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programs such as Amos 'n' Andy in the 1930s. Similarly, a study ofthe
witty but world-weary verse of a writer such as Dorothy Parker can provide
insight into changes in literary taste as America became a more
urban than rural country by the 1920s, when magazines such as The
New Yorker (founded in 1925) helped to define a kind of city sophistication
that was in sharp contrast to the boisterous frontier humor that
had flourished in the nineteenth century.
Another consideration in the study of humor is the extent to
which we should take it seriously. In the field of literature in particular,
scholars have tended to value tragedy over comedy, viewing the
comic as a form that has less to tell us about the important moments
of human experience. E. B. White also addresses this point in introducing
the Subtreasury: "The world likes humor, but treats it patronizingly.
It decorates its serious artists with laurel, and its wags with
Brussels sprouts. It feels that if a thing is funny it can be presumed to
be something less than great, because if it were truly great it would be
wholly serious" (xviii). White goes on to point out that because writers
themselves are well aware of this distinction, a number of them have
signed their real names to their serious work and used pseudonyms
when they wrote humor. And yet when we consider some of the classic
works in the American literary tradition, we cannot say that they
are wholly serious. Mark Twain's novel The Adventures ofHuckleberry
Finn, for example, achieves much of its effect through Twain's use of
many of the major techniques of humor, including slapstick, satire, mistaken
identity, wordplay, and exaggeration. While it can certainly be
argued that identifying comic elements in a novel about slavery is a
different matter than assessing the value of a comic strip or a television
situation comedy, it is nonetheless true that many of America's prominent
writers have found the various techniques of humor quite congenial
to their purposes, including authors as otherwise different as
Herman Melville, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and Eudora Welty.
Before considering the ways in which scholars have, for more
than a hundred years, attempted to characterize American humor, we
should address one more question: why should a nation have a particular
kind of humor? In other words, why should American humor
be significantly different from the humor of England or Japan or Peru?
If, indeed, the creation of humor is an impulse shared by all human
beings, what would make the humor produced by one culture different
from that produced by another? One reason could be that cultures
differ in their histories, values, and geography. For example, the fact
111111 Iilo I IlIillid Sllilos OI'igilllllod liS II grellip or colollies ill rubellion
11/-',l1illSI dOlllillHlioll ily Crout Britain , with its monarchy and various
IlIvllis or Hl'islocracy, led to the creation of the American comic figure
i'roqll!lllily known as Jonathan, a country bumpkin who was treated
1IIIIIIorolisly for his ignorance of city ways but simultaneously admired
ror II is innocence and lack of pretentiousness, The title of Royall Tyler's
17117 comic play The Contrast, which includes a Jonathan character,
po illts to the significant distinctions that the earliest Americans
hili ieved existed between their rural, democratic values and the highly
slratified cultures of Europe. Also America, from its earliest years, has
IIt!un largely a nation of immigrants, which brings former residents of
IIIHny countries together. This circumstance gave rise to humor dealillg
with ethnic groups, highlighting customs, accents, and other
characteristics which served to distinguish one group of settlers from

uckshot so that it is too heavy to move (another of the tale's exaggerations
is that the frog survives this experience).
Also contributing to America's uniqueness as a nation is its institution
of a democratic form of government at a time when most other
nations were still ruled by hereditary aristocracies. The fact that
democracy encourages the participation of its citizens in the development
of its institutions allows those same citizens freedom to criticize
both the nation's leaders and its laws, and such openness has no
doubt contributed to the long American tradition of political humor.
From the colonial period onward, in songs, poems, cartoons, newspaper
columns, plays-and, later, on radio and television-Americans have
devoted a large share of their humor to the expression of political beliefs.
And, because the ideals embodied in the promises of democracy are
just that-ideals and not necessarily realities-a great deal of American
humor, whether overtly political or not, has pointed to the discrepancies
between the grand promises of equality, prosperity, and fulfillment and
the actualities of socioeconomiC; class differences, discrimination,
and corruption. One of the most common purposes of humor is to point
out such distinctions, and American culture has provided a particularly
fertile setting for this development. Accordi'ng to Thomas L.
Masson, who assessed American humor in his 1931 book Our American
Humorists, humor is important because it deals with the problems of
a culture. Masson declares that his purpose in writing his book is "to
show ... that there is no other class of writers in America that is actually
doing more for the country than the humorists," and it is precisely
because of the ills of the nation that this is the case. According to
Masson, "God knows that when we consider the hopeless welter of
slums and bad finance, and utterly banal patter wasted upon our outstanding
problems, such as education, one could cry aloud for some
new satirist to arise who, with a truly illuminated pen, would show
us the utter folly of so much that we accede to-for example, the
frightful stupidities of prohibition .... And the humorists are working
like nailors, constantly trying to correctthe things that they see are
wrong."J
To speak of "American" humor, then, is to assume that these factors
and more have produced both themes and forms which address
a particular cultural experience that is widely shared. But it is important
also to acknowledge significant differences within this experience,
for the diversity that is one of America's distinctive qualities has in turn
produced much humor expressive of these differences. For example,
8 WHAT ' S SO FUNNY?
:11 :ilollirs lIuvo known for some time that different regions of the country
IlIIvlI given rise to humorous writing that reflects regional dialects,
C(lsIOJIIS, and values. The Jonathan figure, who in the earliest years of
1110 Ilut ion's existence represented honest agrarian values in contrast
In the superficiality of aristocratic pretensions, is very much a prod­
Ilet of New England. Although untutored and naive, he is morally
II pright and law-abiding (if sometimes a bit crafty), In contrast, the corrosponding
rural figure that emerged in the humor of the South and the
West in the early nineteenth century was apt to be a lawless renegade
who was contemptuous of both secular and religious authority. An
I!xample is George Washington Harris's character Sut Lovingood, who
inhabited the hills of Tennessee in the decades before the Civil War.
The product of the frontier rather than the more settled Northeast, Sut
is a practical joker who likes nothing better than to disrupt a church
service with one of his pranks, and who declares his atheism in heavily
dialectical speech: "I haint got nara a soul, nothin' but a whiskey
proof gizzard."
Those who study American humor were much slower to understand
that American women had produced a body of humorous work that is
in many respects quite different from that created by men. Indeed,
despite the publication of two early anthologies of women's humor­
Kate Sanborn's The Wit ofWomen in 1885 and Martha Bruere and Mary
Ritter Beard's Laughing Their Way in 1937-until the 1980s most
analyses of American humor were predicated upon a largely male
canon, and therefore emphaSized the centrality of the frontier, politics,
violence, and individualism to the humorous tradition. With the recovery
and study of a great deal of humor by women during the past two
decades, we now have a more complete picture that includes gender
as well as regional and ethnic differences among the varieties of American
humor. We can see, for example, that while male authors were writing
about jumping frogs and practical jokes, women were concerned with
the gossip of sewing circles and the mishaps of homemaking. While
women did not generally write tall tales, they did sometimes write
humorously about the frontier experience, which they perceived
somewhat differently than did their male counterparts. The women
emphasized, as did Caroline Kirkland in her 1839 A New Home-Who'll
Follow?, the interdependence of people in isolated areas rather than
individualism and competition, When women created political satire
in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they often focused on
the battle for female suffrage; and, as Dorothy Parker's verse attests,
INTRODUCTION 9

dimension, which has more direct implications for humorous expression,
is what we might call the semantic: the difference between the
formal language in which abstract ideas are articulated, and the concreteness
of ordinary speech. What Rubin calls a "verbal incongruity"
that "lies at the heart of American experience" provides a form for what
he defines as American humor: the down-to-earth, "homely metaphor,"
which at once expresses and deflates the abstract ideal. Of the examples
of this use of language that Rubin cites, perhaps the most engaging
and instructive is Mark Twain's description of "the calm confidence
of a Christian holding four aces." Not only does Twain point to the discrepancy
between abstract faith and practical action but he also provides
the concrete picture of the Christian sitting at a poker table-a
specific visual incongruity that can make us laugh. Twain's comment
also reminds us of the "shock between Business and Piety" to which
Haweis points: the Christian's "confidence" comes from both his faith
and from a winning poker hand. Thus, the religious and the secular,
supposed opposites, are conjoined. Rubin's definition of the American
"comic imagination" resides in such clashes of opposites. In his words,
"the interplay of the ornamental and the elemental, the language of culture
and the language of sweat, the democratic ideal and the mulishness
of fallen human nature."
Finally, William Keough, in his 1990 book Punchlines (excerpted
in Chapter 6). takes Blair's concept of the frontier and Rubin's notion
of the clash between the lofty ideal and mundane reality a step further
by declaring that the hallmark of American humor is its violence. If
indeed, Keough argues, a nation's humor mirrors its dominant characteristics,
then both the linguistic and the thematic violence of American
humor simply reflects the fact-which many a foreign visitor has
noted-that Americans have an unusually high tolerance, and even an
enthusiasm, for lawlessness and brutality. The lines between Keough's
characterization and those of Blair and Rubin are not difficult to trace.
There is no doubt that life on the American frontier allowed a freedom
from civilized restraint that has appealed to the American sensibility
in both the tall tale and the film Western; the outlaw, from the actual
Jesse James to the fictional Thelma and Louise, is an American hero.
And the conflict between the ideal and the real to which Rubin points
can be far from genteel or gentle. In Nathaniel West's grimly comic 1934
parody of the American Dream, A Cool Million, the central character
lives according to all the Boy Scout virtues, but instead of succeeding,
as the ideal of the Dream promises, he is physically mutilated during
14 WHAT'S SO FUNNY?
thll c:ourStl of tho novel. The backdrop for such humor is a nation that
systHmatically eradicated Native Americans, and in which persistent
racism led to nearly five thousand recorded lynchings of African
Americans between 1882 and 1927, and a culture in which many civilian
adults routinely carry guns, and televised cartoons for children are
noted for scenes of physical brutality. As a result, Keough maintains,
our "native humor reflects the more menacing aspects of American society,
and lampoons certain of our most cherished assumptions, such as
the natural goodness of man and the inevitability of progress." In
emphasizing the violence of American humor, Keough, like most commentators
before him, envisions humor to be almost entirely produced
by men. In the few pages of Punchlines devoted to women's humor,
he acknowledges that although this humor may sometimes be verbally
caustic, it seldom approaches the violence he associates with the rest
of the humorous tradition.
Because these attempts to get at the essence of American humor
have tended, for more than a hundred years, to assume that humor is
the province of white men, the resulting definitions proposed are
necessarily partial. By focusing on such areas of American life as religion,
business, politics, frontier life, and the heroes of popular culture,
these theories must omit segments of the population who have traditionally
not played major roles in these areas and thus have seldom used
them as material for humorous expression. Nonetheless, as we begin
to look at the history of American humor, such theories are useful as
ways to think about that humor.
Bearing in mind their limitations, the analyses offered by Haweis,
Rourke, Blair, Rubin, and Keough point to some essential truths about
the American experience, which in turn has given rise to our humor.
All of the definitions point to some sort of contrast or even paradox.
For Haweis, this is embodied in the "shocks" experienced by the
colonists-the contrast between a European sensibility and the features
of a new (to them) continent, including the necessity that one's piety
be tempered by shrewd practicality. For Rourke and Blair, who by the
1930s could reflect upon the nineteenth century in ways that Haweis
could not, American humor seemed to originate in that century's story
of the individual at odds with the rules of "official" society-whether
the Yankee peddler making his way by his wits (Rourke), or the frontiersman
spinning tales of his encounters with the wilderness (Blair). Rubin
and Keough, conscious of a twentieth-century history that included
severe economic depression, continued racism, and corruption in
INTRODUCTION 15

usiness and politics, see the central paradox giving rise to humor given
the fact that Americans could believe in and espouse certain national
ideals and yet behave in a manner diametrically opposed to them, and,
further, that many could find this situation more comic than tragic.
What should be clear is that one's attempt to provide a definition of
American humor is contingent upon one's tastes, values, and historical
moment.
American Humor: History and Forms
When we speak of the history of "American" humor,
it is important to understand that we do not mean the humor of "the
Americas," which would include not only countries other than the
United States, but also the humor of people who had inhabited the land
that became the United States for hundreds of years before the European
explorers and settlers arrived. It is the humor of those explorers and
settlers and their descendants that scholars have in mind when they
study American humor, and perhaps the term "United States humor"
would be more descriptive, but that would leave out the humor of
the 150 or so years before the United States became a nation. "Euro­
American humor" would be more accurate, if a bit clumsy; however,
"American humor" has become the standard designation. Unfortunately,
little is known about the humor of the native inhabitants of this
continent, the people for centuries called Indians (itself a sort of joke
in that Christopher Columbus and his peers hoped they had found India
but were lost). Language barriers, mutual distrust, and intermittent
hostilities between natives and colonists made most encounters serious
at best, and it was not until the late nineteenth century that native
cultures began to be taken seriously on their own terms-including the
values and beliefs that produce humorous expression.
Commentators who date the beginning of American humor from
the early nineteenth century do so either because they wish to focus
on humor that did not borrow heavily from English and European
themes and forms, or because the kind of humor they find most characteristically
American-for example, frontier humor-began to flourish
in that period. But the seeds of many forms of American humorous
expression were sown well before the Revolutionary War. One of these
seeds was the habit of exaggerating the experience of the New World
in reports to those back home-an exaggeration that is common to many
forms of humor, but which shows up especially in the tall tale, in
American political humor, and even in the films of Woody Allen. The
16 WHAT'S SO FUNNY?
oxplorers and settlers of the colonial period did not always set out to
lin deliberately-often they were understandably overwhelmed by
circumstances for which they had no frame of reference-but their
ilccounts of the landscape and the native inhabitants frequently featured
hyperbole that painted the New World as much better or much worse
lilan it proved to be in reality. At one end of the spectrum, America was
filted with gold (which no one ever managed to find), abundant food,
and natives who would surely make fine slaves. At the other end
were ferocious beasts, extreme cold or heat, and hostile "savages."
Evidence that a colonial writer might even embellish his own story is
offered by two different accounts by Captain John Smith of a trip up
a Virginia river. In 1608, Smith reported that his party was met by
"3 or 400 Salvages"; in 1624, writing of the same experience, he
recorded being threatened by "three or four thousand Salvages." Rather
than a failure of memory, the numerical discrepancy points instead to
Smith's desire to blame the various failures of the Virginia Company
on forces beyond its control. 5
In the absence of any means of either substantiating or debunking
such accounts, writers such as Smith were free to tell whatever stories
they chose, and readers were equally free to believe or mistrust them.
In any event, America in its early years was not so much described as
it was invented. The habit of invention, closely tied to the habit of exaggeration,
laid the groundwork for American humor. Long before the
nineteenth century, Americans were known for their boastfulness and
for their fondness for disguises, Aware of their own process of transformation
from citizens of other countries to residents of a new land,
settlers engaged in self-invention, and often tested out versions of a new
reality on those new to the continent. As Walter Blair and Hamlin Hill
put it in America's Humor (excerpted in Chapter 5): "Since peculiar
things were always happening in America and uninformed newcomers
always lusted for strange news, over the years merry fellows could
unwind incredible yarns about flora, fauna, natives, and geography and
then give true or untrue but more or less plausible explanations."
Such lies-which we might give the term that Twain's Huck Finn
uses, "stretchers"-could be put to more sobering purposes when the
intent was to defraud rather than to amaze or amuse. It was this aspect
of the American habit that Herman Melville captured in his 1857
novel The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, in which man's desire to
trust in others is thwarted time after time (hence our term "con man"
for one who fools another for profit).
INTRODUCTION 17

All of this fooling might seem at odds with our concept of the New
England colonists as grim Puritans with their minds on heavenly
rather than earthly matters, but, in fact, not all colonists of the area came
for reasons of religious freedom, which created conflicts that gave
rise to one of America's first satiric writers. In 1627, Thomas Morton
angered his Puritan neighbors in Plymouth Colony by erecting a
Maypole and conducting what the Puritans regarded as pagan rituals
around it. The clash between them was not solely over religious observance;
Morton, as a fur trader with the Indians, was also in commercial
competition with the residents of Plymouth, who three times
arrested him and shipped him back to England, only to have him
return to Massachusetts. Morton's response to the Puritans was his 1637
The New England Canaan, in which he satirized Puritan society.
Morton characterized them as anti-intellectuals who did not know that
"learning does enable men's minds to converse with elements of a higher
nature than is to be found within the habitation of the mole." He
refers to Captain Miles Standish, a man of small'physical stature, as
"Captain Shrimp," and accuses Standish and his colleagues of making
"a great show of religion but no humanity."
About a hundred years later, a different satirist expressed his displeasure
(or at least mock-displeasure) with what he experienced in
colonial America-this time in Maryland. Ebenezer Cooke, known in
the 1720s as the poet laureate of Maryland, published several versions
of his long poem The Sot-Weed Factor between 1708 and 1731. The title
translates as "tobacco agent," and the poem tells the story of a young
man bringing goods from England to trade forMaryland-grown tobacco
and encountering a culture noted for its uncivilized inhabitants, lawlessness,
and crude lifestyle. At the end of the poem, the beleaguered
trader prepares to return to England to leave this "dreadful curse
behind," and bestows upon Maryland his own curse: "May wrath
divine then lay these regions waste/Where no man's faithful, nor a
woman chaste." Cooke's subtitle leaves no doubt as to his intentions:
"A satire in which is described the laws, government, courts, and
constitutions of the country, and also the buildings, feasts, frolics, entertainments,
and drunken humors of the inhabitants in that part of
America."
Much of the humor of the colonial period dealt with such dissention
between groups of people-religious factions, nationalities, men and
women-and thus turned upon stereotypes that we may find disquieting
today. Nathaniel Ward's The Simple Cobbler of Aggawan (1647),
18 WHAT ' S SO FUNNY?
for oxample, targeted women's fashions in clothing, complaining that
.. it is no marvel they wear drailes [trailing headdresses] on the hinder
pnrt of their heads, having nothing as it seems in the fore part but a few
squirrels' brains to help them frisk from one ill-favored fashion to
IIIl0ther." The Native Americans and the Irish were similarly objects
of such satire, and, as the eighteenth century progressed and the
colonists increasingly felt united against a common enemy, the British
were common subjects of American humor. But even as tensions began
to build toward the inevitable revolution, residents of one colony
could find those of another sufficiently different in beliefs and habits
to provoke humorous derision. One of the best examples is the pronouncements
of the aristocratic Virginian William Byrd on his Carolina
neighbors in such works as the History ofthe Dividing Line (which, perhaps
fortunately, was not published until 1841). Byrd, a hardworking
Anglican, was particularly struck by the backwoods Carolinians'
laziness and lack of religious observance. Remarking on the "Carolina
felicity of having nothing to do," Byrd describes the indolence of one
inhabitant: "Like the ravens,he neither ploughed nor sowed, but subsisted
chiefly upon oysters which his handmaid made a shift to gather
from the adjacent rocks." Byrd's ironic use of biblical phrasing marks
him in contrast to the unpious Carolinians, who "seem very easy without
a minister, as long as they are exempted from paying him."
Because it remained a private document until many years after his
death, Byrd's History was not a source of amusement to his contemporaries.
What published humor would the eighteenth-century American
colonist have found available? One popular kind of publication was the
almanac, which frequently combined such practical information as
observations on the weather with wise and witty sayings known as aphorisms.
The best-known of these sayings were created by the man who
in his multiple roles as printer, inventor, and statesman has come to
embody the American eighteenth century-Benjamin Franklin. Poor
Richard's Almanac began in 1732, and was published for twenty-five
years, reaching many New England families annually. Franklin's
assumption of the persona of "Poor Richard"-one of the many masks
and disguises of American humor-is yet another version of the Jonathan
figure: a simple, unassuming country lad blessed with a fund of common
sense that emerges in such aphorisms as "Three may keep a secret
if two of them are dead," "Fish and visitors smell after three days," and
"Creditors have better memories than debtors." To describe a figure such
as Jonathan or Poor Richard, whose pose of humility is at odds with his
INTRODUCTION 19

wit and wisdom, Blair and Hill reach back to the Greeks for the term
eiron, which Aristotle defined as the "mock-modest man" (and which
gave rise to the term "irony"). Such a figure became a staple of American
humor, combining homespun simplicity with penetrating insight into
human nature and culture.
Periodicals other than almanacs also brought humor to colonial
readers. The first known American magazine devoted expressly to
humor was the Philadelphia Bee, which produced three issues in
1765. A decade before the American Revolution, the Bee was editorially
loyal to the British monarchy rather than to the discontents of the
colonists, and much of its satire was aimed at the governors of what
the magazine called "Quillsylvania." Despite its allegiance to the
crown, the Bee took the part of the common worker against their colonial
rulers, who were described as "great Folks who stick themselves
up for Quality, and turn up their Noses at honest Mechanics."
The heyday of the American comic magazine did not begin for
another century, with the advent of such periodicals as Life, Puck, and
Judge; in the meantime, most Americans would have turned to the daily
or weekly newspaper for amusement. We now think of newspaper
humor as limited to the comic strip pages and the occasional satirical
editorial column, such as those by Molly Ivins and Art Buchwald, but
from the colonial period through much of the nineteenth century,
newspapers printed many kinds of humor, including light verse,
humorous columns, and political satire. Whereas in the twentieth
century we expect journalistic objectivity except on the editorial
pages, earlier newspapers were not bound by such constraints, and many
were fiercely partisan to speCific political parties and factions, often
using humor to espouse or attack political positions.
In the years before and during the Revolutionary War, newspapers
and pamphlets were fully engaged in the conflict between the colonies
and Great Britain. As Carl Holliday puts it in The Wit and Humor of
Colonial Days (1912), "as we approach the prolonged struggle of the
American Revolution, we find the American sense of the ludicrous
becoming more and more alert. The colonist becomes eager to discern
the weakness of his enemy, to discover all of thatenemy's predicaments,
and to set them with taunting laughter before the world."6 Of course,
many in the colonies remained loyal to the British crown, so the taunts
came from both sides in the controversy. However, given the outcome
of the war, most commentators on American humor have chosen to focus
on that which viewed the British as the enemy. For example, of the
20 WHAT'S SO FUNNY?
1I11111Y humorous sketches that dealt with the subject of tea after the
flllllOUS Boston Tea Party, Holliday singles out as "perhaps the best" a
sories of pamphlets titled The First Book of the American Chronicles
of the Times (1774-75). which parodies biblical language as a way of
maintaining the righteousness of the American cause. After the colonists
refused to "bow down to the Tea Chest. the God of the Heathen," they
"assembled themselves together, in a Congress in the great city of Philadelphia,
in the house of the Carpenters, the builders' house, in the land
of Pennsylvania. on the seventh day of the ninth month, with their
coaches, their chariots, their camels, their horsemen. and their servants,
a great multitude and they communed together."
One of the sins of the British. according to the First Book, was soldiers
who "abused .. . the young children of Boston by ... calling them
Yankees." The term "Yankee." like the figure of the New England
Jonathan, is complex, and that complexity is tied up in the development
of American humor and in how Americans regarded themselves.
While the British used the term during the period of the Revolution
as an insult (and used it to refer to all colonists, not just those in the
North), for Americans developing a sense of national pride it came to
stand for qualities on which they put high value. As Cameron Nickels
notes in New England Humor, the figure of the Yankee represented those
qualities that most differentiated the American from his European
background. "As a rustic, he stood emphatically free of influences
derived from the city. where, it was believed, foreign values and practices
tended to prevail and inhibit, even corrupt. native growth. From
those rural origins come the other indigenous. distinguishing features
of the Yankee-his homespun dress, manners, and speech.... [TJhe
rustic Yankee embodied the American common man who had become
the principal element in the experiment in democracy and thus who.
more significantly, seemed to give substance to the hope of achieving
an indigenous national identity."7
Yet at the same time that this hearty agrarian figure represented the
simple virtues that embodied American democracy, his very lack of
sophistication could make him a figure of fun, a target of ridicule. As
America showed signs, shortly after becoming a nation, of developing
more and more into an urban, industrial culture. the rustic Yankee could
be seen, as Nickels puts it, as "a comic anachronism"-"Machinery overwhelms
him, often injures him, and in the city he is awed by the
diversity of people and activities, confused by modern conveniences,
and duped by more knowledgeable city types" (9). Both of these views
INTROD UCTION 21

