Abstract
Glenn Smiley is known for his involvement in the civil rights movement, when he taught strategies of nonviolence to Martin Luther King, Jr. and other leaders of the movement. This article focuses on an earlier period in his life, when he spent time in prison for choosing not to participate in World War II. Smiley believed that prison is only secondary to war in dehumanization and violence. In this article I examine Smiley's use of humor to subvert the established authority structures of the prison system. The comic strategy in which Smiley engaged took four definable forms: education, integration, confrontation, and judgment. These comic strategies played a key role in the development and practice of nonviolent strategies he later used to effect a systematic change among activists in the civil rights movement. Support for the findings in this article comes from the author's personal interviews with Smiley, from an earlier interview of him done in the 1960s on behalf of the Washington Documentation Project, and from Smiley's unpublished memoirs, some of which were written during the time he was in prison and the rest later, in the 1970s. I have also drawn from the relevant theories of scholars such as Henri Bergson, Sigmund Freud, and M. M. Bakhtin to establish the force of the comic in authoritative contexts that tend to breed acts of violence.