mammoth’s loyalties are shown to oscillate between critique and conformity, highlighting the ethical impasse of comedy as a genre of the Anthropocene.