of the Yankee type can be seen in the character of Jonathan in Royall
Tyler's late eighteenth-century play The Contrast, especially in the scene
in which he attends a play in the city, but, knowing nothing about the
theater, assumes that he and the rest of the audience are peeking into
an actual house when the curtain rises. While both we and The Contrast's
original audience may laugh at Jonathan's ignorance, it is also true that
the simple values he embodies are clearly preferred by the playwright
over the European pretensions of the urban dwellers.
For a long time, Americans remained ambivalent about being
identified with the rustic Jonathan and Yankee figures, and especially
resented English and European visitors who characterized American
culture as crude and backward. At the same time, however, humor that
featured the wisdom of a homespun figure flourished throughout the
nineteenth century, and endured well into the twentieth. Perhaps
the best-known such character is Twain's Huck Finn, an unsophisticated
adolescent boy who provides an excellent example of the eiron as he
unmasks various forms of hypocrisy-especially that surrounding
the institution of slavery. A century after Tyler's The Contrast, Twain's
novel has many of the same targets, including social climbing, pretentiousness,
and affectation. In fact, Huck's greatest fear is being
"sivilized," Which he understands as involving Sunday School. table
manners, uncomfortable clothing-and, implicitly, the inhumanity of
slavery. The fact that Huck never explicitly condemns slavery testifies
to his position as the apolitical innocent, and also allows for a moment
of supreme irony in the book, when, having decided not to turn in the
runaway slave, Jim, Huck reckons he will go to hell for this "sin" against
the values his culture has taught him.
Before The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published in 1885,
a number of other humorous writers had used the mask of the untutored
rustic to comment pithily on the American scene. All of these figures
used vernacular speech, which means literally that they speak "the language
of the people." The term signals the use of dialects, which often
contributes to the humor of their observations. The earliest of these vernacular
figures were New England Yankees such as Jack Downing, whom
Seba Smith began creating in 1830 as a way of remarking upon politics
in Maine. Jack's letters from the state capitol to his relatives in
Downingville reveal both Jack's ignorance of the political process and
Smith's understanding of political pettiness and corruption. Jack's
enthusiasm for politics eventually takes him to Washington, where he
becomes an adviser to President Andrew Jackson. When Jackson is
22 W HAT' S SO FUN NY ?
IIwllrdud Ull honorary doctorate of laws degree by Harvard University,
Slllilh has the president remark to Jack that this seems appropriate
h(lcause "I have had to doctor the Laws considerable ever since I been
to Washington." While we might easily see the humor in Smith's play
on words , the incident gains comic force when we understand that,
as president, Jackson represented frontier culture rather than welleducated
Easterners, and there was considerable resistance to him
from the latter group. The vernacular figure did not remain a white male
New Englander such as Jack Downing, but moved West with the development
of the nation; as Nickels notes, the "various vernacular characterizations
... reflect the nation's persistent faith in a dynamic,
democratic pluralism."
By the end of the nineteenth century, two popular vernacular characters
illustrated just how diverse the original Yankee figure had
become. Finley Peter Dunne's "Mr. Dooley" was an Irish bartender in
Chicago who brought his own common sense to matters of politics
and culture in conversation with his patrons. When Mr. Hennessey
voices support for President William McKinley taking over the
Philippines, Mr. Dooley cautions that American imperialism may have
gone too far: " 'Tis not more than two months since ye larned whether
they were islands or canned goods.... If yer son, Packy, was to ask
ye where th' Ph'lippeens is, cud ye give him anny good idea whuther
they was in Rooshia or jus' wast ov th' thracks?" Mr. Dooley is also
skeptical about the get-rich-quick promise of the American Dream,
as he opines, "Me experyence with goold minin' is it's always in th'
nex county."
A very different kind of sage was created by Marietta Holley,
whose"Samantha Allen" spoke in favor of women's rights from her position
as a hardworking homemaker in rural New York State from the
1870s into the twentieth century. Samantha's observations, like those
of Mr. Dooley, emerge in conversations with those who do not share
her common-sense views, including her husband, Josiah, and her
neighbor Betsey Bobbet, both of whom hold traditional opinions of
womj3.n's proper role in society. Holley uses dialect in a more complex
way than do many creators of such rustic observers; when Samantha
speaks of women as a "sect" and of the "spear" in which she wishes
to see them occupied, she is not merely mispronouncing"sex" and
"sphere," but announcing a group's engagement in battle for the right
to vote, receive equal pay, and hold positions of authority. Samantha
repeatedly counters the standard nineteenth-century arguments against
INTRODUCTION 23

women's rights by showing them to be illogical; one of her signature
lines is, "I love to see folks use reason if they have got any."
One of the earliest full-length studies of American humor focuses
precisely on this American tradition of the rural philosopher. Jennette
Tandy's 1925 book Crackerbox Philosophers in American Humor and
Satire takes the first word of its title from a common feature of the country
general store: a box (or barrel) of crackers from which those who gathered
for conversation might help themselves while they discoursed upon
weather, crops, and politics. These "philosophers" are, for Tandy, a type
of "folk-hero, the homely American" who "represents the man of the
people," and whose continuity in American writing "suggests a national
ideal."8 (Tandy's term "man" is descriptive of the fact that all of her
examples are male; the work of Marietta Holley, although in its own
day as popular as that of Mark Twain, was not rediscovered until the
1970s.) Tandy, like other observers, points out that crackerbox philosophers
were historical figures as well as fictional creations, including
such people as Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and Davy
Crockett, all "living examples of the sages whom Democracy delights
to honor" (x) . During the decade in which Tandy's book was published,
Will Rogers emerged as one of the most pop'ular real-life rustic
philosophers. The fictional tradition continued as well, with
Langston Hughes's character "Simple" introducing the black vernacular
figure in the 1940s, and is alive today in Garrison Keillor's folksy
stories of Lake Wobegon.
It is interesting and somewhat ironic that Tandy's celebration of the
crackerbox philosopher was published in 1925, for the same year saw
the debut of the magazine The New. Yorker-a periodical consciously
designed to appeal to the urban sophisticate and featuring a humor that
relied for its effect upon linguistic play, in-group allusions, and the
creation of a somewhat world-weary, well-educated persona. One signature
of The New Yorker was-and continues to be each Februarythe
cover drawing of the top-hatted and monocled Eustace Tilley, a figure
far removed from Downingville, Maine, and Samantha Allen's kitchen.
The New Yorker humor favored irony over common sense, and dealt far
more commonly with the arts and the social scene than with politics.
The success of The New Yorker was due in part to demographic fact: the
1920 census revealed that for the first time in America's history, more
people lived in towns and cities than in rural areas, and the urbanization
that had begun with the development of industry in the nineteenth
century would continue throughout the twentieth. Many of those who
!
24 W HAT' S S 0 FUN NY?
wrolu for '['/W Nt.'W Yorke/' ill its ()urly years-including Dorothy Parker,
S. J. l'ul'(t1Il1an , Robert Benchley, E. B. White, and James Thurber-were
11II10ng the most popular humorous writers of the first half of the
IWHntieth century. By the time Jennette Tandy published Crackerbox
I'll ilosophers, then, the tradition that she traced was in the process of
heing superceded by one that sprang from city pavements rather than
from native soil.
Tension between urbane sophistication and what Tandy calls the
" homely American" was, however, not a new phenomenon in the
1920s. In the popular tall tale of the nineteenth century, for example,
the actual tale, narrated in the dialectical speech of the frontier, was
frequently distanced from the reader by what has come to be called a
"frame narrative." That is, the tale and its teller are introduced by a visitor
to the frontier setting, often a well-educated Easterner to whom the
untutored storyteller is an amusing curiosity. In Thomas Bangs Thorpe's
"The Big Bear of Arkansas" (1841), for example, the "frame" narrator
is traveling on a steamboat on the Mississippi River; describing himself
as "a man of observation," he finds the mix of people on a steamboat
an opportunity for "amusement or instruction." Such an opportunity
takes the form of a fellow traveler from Arkansas, who boasts of killing
forty-pound wild turkeys and of his hunting of an enormous bear who
proves to be "an unhuntable bear" who, rather than being shot, "died
when his time come." At the conclusion of the Arkansan's tale, the frame
narrator muses that the hunter is, like all "children of the woods," superstitious
about the bear, and thus asserts his superiority over the Arkansas
hunter. Similarly, the frame narrator of Twain's "Celebrated Jumping
Frog" approaches "garralous old Simon Wheeler" for news about one
Leonidas W. Smiley, and is treated instead to the tale of Jim Smiley and
his frog. At the end, he makes his escape before Wheeler can regale him
with a story about Jim Smiley's cow.
The contrast between the frame narrator and the teller of the tall
tale, like that between the crackerbox philosopher and New Yorker
humor, is similar, 0'£ course, to the contrast, developed in the colonial
period, between European cultures and that of the emerging nation. As
the vast territories of the United States were settled, distinct regional
and sectional differences became apparent: not just rural versus urban,
but North versus South and West versus East. The frontier tall tale was
not written for a frontier reader, but instead for those in the East who,
like the frame narrator, would find the story amusing because it conveyed
a different sensibility and set of manners. "The Big Bear of
INTRODUCTION 25

Arkansas" was published in the New York Spirit of the Times, which
for thirty years before the Civil War published numerous sketches
about various parts of the country.
Americans were fascinated by their differences from one another,
and in an era before electronic media could introduce people in different
parts of the nation to one another, the printed story served this purpose.
One predictable result was the development of a number of regional and
ethnic stereotypes, some of which have not lost their force even today.
Perhaps the height of regional humor was achieved by Irvin S. Cobb in
his series of 1920s books describing the peculiarities of various states
under the general title "Cobb's America Guyed Books." Inspired by
such satiric travel books as Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad (1869), Cobb
is very much in the tradition of the crackerbox philosopher as he observes
of New York that "so far as I know, General U. S. Grant is the only permanent
resident," and of his native Kentucky that "the state is shaped
like a camel lying down." The tendency of humor to exaggerate and
simplify made it a prime vehicle for furthering such stereotypes as the
shrewd Yankee, the aristocratic Southerner, the drunken Irishman,
the crude (or supremely brave) frontiersman, the gossiping woman, the
childlike (or dangerous) African American.
Such stereotyping may have taken deep root in American humor
for several reasons. The size and the diversity of the country magnified
differences, and often allowed citizens to understand each other
only in superficial ways. Successive waves of immigration from other
countries continually increased the culture's ethnic diversity, and
each new group, with its customs, language patterns, and values,
seemed a fair target for joking and satire that seem to be one way that
people assimilate that which is different or threatening (as the Catholicism
of the Irish was perceived as a threat to the nation's largely Protestant
beginnings). Yet another contributing factor to American humor
has been the habit of self-criticism fostered by democratic principles.
As we have seen, for example, the figure of the New England Yankee
embodied both positive and negative traits-shrewdness could be a
means of survival, but it could also tip over into dishonesty-so that
pride and confession could go hand in hand. Dunne's Mr. Dooley provides
another example, for in creating this bartender with a thick
Irish brogue, Dunne furthered elements of the common Irish stereotype:
the loquacious man fond of strong drink.
Southern humorists as well as those in the North helped to invent
the mythologies and stereotypes of their region. The Virginian William
26 WHAT'S SO FUNNY?
lIyrd was ono or the earliest to remark upon the characteristics of his
SOlltilern neighbors, and he was followed in the nineteenth century by
dozens of others. As M. Thomas Inge has noted, these Southern humorists
"wrote about matters of masculine interest and portrayed a world
or violence and exaggeration through tall tales and expanded metaphor."g
The humor of what has come to be called the "Old Southwest"which
includes the states of Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana,
Mississippi, Arkansas, and Missouri-was created primarily by journalists
who tapped into the rich oral tradition of a region that was developing
several distinct subcultures. The humor that Walter Blair
characterized as coming from the Old Southwest between 1830 and 1867
in his Native American Humor arose not from the plantation aristocracy,
but instead from the mountains, woods, and bayous of these
Southern states-areas only loosely bound by the laws and codes of more
settled regions. It was here that "The Big Bear of Arkansas" and the iconoclastic
Sut Lovingood emerged, to be joined by Johnson J. Hooper's character
Simon Suggs, who in one sketch earns the title "Captain" when
he organizes his townspeople to protect against a threatened Indian uprising.
Suggs and his comrades spend their time drinking whiskey and playing
cards, and succeed in shooting not Indians, but a pony, a yoke of
oxen, and the "Widow Haycock." Old Southwest humor is filled with
violence, animals, and off-color jokes; it joyously exposes the foibles
and excesses of men who live by their wits.
If we are to judge by Roy Blount. Jr. 's, characterization of Southern
humor in the introduction to his Book ofSouthern Humor (excerpted
in Chapter 8) and many of the selections in his collection, there is considerable
continuity between the humor of the Old Southwest and more
recent Southern humor. Time may have curbed the lawlessness, but
there is a similar tendency to render experience in hyperbole, animals
and guns are still featured, and the Southerner is still portrayed as having
more faith in the concrete, physical fact than in the abstract idea.
It is this last characteristic that Blount captures in what he terms "the
qUintessential Southern Zen koan": asked whether he believes in infant
baptism, the Southerner responds, "Believe in it? Hell, I've seen it done!"
Also, although Blount does not put it quite this way, Southern humor
is concerned with the local and the everyday experience. He lists (somewhat
tongue-in-cheek) the "'typical' concerns of the region ... [as] dirt,
chickens, defeat, family, religion, prejudice, collard greens, politics,
and diddie wa diddie." Another characteristic of Southern humor, which
ties it to an oral storytelling tradition, is a love of language, not only the
INT ROD UCT ION 27

