Among Frederick Douglass's formidable skills critic of slavery and racial prejudice, he was widely remembered during the nineteenth century for being able to make his audiences laugh. Toward the end of Douglass's final autobiography, The Life and Times, he remarks that "I have been greatly helped to bear up under unfriendly conditions, too, by a constitutional tendency to see the funny side of things" (470). In support of his claim, he tells a story of riding a crowded night train ...