Its vise grip on the comic reminds us that people familiar with genocide are usually pretty funny—there has to be at least a little laughter on the other end of survival, to make it worth anything. But Pico’s narrator is equally aware that the humor of people who’ve known intergenerational trauma is also nearly always a defense mechanism, a way to deflect, a practiced jujitsu that survivors use to make their way through the world, always blocking and redirecting the unexpected blows:
