Comic register can encode an ideological hierarchy where liberal characters appear more fully human.

Evidence

Kureishi throws in his lot with a sort of no-nonsense, muscular secularism of the kind nowadays associated with Amis, McEwan, Rushdie, and the late Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris: a critique of religion as superstition that primarily has Islam in its sights. This position is consistent in Kureishi’s work, but it also has implications for the form of The Black Album. For instance, Bart Moore-Gilbert has noted how “the predominantly comic register of The Black Album expresses its author’s perception that the threat of ‘fundamentalism’ is minimal and that its exponents are primarily ridiculous and self-deluded rather than evil or, indeed, rational actors.… The inescapable inference to be drawn from The Black Album is that the more complexly drawn (‘liberal’) characters are more fully human, as well as being more worthy citizens, than their ‘fundamentalist’ antagonists.” — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 180

Categorization

• XREF: The core contesting-vs-reinforcing diagnostic: form (comic register) carries ideological freight — a transferable tool for judging how Hamid and Naqvi’s narrative technique positions Muslim characters.
• SEED: Essay angle: ‘when satire is a form of containment’ — how comic register strips antagonists of rationality and thereby excuses the reader from taking their views seriously.