extravagant "stretchers" of hyperbole, but a delight in playing with and
piling up words, as Blount does himself when musing about split
infinitives: "Hell, I have known infinitives to actually just, truth of the
matter, near about evermore before God in broad daylight purely ... To
the point where the infinitive was scattered to the winds like an
opened-up sack of feed, and the person speaking didn 't even necessarily
know what an infinitive was."
Blount's collection of Southern humor reaches back to the nineteenth
century for some of its selections-including work by Mark
Twain, Johnson J. Hooper, and one of the earliest Southern humorists,
A. B. Longstreet, author of Georgia Scenes (1835)-but far more are from
the twentieth century. Some differences can be noted from what Inge
describes as the "matters of masculine interest" (that is , white males)
that dominated earlier Southern humor. While the humor of African
Americans could be more or less silenced in earlier periods-not considered
part of "literature," not included in anthologies, just plain
ignored-the same is not true today, and Blount includes the folk
tales of Joel Chandler Harris, selections from the work of Zora Neale
Hurston and Alice Walker, and some of Alice Childress's sketches
about a black domestic worker. Far from being merely an oppressed
group, Blount mllintains, blacks are and have been central to Southern
culture, which he characterizes as "Africa-Celtic," the second term referring
to the original white settlers, "wild, oral, whiskey-loving, unfastidious,
tribal, horse-racing, government-hating, Wasp-scorned Irish and
Welsh and pre-Presbyterian Scots." Harris's "Br'er Rabbit," always
outwitting larger, fiercer animals, represents the survival of an enslaved
race, so it is not surprising that the same character shows up in the tales
collected by anthropologist and fiction writer Hurston and published
in her book Mules and Men (1935). The white men of the nineteenthcentury
tall tale hunted animals; African-American storytellers wove
them into stories about coping craftily with oppression.
Female Southern humorists of the twentieth century have demonstrated
their own coping mechanisms, responding to the stereotypes
and mythologies that have developed around them. For the black Alice
Childress, the domestic servant has to be reclaimed from the perception
that she is dirty and dishonest; when the employer of Childress's
character Mildred in Like One ofthe Family (1956) holds onto her purse
whenever Mildred is in the apartment, Mildred is driven to tell her,
"If I paid anybody as little as you pay me, I'd hold my pocketbook, too!"
White Southern women have often used humor as a way of stepping
28 WHAT'S SO FUNNY ?
dowil !'J'()1ll the pedestals that traditional notions of ideal Southern wom­
1111 hood have erected for them. Florence King's Confessions ofa Failed
SuullwJ'Jl Lady (1985) records her grandmother'S earnest but only par­
I illily successful attempts to make her a true Southern lady, the result
or which she summarizes in the memorable line, "No matter which sex
I went to bed with, I never smoked on the street." The humor of South­
Ill'll women shares with that of Southern men a fondness for animals,
I he oddities of families, and language. Bailey White, who, like Garrison
KI!illor, comes to us through both printed stories and National public
Radio. writes frequently of life with her somewhat eccentric mother,
lind animals are often a part of the story. In "Toot and Teat," for example,
Mama makes scrapple from the head of a female pig, and takes care of
the sow's orphaned piglets by putting them in a box with a dog who
periodically thinks she is pregnant. That the dog's name is Helen of Troy
is no surprise in a region where many things are larger than life.
Pointing to real rather than fictional absurdities is the business of
Molly Ivins, who continues the long American tradition of the newspaper
columnist writing humorously about politics. Ivins, a Texan, revels
in the earthy, concrete language we associate with Old Southwest
humor, and her work has some of the qualities of the tall tale. Writing
of a congressional candidate who "thinks you get AIDS through your
feet," she comments that he is "smarter than a box of rocks" for wearing
shower caps on his feet while showering in a San Francisco hotel.
While a number of twentieth-century women humorists (not just
in the South) have worked actively against stereotypes that have caused
them to be seen in simplistic and discriminatory ways, many earlier
women have seemed to be complicit in the furthering of such stereotypes.
The early nineteenth-century writer Frances Whitcher, for example,
published sketches describing small-town women as gossipy, competitive
husband-hunters. Writing in rural New York State in the 1830s and
1840s, in the dialect humor then popular in most parts of the country,
Whitcher portrayed women caught in the development of social-class
struggle in the United States, vying with the quality of their homemade
bread and hand-adorned bonnets for secure places on a community
social ladder. Such struggles, like the pretensions of the urbanites
in Royall Tyler's The Contrast, invite satire, and thus Whitcher presents
Miss Sampson Savage, who "know'd she wa'n't a lady by natur nor by
eddication, but she thought mabby other folks would be fools enough
to think she was if she made a great parade." The speaker, Aunt Maguire,
chatters on about Miss Savage while at the same time criticizing her
INTRODUCTION 29

for talking "without cessation." Another of Whitcher's characters,
Priscilla Bedott, talks around and around her subject, digressing
frequently, and when she tells us that her nickname is "Silly," we may
be tempted to take the word in its literal sense as an adjective. Yet in
providing satiric portraits of these women's behavior, Whitcher can also
be seen as critiquing the origins of such behavior in the rise of genteel
culture in the early nineteenth century, which increasingly stressed
the separation of men's and women's spheres of influence and women's
economic dependence on men. Thus, "Miss" (actually Mrs.) Sampson
Savage, married to the wealthiest-if hardly the most respected-man
in town, achieves authority in the only way available to her: a display
of the material wealth made possible by her marriage.
By the latter decades of the century, both the "cult of gentility" and
feminist protests against its restrictions had gained force, and both are
central to Marietta Holley's first book, My Opinions and Betsey Bobbet's
(1873). While Holley's character Samantha is amusing in her role as
the sage philosopher, her friend Betsey is sharply satirized as the
apotheosis of the dependent woman, who seeks the social approval that
can be hers only if she marries. In the metaphor of the day, she is a
"clinging vine" looking for a "sturdy oak" to which she can attach herself.
Samantha and Betsey engage in comic debate abqut woman's
role throughout the book, with Betsey maintaining in her affected
manner of speech that it is "woman's greatest privilege, her crowning
blessing, ... to be a sort of poultice to the noble, manly breast when
it is torn with the cares of life," to which the busy homemaker Samantha
responds testily, "What has my sect done ... that they have got to be
lacerator soothers, when they have got everything else under the sun to
do?" The contrast that Holley draws between Betsey's affectations and
Samantha's common sense is one that had persisted in American humor
since the colonial period, and the popularity of Holley's work over a
period of four decades suggests that readers were drawn to Samantha's
rustic appeal even if not all of them were sympathetic to her continual
insistence that women be given the right to vote.
When Dorothy Parker began her career about the time that Holley's
was concluding (the last Samantha book was published in 1914), dialect
humor had lost much of its popularity in favor of sophisticated wit,
but relationships between the sexes continued as predominant theme
in women's humor. Indeed, some of the unhappy female personae in
Parker's verses and sketches have more than a passing kinship with
Betsey Bobbet in the sense that personal fulfillment is contingent upon
30 WHAT'S SO FUNNY?
IIllilli dllvotioll tiiat sellms maddeningly elusive. Parker'S "General
l'ilVillW 0(' the Sex Situation," collected in her 1927 book Enough Rope,
provides a succinct assessment of the dilemma in its first four lines:
Woman wants monogamy;
Man delights in novelty.
Love is woman's moon and sun;
Man has other forms of fun.
At the same time that Parker depicted women as losers in the unequal
"hattie of the sexes," however, her work, like that of Whitcher and
I lolley, shows that she understood such inequity to be the result of social
st ructures rather than inherent in men and women. Her sketch "The
Waltz" portrays male-female relationships as a culturally mandated
dance which women could resist only privately, while acquiescing to
it in public. The narrator's two voices represent these responses, as she
says to her partner, "It's the loveliest waltz, isn't it?" but thinks to herself.
"must this obscene travesty of a dance go on until hell burns out?"
By the middle of the twentieth century the most popular form
of humor written by women depicted the life of the suburban homemaker
as a comically chaotic experience involving the antics of children,
the malfunction of household appliances, and partially successful
attempts at cooking, dieting, and entertaining. Critically dubbed the
"housewife humorists" by Betty Friedan in her 1963 book The Feminine
Mystique, such writers as Phyllis MCGinley, Jean Kerr, Peg Bracken,
Margaret Halsey, and Shirley Jackson can be seen, as Friedan saw
them, as contributing to an image of women as illogical and inept, pursuing
perfection in a set of repetitive, trivial tasks. Halsey's narrator in
This Demi-Paradise: A Westchester Dim}' (1960) admits her fear that she
will not come up with the right amount of money at the conclusion of
her daughter's Girl Scout cookie sale; jackson's persona in Life Among
the Savages (1953) tells of putting her husband's cup and saucer in the
oven and an egg in his fruit-juice glass as she goes into labor with their
third child; and Bracken, in her 1960 I Hate to Cook Book, acknowledges
that many women do not want to deal with leftovers at all,
much less do something creative with them. Friedan charged that such
humor served to trivialize women's real discontents with their domestic
role by making light of them. At the same time, we can see such
humor as having a subversive force, much as Parker'S "The Waltz"
employs a second voice. jackson's persona, for example, erupts angrily
against male presumption when her doctor remarks while she is in
INTRODUCTION 31

labor, "I know just how you feel." And Bracken's book makes it clear
that in cooking, as in other household duties, women are measured
against impossibly high standards, which for Halsey were embodied
in an "invisible critic" that hovered over her.
In their introduction to Redressing the Balance: American Women's
Literary Humor from Colonial Times to the 1980s (excerpted in Chapter
9), Nancy Walker and Zita Dresner outline several characteristics of
women's humor that may already be apparent in this brief overview.
First, and most obviously, women-like anyone else, for that matterhave
created humor about what they know best and what concerns them
most. Rather than tall tales about outrageous frontiersmen, they have
written about neighbors, relationships, sewing circles, and children.
When their humor has been political, as it often has, it has tended to focus
on women's rights-suffrage until 1920, and other forms of equality since
women won the right to vote. Second, women's humor has been less
aggressive and hostile than has that of men. The formulation of the "lady"
that Florence King writes about so amusingly in her Confessions does
not include these qualities, and even today's female stand-up comics
acknowledge that they must be careful not to hit their targets too hard
lest they tum audiences off. A third difference is that because of their
unequal position in society, women may be even more conscious than
men of what Louis Rubin calls "the great American joke": the incongruity
between promise and reality, things as they should be and as they
are. It is this kind of incongruity that Holley's Samantha Allen points
to when her friend Betsey announces that woman's role should be to
"soothe" the "lacerations" of the masculine ego. The busy Samantha suggests
instead that men "soothe" each other, since they have more time
than do women: "They might jest as well be a soothin' each other as to
be a hangin' round grocery stores, or settin' by the fIre whittlin'." A much
more recent example of women's humor of incongruity is Gloria
Steinem's speculation about the socio-political changes that would
result if men rather than women menstruated-including the prediction
that "sanitary supplies would be federally funded and free."
The fact that the humor of American women has often used subversive
methods to convey its messages, while appearing on the surface
to further certain negative stereotypes of women, allies it closely to the
humor of America's many ethnic groups. In their essay "Ethnic Humor:
Subversion and Survival" (Chapter 12), Joseph Boskin and Joseph
Dorinson point out the process by which such groups took the very tools
used to denigrate them and used them to their own advantage: "Derisive
32 W HAT' S S 0 FUN NY?
lilOI'Olllypos wow IIdaplod by lhoi .. largots ill mucking self-dl1scription,
IIlld I hon, triumphantly, adopted by the victims of stereotyping themsolves
as a means of revenge against their more powerful detractors."
(llll! way in which this works, Boskin and Dorinson argue, is by a kind
of" first strike" method, in which members of an ethnic group make fun
of themselves before someone else can do it, and they cite the kind of
joke (actually, a riddle) that some Polish-Americans told when the
Polish John Paul II became Pope: "Why doesn't the Pope let any dogs
into the Vatican? Because they pee on poles." The authors acknowledge
that a group using this kind of humor-that is, telling jokes with themselves
as the target-is subject to various interpretations. It could suggest
that members of the group accept the low status accorded them by
others, and consider themselves worthy of being the targets of such
humor. However, it seems far more likely, as Boskin and Dorinson
assert, that members of ethnic groups "readily employed their own wits
to criticize American values and peculiarities, and maintained thereby
a measure of self-respect." If this is the case, then insisting on those characteristics
that mark them as "different"-such as Mr. Dooley's Irish
brogue-becomes a way of asserting a group identity and solidarity
against a majority culture and its values.
In fact, by insisting in some ways on their "outsider" status as a position
from which to critique American institutions and values, members
of ethnic groups have participated in one of the central functions of American
humor-to operate as a cultural corrective. Boskin and Dorinson
point to Dunne's Mr. Dooley as a prime example of this participation.
Among the targets of Mr. Dooley's humor is American materialism; when
listing the wonderful technological advancements that Americans enjoy,
such as the steam engine, the cotton gin, and the airplane, he identifies
as the "crownin' wur-ruk iv our civilization-th'cash raygisther." The
Jews had been dealing with discrimination for centuries in Europe, and
had a comic tradition long before emigrating here that had some of the
same purposes that developed in American humor: deflating the
wealthy and pretentious, and promoting the interests of the common
man. Boskin and Dorinson suggest that one of the reasons why Jews in
such great numbers became prominent as humorists and comic performers
in America was that their humorous traditions so closely paralleled
those of American culture; they list Groucho Marx, Sid Caesar,
Lenny Bruce, Jackie Mason, Don Rickles, and Mel Brooks, and to this
list of performers could be added the writers Milt Gross, S. J. Perelman,
Leo Rosten, and Max Shulman, among many others.
INTRODUCTION 33

The enslavement of African Americans and SUbStHIlIlJIlt cultural
racism gave rise to numerous stereotypes of them in mainstream
American culture, and largely hid from the view of white Americans
the ways in which blacks used humQr to resist oppression. Practicing
comic traditions within their own communities, blacks, as Boskin
and Dorinson point out, developed codes of language and character that
allowed them to be outwardly subservient while communicating to each
other visions of revenge and reversal of authority. The figure of "John"
represented the slave against the "Master" in verbal renditions of outwitting
the slaveowner, whereas the rabbit figure of black folktales plays
tricks on the larger and more powerful animal characters, eluding
their power. Both John and the rabbit break rules and wear masks, as
do some of their counterparts in America's dominant humorous tradition,
but not for the same reasons. Whereas the crafty Yankee peddler
and such figures as Sut Lovingood practiced the native wit of the
common man within a culture of which they were acknowledged to
be a part and whose institutions they could affect, slaves stood outside
that culture-denied citizenship and even full humanity. One result
was the contrast between the triumphant characters of black folktales
and the degrading stereotypical masks that African Americans were
forced to wear in public: the subservient Uncle Tom, the smiling cook
Aunt Jemima, the slow-witted Sambo-all figures of fun to white
Americans, but hardly representing the real values of black culture.
Many Americans became familiar with comic stereotypes of blacks,
the Irish, and other groups not on the printed page but in theatrical performance.
Beginning soon after the Revolutionary War, drama celebrating
American life and character-whether fundamentally serious or comicoften
featured minor characters representing the nation's identifiable
ethnic and national groups, and usually served as comic relief. In An
Emerging Entertainment, Walter J. Meserve points out that the wave of
Irish immigration following the War of 1812 prompted the emergence
of the "stage Irishman," who "became a comic character ... almost equal
in popularity to the Yankee," and joining similar figures of the Indian,
the Negro, and the Dutchman. Before 1828, Meserve notes, "Negroes
invariably had speaking parts only as servants," and the Irish were also
frequently portrayed in the same role. 10 As American dramatists looked
for appropriate subject matter during the nineteenth century, they
sometimes found it in novels written by their contemporaries, and in
an effort to create appealing theatrical experiences for their audiences,
they introduced comic stereotypes into the cast of characters. Thus, for
34 W HAT' S SO FUN NY?
IIXlllllplli. wlwlI J!lllIes I,'!m i 11101'0 Cuoper's 1821 llovel The Spy was dl'a­
1111111:1.011 by Charles Powell Clinch in 1822, the plot included a humor­
OilS Nogro servant. The most widely popular and enduring dramatization
or 1111 American novel was that created by George L. Aiken of Harriet
lIoochel' Stowe's 1852 anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. The play
1\lIIde the most of Stowe's novel's great potential for sentimental scenes,
hilt wholly invented its comic elements, making the black orphan girl
Topsy and the long-suffering slave Uncle Tom into comic figures to which
IIlIuiences responded enthusiastically. Although Stowe's novel was a
host-seller, Blair and Hill, in America's Humor, propose that "the charlI(:ters
and scenes that the public came to know weren't, as a rule,
lhose of the book but those in the six-act drama." Fulfilling audience
oxpectations by then established by the minstrel show, Topsy sang and
danced-"a minstrel show darky chucked into a drama"-and between
ncts Tom performed "minstrel-show hoedowns, songs, and Brother
Bones monologues" (251-52).
Ifethnic figures such as Mr. Dooley stood just sufficiently apart from
mainstream American culture to critique its ideals and practices, the
black figures popularized in the minstrel show from the 1830s through
the rest of the century instead represented white America's anxieties
about and appropriation of African-American culture. As Boskin and
Dorinson suggest, the minstrel show served the purposes of whites, not
blacks, who had little part in its creation: "The white performer who
put on his blackface minstrel mask was performing a rite of exorcism
.... The black persona he portrayed-indolent, inept, indulgentembodied
the anti-self and objectified the distance between social
norms and man's instincts." In other words, by creating the benevolent
Mammy and the foolish black male, whites tamed otherwise threatening
presences in the culture and attempted to laugh away their own guilt.
The format of the minstrel show reflected the opposition-by this time
traditional in American humor-between the pretentious and the innocent,
the well educated and the bumpkin. Exchanges between the master
of ceremonies, known as the "interlocutor," and the blackface
characters, who cracked jokes in dialect, created much of the humor in
this popular form of performance. A similar format carried over into radio
comedy, especially in the Amos 'n' Andy show, which premiered in 1928
and featured the supercilious Andy and the earnest but somewhat
backward Amos. This program, like the minstrel show, was humor in
blackface: the black characters were played by the white actors Freeman
Gosden and Charles Correll.
INTRODUCTION 35

misuse of a word, had its origins in sophisticated comedy; named for
Mrs. Malaprop in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's 1775 play The Rivals,
it differs from the misspellings and mispronunciations of American
dialect humor.
Another humorous form with a long history that became popular
at the turn of the century was the parody-especially the literary parody-and
one of the most well-known parodists of the first two decades
of the twentieth century was Carolyn Wells, who wrote for Judge.
Wells, who was an editor of collections of humorous writing as well
as a humorist, wrote parodies of Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy,
and created fanciful creatures such as the "Clothes Horse" and the
"Golf Lynx." Wells was particularly fond of poking fun at stereotypical
images of women. In "To a Milkmaid," she writes of "thy impossible
milk pail and thy improbable bodice," and in "The Thailing Skirt"
she addresses the early-century fashion dictate that women's skirts
sweep the floor:
Thou trundling, trailing skirt!
Smearing thyself with dirt,
Forever catching in the swinging doors
As we go in and out of stores.
In addition to fashions, the comic magazines included regular features
that appealed to other interests of the upwardly mobile urbanite, such
as the popularity of golf and of that new invention, the automobile.
As America's pride in its own literature increased in the early years
of the twentieth century, many writers and editors felt the need for a
"new" American humor, which such magazines as Puck, Judge, and Life
had begun to fulfill. John Kendrick Bangs, who helped to found Life and
wrote for both Puck and Judge, announced in 1900 that, "it is not necessary
nowadays to be vulgar to be amusing." Bangs, who also wrote
for the prestigious Harper's Magazine, was well-versed in literature,
and peppered his humor with literary references and allusions. His 1896
book The House-Boat on the Styx features conversations among such
luminaries as Diogenes, Shakespeare, Napoleon, Alfred, Lord Tennyson,
Artemus Ward, and Samuel Johnson. Yet Bangs was no pedant; his
humor is zany, whimsical, and filled with imaginative reversals of
everyday reality, as when he proposed to start a newspaper that
reported what had not happened-for example, "George Bronson,
colored, aged twenty-nine, a resident of Thompson Street, was caught
cheating at poker last night. He was not murdered." An extreme version
40 WHAT ' S SO FUNNY?
III' !;III :h whilllsicul hUlllor III 110 1"f.\1 II I UII the Wusl Coast iII The Lark, which
(Illhlishod monthly issues between 1895 and 1897 in San Francisco.
(:Illlsidered by some to be inspired nonsense and by others childish selfi
Iidulgence, The Lark's humor was certainly not vulgar, but instead had
/I dreamlike quality, typified by Lark founder Gelett Burgess's verse "The
I'urple Cow ":
I never Saw a Purple Cow;
I never Hope to See One;
But I can Tell you, Anyhow,
I'd rather See than Be One.
The element of the humor of Bangs and Burgess that was particularly
"new" in the American humorous tradition was its almost complete
lack of reference to social reality. From its earliest days, American
humor had largely been a response to the practical realities of settling
a wilderness, experimenting with a democratic political system, and
negotiating the needs of different groups of people within a common
national experience. Seldom had our humor been merely for fun,
without serving some sociopolitical purpose, and what we might call
the humor of reality-as opposed to the humor of fantasy-has maintained
its dominance throughout American literary history. One reason
for this trend is that the humor of wit and whimsy, the literary
parody, and other forms requiring education and sophisticated tastes
necessarily appeal to a small audience. Conscious of this limitation,
the editors of The Lark and its Chicago cousin The Chap-Book took pride
in being magazines for a small elite; Gelett Burgess wrote in the last
issue of The Lark that "it has never been 'popular: but something in
the quality of its friends gave it repute. The Lark was received by the
few who had 'discovered' it with indulgence."
The New Yorker began publication in 1925 with a similar stance
of exclusivity. The magazine's founding publisher, Harold Ross, started
with a sort of manifesto that decreed that The New Yorker was not for
"the old lady in Dubuque," and such geographical snobbery extended
even to the magazine's definition of New York as only Manhattan. Yet
a combination of factors caused The New Yorker to take its place as
America's premier periodical publishing humor-a status it has now
enjoyed for more than seventy years. One of these factors, as everyone
who writes about The New Yorker seems to agree, was Ross's sheer luck
in staffing the magazine with extremely talented writers and artists. The
list of early contributors reads like a Who's Who of the best comic
INTRODUCTION 41

writers and illustrators of the first half of the century: E. B. White, James
Thurber, Wolcott Gibbs, Peter Arno, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley,
Helen Hokinson, and many more. Another reason for The New Yorker's
success was its innovations in humor, of which perhaps the most
important was the single-frame cartoon with a caption in which the
visual and the verbal depend upon each other for humorous effect. One
of the most famous cartoons, created by James Thurber, shows a man
and woman in bed while a seal looks over the headboard behind
them; in the caption, the woman says, "All Right, Have It Your Way­
You Heard a Seal Bark!" Another innovation was the "Talk of the Town"
section at the beginning of each issue-a series of observations of
New York life, first written by E. B. White. Announcing this section
in his 1924 prospectus for the magazine, Harold Ross described it as
"a personal mention column-a jotting down in the small-town newspaper
style of the comings, goings and doings in the village of New York.
This will contain some josh and some news value."
It was precisely The New Yorker's treatment of the city as a "village"
that gave the magazine wide appeal beyond Manhattan. While
the subjects of the "Talk of the Town" pieces were people, places, and
events of a single New York borough, the column.resembled those in
small-town newspapers that told who had visited relatives there, who
had celebrated birthdays and anniversaries, and who had won prizes
at the county fair. As Steven H. Gale writes, "the flavor" is "that of a
small-town newspaper reporting on current events in a folksy way that
implies that the writer and reader know each other, share the same
beliefs, and are on familiar terms. "15 Such an approach, Ross's manifesto
notwithstanding, allowed "the old lady in Dubuque" to feel at
home in the magazine's pages.
Although The New Yorker regularly published reviews of plays and
books, and reported what was happening at upper-middle-class locations
such as art museums, nightclubs, and the racetrack, the stance
most writers adopted was far from snobbish; they were sophisticated,
but not pretentious, worldly, but not effete. Something of this attitude
can be seen in the poem titled "Bohemia" by Dorothy Parker, published
in the September 17, 1927, issue of the magazine:
Authors and actors and artists and such
Never know nothing, and never know much.
Sculptors and singers and those of their kidney
Tell their affairs from Seattle to Sydney.
42 WHAT' S SO FUNNY?
I'llIywriKhls lind pOllls IIl1d sl1ch hOl'sos' IIm:ks
SllIl't off from anywhme and ond up at sex.
Diarists, critics, and similar roe
Never say nothing, and never say no.
People Who Do Things exceed my endurance;
God, for a man who solicits insurance!
The sense of shared problems and concerns conveyed in New Yorker
humor was often contained in its cartoons as well. The anonymity of
lhe American suburb was embodied in one of Robert Day's cartoons,
which pictured, in the midst of row upon row of identical houses, a
woman saying to a postman, "I'm Mrs. Edward M. Barnes. Where do
I live?"
The first generation of New Yorker humorists-especially Thurber,
Henchley, White, and Perelman-contributed to what has been termed
the humor of the "little man" that flourished in the period between the
two World Wars. The technological advancement and urbanization
that drew American readers to more sophisticated types of humor during
the era also created feelings of anonymity and bewilderment, as large
c.orporations, mass advertising, high-rise apartment buildings, and
rapid change became facts of life. The little man shared with the
Jonathan figure of earlier years a sense of being overwhelmed by social
complexities, but for him there was no return to rural simplicity-no
"territory" to "light out to," as Huck Finn declares he will do at the end
of Twain's novel. James Thurber, in his preface to My Life and Hard Times
(1933). offered perhaps the most cogent description of the little man that
he helped to create. His gestures are "the ludicrous reflexes of the
maladjusted; his repose is the momentary inertia of the nonplussed."
The little man's sense of ineffectuality may be largely caused by global
disorders, but he locates the real problems within himself: "He knows
vaguely that the nation is not much good anymore; he has read that the
crust of the earth is shrinking alarmingly and that the universe is growing
steadily colder, but he does not belieye that any of the three is in
half as bad shape as he is." For Thurber, the quintessential little man
of the twentieth century was the humorist himself, who sat "on the edge
of the chair of Literature," and "the wheels of [whose] invention are set
in motion by the damp hand of melancholy." In The American Humorist:
Conscience of the Twentieth Century, Norris W. Yates compares the
little man to the typical persona of nineteenth-century American
humor. Whereas the earlier figure was "self-made, self-employed, and
INTRODUCTION 43

self-reliant," the little man was "a consumer, both of goods and of propaganda."16
The typical recourse of the little man is to retreat into his
own imagination, as do the central characters of Thurber's "The
Unicorn in the Garden" and "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty."
Thurber often represented the pressures of contemporary life in the
form of animal fables. In "The Shrike and the Chipmunks," for example,
a male chipmunk with artistic tendencies would rather arrange the nuts
he gathers in attractive patterns than see how many he can accumulate,
but his wife wants him to become "the wealthiest chipmunk in
the woods." When the female chipmunk goes away for a few days, her
husband's sloth protects him from the deadly attacks of the shrike, who
cannot get in because "the doorway was clogged up with soiled laundry
and dirty dishes." Restored to regular habits upon his wife's
return, the chipmunk is killed by the shrike while taking a walk. The
moral of Thurber's fable is a parody of one of Benjamin Franklin's Poor
Richard aphorisms: "Early to rise and early to bed makes a male
healthy and wealthy and dead."
The little man feels himself to be at the mercy of the media as well
as of ambitious wives. E. B. White's "Dusk in Fierce Pajamas" is the
fantasy of a man who realizes after reading Vogue and Harper's Bazaar
that his "own life is by contrast an unlovely thing, with its disease,
its banalities, its uncertainties, its toil, its single-breasted suits, and its
wine from lesser years." His imagination takes him to a series of social
settings suggested by the magazines, which whimsy makes increasingly
bizarre, until he is "in the modern penthouse of Monsieur Charles
de Bastagui. The staircase is entirely of cement, spreading at the hemline
and trimmed with padded satin tubing caught at the neck with a bar
of milk chocolate." Of all the writers who addressed the dilemmas of the
little man, S. J. Perelman most frequently allowed whimsy to spin into
absurdity, especially when his persona is confronted with modern technology.
In "To Sleep, Perchance to Steam," Perelman is introduced to
his first electric blanket, called by its manufacturer an "Electric
Comforter," which leads him to speculate that he "could pass through
a room containing the Electric Comforter in the original gift box and
emerge with a third-degree burn." Reading, but not reassured by, the
instruction booklet, Perelman "experienced a distinct tingling sensation
which could only have emanated from the booklet itself. Luckily, I had
the presence of mind to plunge it into a pail of water and yell for help."
When scholars began to rediscover women's contributions to
American humor, it became clear that the "little man" had been
44 WHAT'S SO FUNNY?
1ll:l:III11IHllliod by 11 "Iiltln WIIIIIIIIl" durillg tho interwar period. But
wliol'olls the little man is haunted by a universe that seems insane
IIlId/or dangerous, the little woman's concerns are more local and immedillto-especially
the culture's expectations of her performance in
hoI' assigned role. Instead of the fantasies of White's and Perelman's
characters, her head is filled with the voices of etiquette manuals,
hOlllemaking gUides, and popular magazines; in little man humor,
women (such as the female chipmunk) nagged him, but in little
woman humor, women were themselves beset with advice and standards
from all quarters. The speaker in Dorothy Parker's "The Waltz"
is an example of the little woman, fulfilling the social expectation that
she be an amiable dancing partner against her will. Cornelia Otis
Skinner's persona is another example. The speaker in Skinner's Soap
Behind the Ears (1941) is subject to behavioral expectations when shopping
for her son's clothes; the clerks "seem to expect the average
mother to act and talk as if she's stepped off the front page of Good
Housekeeping. And what's worse, I do." In Dithers and Jitters (1939),
Skinner's speaker confesses that she lacks the supposedly innate
female talent for flower-arranging, "one of those tenderly becoming
gestures expected of us women-like mending socks or crying at
weddings." Women writers also pushed the little woman to two different
extremes. One, exemplified by Parker's story "Big Blonde," is
desperation: Hazel Morse has learned a set of skills that are supposed
to please men; when these fail, she attempts suicide. At the other
end of the spectrum are characters such as Anita Loos's Lorelei Lee,
in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925). Sometimes wrongly seen as the
stereotypical "dumb blonde," Lorelei is actually the supreme eiron,
pretending ignorance of the world but telling readers, in her comically
ungrammatical style, how she flatters the egos of men in order to maintain
a comfortable way of life.
If the humorous little man and little woman were intended to
represent the anxieties of the average American in the decades following
World War I, the medium through which humor reached that American
was increasingly the radio, which continued the American oral tradition
in a particularly intimate form: individuals and families listened
to comic sketches and dialogues that seemed performed especially for
them in the privacy of their own homes. As one author has said, "A
successful radio performer sounded as if he or she spoke to each individual
on a one-to-one basis. Millions came to feel that they knew such
radio 'personalities' intimately.,,17 In the mid-1920s, about 20 percent
INTRODUCTION 45

of American homes had radios; by the time the nation entered World
War II in 1941, the number was close to 90 percent. As radio networks
developed during the 1930s, listeners in all parts of the country could
simultaneously experience the same comedy broadcasts, which made
possible a sharing of an American sense of humor that had never
before been possible. Both direct listener responses and the sales of products
that sponsored radio programs provided fairly quick indications
of what the American public found amusing.
Radio humor began by borrowing from earlier forms, notably the
vaudeville show. The two-man "song and patter" team was a direct carryover
from the vaudeville stage, alternating musical numbers with
comic dialogue. The vaudeville emphasis on ethnic humor also made
the transition to radio; the German-Jewish dialect comedy team of
Weber and Fields performed during the inaugural broadcast of the
National Broadcasting Company in 1926. Some of the most enduring
radio comedians had begun their careers in vaudeville: Ed Wynn,
Fred Allen, Jack Benny, and George Burns and Gracie Allen. For the
performer, this change from one comic medium to another was not
always easy. As Arthur Frank Wertheim points out in Radio Comedy,
several crucial differences could be obstacles to success. The costumes
and props used by a stage performer were clearly of no use when
an audience could not see the act, and the absence of a responsive audience
meant that comedians had to develop a sense of timing without
hearing laughter or applause.
Perhaps most important for the development of American humor,
appealing to a diverse, invisible audience put certain restraints on comic
subject matter. A radio comic who was broadcast regularly had to
have new material for each show, in contrast to the vaudeville performer
who went from town to town telling the same jokes. A radio humorist
also could not risk alienating a segment of the faceless audience;
Wertheim quotes a vaudeville performer who commented on this fact
in 1926: "[the radio performer) can not tell stories that hold a race, a
class or a religion up to ridicule, he cannot jest of things which are not
familiar to the every day life of his hearers." And because radio was
from the start perceived as "family home entertainment," "lewd jokes
and double entendres were taboo" (14-15). Ed Wynn, who was particularly
popular in his program The Fire Chief in the 1930s, solved
the audience dilemma by pioneering the concept of the studio audience
at his broadcasts, and he continued to wear the outlandish costumes
of his vaudeville days.
46 w HAT' S S 0 FUN NY?
Milch I!HJ'ly J'lIdio hlllllOJ' was. itS WllI'lhuilll says, "iIlHl\[) and corny,"
dopolldillg upon pUllS and ollwr wordplay. One of Wynn's stories con­
(;tll'I10d a hoy whose father tells him to write a ten-page essay on milk,
htlt the boy decides he can get by with one page by writing about cond!!llsed
milk. If radio comics, bowing to a diverse audience, avoided
Ii II mor that ridiculed races and creeds, apparently women were
IIxpected to go along with joking at their expense. One of Wynn's fou­
I i lies involved fictitious letters from listeners, and when one of these
asked the significance of a married man dreaming he was a bachelor,
Ihe reply was, "it's a sign that he's going to meet with a great disappointment
when he wakes up." Radio comics typically worked with
one or more "straight men," who set the comedian up for his comic
lines. Similar to the interlocutor of the minstrel show, the straight man
adopted a pose of seriousness or innocence that allowed the comic to
deliver the punch line. As advertising became increasingly important
to the radio industry, the announcer who delivered the commercial message
often became a straight man. When The Fire Chief's announcer accidentally
mispronounced "gasoline" as "gasoloon" during one broadcast,
Wynn's teasing him about his slip became a regular feature of the
show. Rather than resisting such interplay between announcer and performer,
advertisers quickly realized the publicity value of such joking.
I\s Roland Marchand notes, "Program stars such as Ed Wynn, Heywood
Broun, and Jack Benny were induced to 'kid' the sponsor's product during
their comedy skits and routines, thus associating the product with
their own personalities" (109). Thus, radio humor, in addition to
amusing its audiences, was used to further the interests of American
business.
The Amos 'n' Andy program, which borrowed from the minstrel
show the device of white men impersonating blacks, had far less racist
intentions than its predecessor. While it did perpetuate certain stereotypes
of African Americans, it appealed to black listeners as well as white
ones, in large part because its creators, Gosden and Correll, based the
shows on material gathered on research trips to Harlem. So great was
their commitment to realism, Wertheim points out, that "dots on a map
of Harlem in their office indicated the exact location of important
places in the show" (57). Also, Amos 'n' Andy played upon a different
version of the little man than did the humor of Thurber and White: when
the stock market crashed just two months after the program began to be
broadcast over NBC, Gosden and Correll immediately made the economic
depression part of the show, indicating how the resulting hardships
INTRODUCTION 47

man" of democratic ideals. Since the 1970s, sitcoms increasingly have
dealt with issues such as racism and sexuality, but because of the need
to appeal to a mass audience, the shows have provided only shallow or
superficial ways of handling them. Mintz concludes that the television
situation comedy may be contemporary America's "most effective form"
of conveying ideologies that reflect the audience's "values, attitudes, dispositions,
fears, and hopes."
David Marc characterizes the television situation comedy as a
"representational" form of humor in that it replicates, with some
degree of realism, everyday life. Television's other major form of
humor, the comedy-variety show, he terms "presentational"-various
artists present their songs, skits, monologues, and dialogues to the audience.
Such a format has an obvious ancestor in vaudeville, in which
singers, dancers, and comics took their places on the stage one after
another, and the format was also used in the early days of radio. The
Ed Sullivan Show was one of the longest-running variety shows on television,
although it featured more musical numbers than it did standup
comics, which Marc considers one of the most appropriate as well
as the most challenging forms of television humor. Indeed, Marc's
vivid description of the stand-up comic applies equally well to live
performance:
Stand-up comedy, as developed in the American nightclub, is one
of the most intense and compelling of modern performance arts.
Eschewing the protection of narrative superstructure and continuity,
the stand-up comedian nakedly faces the audience. He
truly works in the first person, making no distinction between persona
and self. When successful, the monologist offers an awesome
display of charismatic power: the lone individual controlling the
imaginative and physical responses of millions. By the same
token, nowhere is failure more pathetic or painful.
The risk taken by the stand-up comic is that he (and, less often, she) is
alone, not part of a group or an element in a story, and gambles that what
he believes to be funny will be shared by the audience.
In "Stand-up Comedy as Social and Cultural Mediation" (Chapter 11),
Lawrence Mintz argues that this form of humor long predates the
vaudeville show-that it is, in fact, "the oldest, most universal, basic,
and deeply significant form of humorous expression .... the purest public
comic communication." Using the insights of sociologists and
anthropologists, Mintz locates the origin of modern stand-up comedy
52 W HAT ' S S 0 FUN NY?
ill IIllciont "ritns, rituals, and dramatic experiences" that include "the
tl"lldition of fools, jesters, clowns, and comics, which can be traced back
nt lmlst as far as the Middle Ages." In the history of American culture
specifically, Mintz defines the stand-up tradition to include the circus
clown, the minstrel show, and the humorous lecture-circuit performer
of the nineteenth century, such as Mark Twain and Artemus Ward. It
is the function of stand-up comedy within a culture that is of most interest
to Mintz in this essay; as he alternately affirms and subverts commonly
accepted cultural values, the comedian serves as our "comic
spokesman," allowed a freedom of expression not permitted the ordinary
individual. The stand-up comic thus gives voice to what the
audience might secretly feel but not dare say, and often does so by using
the guise of a socially unacceptable persona-"the grotesque, the buffoon,
the fool, the simpleton, the scoundrel, the drunkard, the liar, the
coward, the effete, the tightwad, the boor, the egoist, the cuckold, the
shrew, the weakling, the neurotic"-whose views we can superficially
reject. Mintz draws his examples from the world of performance artfor
example, the egotistical pennypincher Jack Benny, the socially
inept Woody Allen, the self-deprecating Phyllis Diller, the promiscuous
and provocative Richard Pryor. We can also find instances of the
use of such guises in America's humorous literary tradition-the mockinnocent
Jonathan, Huck Finn, and Lorelei Lee; the renegade Sut
Lovingood; the victimized Dorothy Parker; the bewildered S. J. Perelman.
On paper, however, such figures lack an important dimension that
Mintz ascribes to the comic performance, that is, the interplay between
comic and audience in which a degree of community is established so
that humor can do its work of cultural mediation.
The sense of community between stand-up comic and audience is
similar to what Gerald Mast calls the "comic climate" of film. That is,
just as the comic performer must establish what Mintz terms the "license
of comedy" so that certain things can happen that could not if the situation
were perceived as "serious," so the filmmaker provides one or
more signals that "the action is taking place in a comic world." Mast's
The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies (excerpted in Chapter 13)
does not deal exclusively with the American film comedy, and with
good reason: more than most forms of humor, film, perhaps because
of the universality of the visual image, has been an international
phenomenon. While Americans today may identify movies with the
giant film industries of Hollywood, in the early decades of the twentieth
century most American films were made on the East Coast. The
INTROD UCTION 53

comics as a "form of legitimate culture, quite capable of confronting
the major questions of mankind, but .. . with a gentler spirit that leads
to laughter at the moment of recognition."
The daily comic strip provides a good example of how American
humor has been subject to both continuity and change. Some currently
syndicated strips have been running for decades with their basic
premises essentially unaltered. Mary Worth, whose title character Inge
has called "the matronly Miss Lonelyhearts of the Geritol set," began in
the 1930s 22 ; Dagwood and Blondie and their children have not aged for
years, and although Blondie now works outside the home in a catering
business, Dagwood still collides with the mailman and naps on the couch.
Dilbert, on the other hand, is a product of the computer age, addressing
the cubicled world of the corporate programmer while at the same
time continuing the tradi tion of the little man overwhelmed by a crazy
world. In books and periodicals as well as other media, America's
humorists have kept alive certain themes and issues while adapting them
to contemporary life. The nation's diversity is still reflected in a variety
of racial and ethnic voices. The urban sophisticate still counterpoints
the folksy philosopher, and we still observe what Rubin called "the great
American joke"-the disparity between the promised ideal and the lessthan-perfect
realities with which we live.
As a group to whom the ideal has seldom been promised, Native­
American writers of the twentieth century have expressed their anger
at several centuries of European oppression and genocide, but they have
also displayed a remarkably resilient humor when addressing cultural
encounters. Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris's The Crown ofColumbus
(1991) is a modern retelling of Christopher Columbus's "discovery" of
America that takes decidedly satiric stabs at presumptions of European
superiority. Poet Paula Gunn Allen has a keen sense of the ironies of
contemporary Native American life in a culture in which native heritage
has become a commodity. In her poem "Taking a Visitor to See the
Ruins," Allen describes taking a tourist to New Mexico to see, not the
"pueblos/once home to vanished people" that he had expected to see,
but instead her mother and grandmother living in a high-rise apartment:
the two who still live pueblo style in high security dwellings
way up there where the enemy can't reach them
just like in the olden times.
And Louise Erdrich shares this sense of irony in her poem "Dear John
Wayne," in which she recounts the experience of Native American
58 WHAT'S SO FUNNY?
YOlIlIH pooplo al u tlrivo-in llIovie watching the American Western
ho\'() oncollnler a group ofIndians "arranged like SAC missiles,ltheir
lonllwl's bristling in the meaningful sunset."
Among America's comic novelists, Philip Roth has most consis­
IOlltly mined the possibilities of American Jewish humor, beginning with
['ortnoy's Complaint (1969), which abounds in jokes about overbearing
Jewish mothers. Roth's work demonstrates the extent to which, for
1\ century, Jewish comics and humorists have been central to the
American humorous tradition. Not only has their humor featured the
msilient underdog that shares similarities with the American "common
lIIan," but Roth in particular has drawn upon a number of humorous
lorms in his work, including vaudeville, political satire, and the trad
ition of oral storytelling. Roth's The Great American Novel (1972) not
only deals with that great American pastime, baseball, but also has many
of the qualities of the tall tale, including, in the form of its "Prologue,"
what Blair and Hill call "proportionately one of the lengthiest 'frames'
lor a boxed narrative in the history of our humor" (477). The story that
I his narrator has to tell is one of a peculiarly American persecution:
the suppression of the history of a major baseball league.
Langston Hughes'S character Jesse B. Semple (whose ironic nickname
is "Simple"), from the 1940s into the 1960s, recalls Seba Smith's
Jack Downing in his mock-naive questioning of institutions, but there
is an edge to Semple's voice that is missing from Downing's: whereas
the politics that fascinate Downing do not necessarily affect his own
late, Semple, as a black man, is not so fortunate. Through Semple, who
first appeared in Hughes'S Chicago Defender newspaper column in 1943,
Hughes attacked the injustice of racial segregation and America's
slowness to achieve true racial equality. In one Semple sketch, for
example, Hughes's character finds himself in a whites-only waiting
room but is unable to leave because, a policeman tells him, the single
door is for whites-only use. Semple also pointed to the failure of those
considered black leaders to speak directly to the needs of their people,
as he does in the following mock-innocent address to one "Dr. Butts":
"Dr. Butts, I am glad to read that you writ an article in The New York
Times, but also sometime I wish you would write one in the colored
papers and let me know how to get out from behind all these buts that
are staring me in the face. I know America is a great country but-and
it is that but that has been keeping me where I is all these years. I can't
get over it, I can't get under it, and I can't get around it, so what am I
supposed to do?"
INTRODUCTION 59

in The New Yorker, for example, may have fairly universal appeal. but
they often refer to trends. fads. or personalities so specific as to perplex
readers who are out of touch with them. The title of one of Fran
Lebowitz's books. Metropolitan Life (1978). suggests that she writes
specifically for an urban reader-more particularly. a New York
reader-who can relate to her account of looking for a city apartment
that actually has a complete bathroom, the habits of New York taxi drivers.
and references to streets and stores in Manhattan. Similarly.
Garry Trudeau (creator of Doonesbury) parodies New York Times classified
advertisements in his 1993 "Advt. ... with results designed to
amuse the urban-literate reader:
SUCCESSFUL, PROFESSIONAL, QUALiTy-time couple seeks 24-hour.
seven-day. live-in nanny to care for our two little miracles. 3
and 5. teach them manners. values. Spanish. etc. $110 wk. Call
secretary at (315) 999-1515.
WILL TRADE PORK bellies for Hampton time share. Call beeper
number (914) 777-1588.
While television. film. and other mass media have helped to familiarize
contemporary Americans with ways of life far different than their
own everyday experience. some of our humor seeks quite specific
audiences.
In 1931. Thomas L. Masson called upon humorists to help correct
society's wrongs- to "show us the utter folly of so much that we accede
to." In 1994. Moshe Waldoks. editor of The Best American Humor, 1994,
found American life so full of absurdities that a humorist would find
it difficult to create material that could match the daily news in comic
potential. Declaring that "we live in an age that defies parody." Waldoks
provides a list of current events that reads in part as follows:
I am writing in a week when Olympic skater Tonya Harding was
under suspicion for conspiring to break Nancy Kerrigan's knee;
Lorena Bobbitt was found temporarily insane when she sliced off
her husband's penis; ... afternoon talk shows were devoted to
body-piercing for teenagers and slm marriage ceremonies; ... Dan
Quayle appeared in a Lay's potato(e?) chip commercial; Staten
Island was thinking of seceding from New York City; Bill Clinton
made a Reaganesque State of the Union speech. leaving the
Republicans not quite speechless; and did I mention that Tonya
62 WHAT'S S0 FUN NY?
IlnrclinK was stillundnr suspicion of conspiring to break Nancy
Korrignn's knoe?
Now try to be funny after all that. 25
In order to "be funny after all that." contemporary humorists­
Ilspocially in such quick responsive forms as the comic strip and standlip
comedy-need only work slight exaggerations on what already
:lIloms absurd. Trudeau's mock classified ads are only a short step away
I'rom the actual ones. and his comic strip Doonesbury often pushes
II potentially absurd political or social controversy to its logical
IIxtreme. During the recent controversy about whether "ebonics" is an
I\(:tuallanguage spoken by some African Americans. for example. a
Jloonesbury strip featured a black educator who identified the utter­
IllIce "Ain't no way. Nobody jivin' 'bout nothin'" as a "quadruple neg­
IIlive ... an ancient Egyptian idiom." In addition to referring to a

if you bolt the door." Korean-American stand-up comic Margaret Cho
often addresses racial stereotypes in her act. When following a comedian
who had joked about Asian taxi drivers, for example, she introduced
herself by saying, "Hi, my name is Margaret Cho, and 1 drive very
well." And like other groups that have been subject to discrimination
in American culture, gays and lesbians use humor as a platform from
which to address their status. An example is Gail Sausser, whose book
Lesbian Etiquette (1986) displays a common-sense humor not that far
removed from Holley's Samantha Allen. Bemused by questions about
why people "choose" to be gay, Sausser quips, "As if one morning each
of us stood in front of the mirror and said, 'I think I'll become a persecuted
minority today,' "
While it is clear that no single definition of American humor can adequately
capture and explain such diversity of issues, forms, and styles,
some general conclusions can be drawn about its nature and pur- '
poses. Humorous expression has always been integral to the American
experience. Since the beginnings of nationhood in the late eighteenth
century, the existence of freedom of speech and a free press has
allowed and encouraged people to openly circulate their views about
institutions, policies, values, groups, and individuals. Assisting this
circulation, especially in the twentieth century, has been a rapid
expansion of technology, so that humor can be found in automobile
bumper stickers, on the Internet, and in film as well as in newspapers,
magazines, and novels. A second general observation is that America's
geographical and ethnic diversity has had a decided effect on the
nation's humor. While such forms as the ethnic joke and the minstrel
show reveal anxieties about differences, members of minority groups
have used humor as a means of survival, group identification, and
protest against discrimination. It could be argued, in fact , that humor's
capacity to relieve tension and render acceptable that which is potentially
threatening has helped in the process of assimilating various
groups into American culture. While the concept of a single "national
character" has been wisely abandoned, it is nonetheless true that certain
widely shared values, such as the freedoms put forth in the Bill
of Rights, stand in contrast to our many differences, and this leads to
a final conclusion about American humor: the paradox that while
humor declares nothing to be sacred, Americans have used it to press
for those ideals of equality, opportunity, and freedom that often seem
to gleam elusively in the distance.
64 WHAT'S SO FUNNY?
NO'l'ES
I. I':. I\, Whit" and Katharine S. White:, cds., A Subtreasury of American
lIlIlIIOI' (Now York: Modern Library, 1941), xiii. Subsequent references will
hu page numbers in the text.
z. Sigmund Freud, "Humor," in The Complete Psychological Works ofSigmund
freud, trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1961),
21:162.
:L Thomas L. Masson, foreword to Our American Humorists (1931 ; reprinted
ed. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1966).
'1. Walter Blair, " 'A Man's Voice, Speaking': A Continuum in American
Humor," in Essays on American Humor: Blair Through the Ages, ed.
Hamlin Hill (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 40.
OJ'. For an analysis of John Smith as an unwitting early American humorist,
see Thomas J. Haslam, "Absentee Government, the Absurd Frontier, and
the Laughable Origins of American Identity; or, the Twice-Told Fish Tale
of Captain John Smith," Studies in American Humor 7 (1989): 58-66.
Ii. Carl Holliday, The Wit and Humor of Colonial Days (1607-1800)
(Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1912), 91.
7. Cameron Nickels, New England Humor: From the Revolutionary War to the
Civil War (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993), 8. Subsequent
references will be page numbers in the text.
II . Jennette Tandy, Crackerbox Philosophers in American Humor and Satire
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1925), ix.
!J. M. Thomas Inge, Perspectives on American Culture: Essays on Humor,
Literature, and the Popular Arts (West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press,
1994), 7.
10. Walter J. Meserve, An Emerging Entertainment: The Drama ofthe American
People to 1828 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 240-41.
11. Arthur Frank Wertheim, Radio Comedy (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1979), 88. Subsequent references will be page numbers in the text.
12 . Lawrence E. Mintz, "The 'New Wave' of Standup Comics: An Introduction,"
American Humor 4 (Fall 1977): 1.
1:1. Randolph Bourne, quoted in the introduction to Max J. Herzberg, The
Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature (New York: Thomas Y.
Crowell, 1962), v.
14. Thomas Grant, "Judge," in American Humor Magazines and Comic
Periodicals, ed. David E. E. Sloane (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987),
186.
15. Steven H. Gale, "The New Yorker," in American Humor Magazines and
Comic Periodicals, 186.
I Ii. Norris W. Yates, The American Humorist: Conscience of the Twentieth
Century (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1964), 39.
17. Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for
Modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985,) 108.
I II. Jack Gauer and Dave Stanley, There's Laughter in the Air!: Radio's Top
Comedians and Their Best Shows (New York, 1945), 75.
19. James Agee, "Comedy'S Greatest Era," in Agee on Film: Reviews and
Comments by lames Agee (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1958), 3.
:m Wes D. Gehring, "Film Comedy," in Humor in America: A Research Guide
to Genres and Topics, ed. Lawrence E. Mintz (New York: Greenwood
Press, 1988), 73-74.
INTRODUCTION 65

Don L. F. Nilsen et al., “Humor in the United States,” in National Styles
of Humor, Avner Ziv, ed. (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988): 157-88.
BACKGROUND
Pictographs left on stone walls, anthropological evidence of games and
play, and stories handed down orally all indicate that the one million
native Americans living on the North American continent in what is now
the United States had a sense of play and humor. But for practical reasons,
this account will begin in the 1600s when settlers from the Old World
came to establish colonies in the New World.
These early immigrants had little to smile about. In 1607 (about the same
time Shakespeare was writing Macbeth), 105 Englishmen came to
Jamestown, Virginia. Conditions were so bad that at the end of the first
year only 36 were still alive. Further north in Plymouth, only 50 of the 102
who arrived on the Mayflower survived the winter. Spanish settlers were
somewhat more successful in the [157] Southwest, Florida, and California.
In the next decades, Dutch traders, Puritans, Swedes, Finns, and
Frenchmen came so that in 1690, 214,000 settlers lived in America. By
1770 this number had increased tenfold to 2,205,000, with the French
controlling a huge fur-trading empire in the middle of the continent. The
following characteristics of American humor can be traced directly back
to influences from these early circumstances.
An anti-intellectual bent: The settlers found that book learning was not
enough to save them from starvation, inclement weather, and diseases. To
keep from perishing took a healthy dose of good luck combined with
creative problem solving and hard work. Out of their experiences and
those of their descendants, grew a strong feeling for "Yankee ingenuity"
and the "great American work ethic." These attitudes made it fair game to
make fun of the newcomer, the greenhorn, the poor fellow who arrived
with book learning but no common sense, the one that Benjamin Franklin
described as "so learned that he could name a horse in nine languages. So
ignorant, that he bought a cow to ride on" (Blair and McDavid, 1978, p.
xii).

A heavy use of exaggeration: The size of the American continent, its
diversity, and unusual geographic features inspired awe in those who
came to visit. In spite of the hardships they had to endure, its explorers
and settlers were caught up in optimistic dreams about their new country
and what it had to offer. Generations followed the example of the early
Spaniards who reported seeing cities of gold, fountains of youth, and
mountains of treasure. Partly out of defensiveness, the people who chose
to come to America felt an obligation to prove their superiority. They
were like Benjamin Franklin, who, when British critics claimed that the
colonies could not produce enough wool to provide each inhabitant with
a pair of stockings, replied:
The very Tails of the American Sheep are so laden with Wool,
that each has a little Car or Waggon on four little wheels, to
support and keep it from trailing on the ground. (Cohen, 1978, p.
250)
Making fun of ethnic minorities: Folklore has always been filled with
stories about noodleheads, simpletons, and foolish Jacks. In many
cultures such stories have been attributed to people from a specified
geographical area, but in America this trend is exaggerated. One reason
is that the lack of a firmly established class system means that all
individuals can aspire to rise in the social structure. However, climbing
the ladder of success means passing other people. Joke tellers lift
themselves up by putting others down whether on the basis of racial or
geographical origin, religion, or occupation.
The emphasis on racial origins goes back to the very beginning when
settlers from Europe came and took away the Indians' lands and thereby
their means of earning a livelihood. The settlers salved their consciences
by thinking of the Indians as less than human. Thinking of people of
color as not having souls was a convenient rationalization for taking
advantage not only of "red men" but [158] also of "blacks" brought from
Africa to be slaves and of the "yellow men" brought from Asia to wash
the "white man's" clothes and build his railroads.
Racist humor has been popular because it makes the joke teller feel
smart and therefore superior. For the majority, it relieves tensions and
fears over whether the newcomers will compete for the best housing and
jobs. In some ways it keeps these dreaded events from occurring because
by passing on the prejudices of one generation to another it keeps
minorities "in their place."
Dialect as deliciously funny: During the early years of the United States,
British visitors would go home predicting the sure death of the Queen's
English. Settlers came to English-speaking America with their own
languages: French, Spanish, Danish, German, Norwegian, Swedish,
Dutch, Yiddish, Russian, or one of a dozen other languages. Never had
there been such a mass conversion to a new language, but such conformity
did not come about without some accompanying stress. As Walter Blair
and Raven McDavid point out, in the 1800s "school marms and dictionary
makers were stuffy and stern about spelling, elegant diction, and grammar;
therefore, assaults on all three seemed both naughty and funny" (1983, p.
xxiii). The result was that the common folk in the 1800s latched onto
unlearned speech for their literary pleasure, taking pride in its creativity
and its distinctive American, as opposed to British, flavor.
Wit as a way of enforcing social norms: Immigrants came from countries
where their behavior had been controlled not only by laws but by rigid
class structures, state religions, centuries of tradition, and pervasive
economic conditions. They came to the New World in search of freedom,
but there is an inherent contradiction between the idea of personal
freedom and the blending into a unified society of millions of people
coming from countries as different as Finland, China, England, and
Armenia. When the behavior of groups or individuals clashed too strongly
with the rest of the society, humor was often used as the sandpaper to
smooth edges and round off the sharp comers.
For example, in 1846, when members of the newly founded Mormon
church went west to Utah and began practicing polygamy, people
throughout the rest of the country gave their leader, Brigham Young, such
contemptuous nicknames as Bigamy Young, King Brigham, the Sultan of
the Wasatch, the Mormon Bull, the Incestuous Saint, the Puissant
Procreator, and the husband to a multitude and father to a nation. The
purpose of such humor was to intimidate and censure through mockery.
Artemus Ward said that Brigham Young "loved not wisely, but
two-hundred well,""The pretty girls in Utah mostly marry

Young,""Brigham's religion is singular and his wives are plural," and
"Out in Utah they practice Bigamy, Trigamy, and Brighamy" (Robertson
and Hingston, p. 130).
In 1896, when polygamy was outlawed and Utah became the forty-fifth
state in the Union, these jokes lost their sting and faded into historical
quaintness because they were no longer needed to enforce social norms
(McKay, 1983). [159]
TRADITIONAL FORMS AND EXPRESSIONS
IN HUMOR BEFORE THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Popular Forms
In New England villages the local tavern became the center of the
community, a place where jokes and stories were exchanged. In Boston
the first tavern opened in 1634. Toys and dolls were for sale in both
Boston and Salem by the mid1600s, and by the early 1700s the Bowery
near New York City had several taverns and theatres. Twenty-five
thousand pounds was spent to import rum in 1728. A popular ditty went:
There's but one Reason I can Think,
Why People ever cease to drink,
Sobriety the Cause is not,
Nor Fear of being deam'd a Sot,
But if Liquor can't be got.
British soldiers sang a playful song making fun of the Americans. It was
about Yankee Doodle Dandy, who with "all the girls was handy. . . .
went to town, riding on a pony, stuck a feather in his cap and called it
macaroni." When American troops adopted it as a marching tune, it lost
its satirical sting and was played when the British troops surrendered at
Yorktown.
In 1774, partly as an austerity measure and partly out of religious
objections, the Continental Congress banned horse racing, cockfighting,
gambling, and theatrical performances. The attitude that drama was
wicked or at least frivolous lasted long after the war, but in 1787 The
Contrast by Bostonian Royall Tyler opened at John Street Theater in New
York City. An immediate success, this first American comedy ridiculed
aristocratic values while extolling the rustic virtues of its Yankee hero.
In 1790 Benjamin Franklin died, and 20,000 people, the largest crowd
ever to gather in what was now the United States, came to Christ's Church
in Philadelphia for Franklin's funeral. Much of his popularity was due to
the wit and humor of his almanacs, which for 25 years had been providing
such witty advice as the following:
Experience keeps a dear school, yet Fools will learn in no other.
Where there's marriage without love, there will be love without
marriage.
In 1818 Washington Irving’s story Rip Van Winkle mentioned the bowling
of pins as a popular pastime. The game had probably been popular for
some time. In the 1820s football developed in American colleges, first as a
form of hazing in which the freshmen kicked the ball around and the
sophomores kicked the freshmen around. But by 1873 football was so well
established that President [160] White of Cornell University went down in
history when he refused permission for a game by saying that he "would
not permit 30 men to travel 400 miles to agitate a bag of wind."
In 1823 the first American minstrel show was performed. Actor Edwin
Forrest blackened his face to play the part of Negro Ruban in Tailor in
Distress, a farce by Sol Smith. Minstrel shows in which white actors
pretended to be black actors, singers, and dancers were popular for the
next several decades.
Laughing at blacks and at other "foreigners" was probably reassuring to
many Americans because even though they or their parents were
immigrants who spoke with accents, they weren't as "foreign" as those
being laughed at. One of the most popular jokes of the 1890s was about a
Chinese man who, when he saw the cable cars that replaced the
horse-drawn trolleys in San Francisco, said "No pushee, no pullee, but
goee like hellee allee samee."

In 1895 occurred a little-noticed event that would influence humor all
over the world. The first movies were made with the first public
showing taking place on April 23, 1896, at Koster and Bial's Music Hall
in New York. The film included a humorous fight between a tall, thin
boxer and a short, fat boxer. The New York Times acclaimed the
exhibition "all wonderfully real and singularly exhilarating."
Humor in the Literary and Performing Arts
On April 30, 1598, the first theatrical performance was given in
America. The play, a Spanish comedy about an expedition of soldiers,
was presented near what is today El Paso. Like this play, much of the
humor enjoyed by the colonists was imported from England and Europe.
But in 1647 a truly amusing American book was published. It was
Nathaniel Ward, The Simple Cobbler of Aggawam. It was supposed to
be the reflections of a humble shoemaker, but it was really an attack on
current customs and fashions.
In 1666 New Englanders were shocked by another humorous book,
George Alsop's A Character of the Province of Maryland, with such
statements as "Herds of deer are as numerous in this province of
Maryland as cuckolds can be in London, only their horns are not so well
dressed and tipped with silver" (Carruth, 1979, p. 26).
In 1714 Robert Hunter, governor of New York, published Androboros,
the first play written in the colonies. It was a political satire lampooning
the senate and Hunter's lieutenant governor. No record of its being
produced exists, but the written version did amuse readers. In 1725
Nathaniel Ames, a Massachusetts physician, published the Astronomical
Diary and Almanack. It was extremely popular and is thought to have
been the prototype for the almanacs that Benjamin Franklin published
between 1732 and 1757. Typical entries by Ames included these bits of
advice for winter:
Ladies, take heed, Lay down your fans,
And handle well Your warming pans. [161]
This cold, and uncomfortable weather
Makes Jack and Jill lie close together.
On December 21, 1767, one of the first tall tales appeared in the Boston
Evening Post. The closing line of the story was "This is a fact." The editor
must have felt that such a line was needed after telling about a hunter who
shot three mooses, one being ten feet high and ten feet long. On the way
home the man also happened to kill a wildcat.
In 1809 Washington Irving, under the name of Diedrich Knickerbocker,
published the first American humorous book to impress Europe and
England as literature. It was a tongue-in-cheek history of the Dutch in
America entitled History of New York and became a best-seller.
Social satire as a comedy form attained new prestige in 1845 when Anna
Cora Mowatt's Fashion was produced. It was the story of a newly rich
man with a social-climbing wife. For contrast, Mowatt included foreign
characters, a technique that was followed by other playwrights including
Harry Watkins with his 1851 Nature's Nobleman, Mrs. Sydney Bateman
with her 1857 The Golden Calf, and William Henry Hurlbert with his
1858 Americans in Paris.
Two major trends characterized American literature of the 1800s. First
was the exaggeration of the heroes. Albert Marchwardt and Joseph Dillard
explained how in most countries storytellers focused on "the little people,"
dwarves, elves, fairies, etc. But Americans have been so busy doing big
jobs that they have never taken time off to let their minds play with the
tiny folk who have magic powers. At the end of a hard day's work the
American cowboys or miners or lumberjacks or apple pickers have had
their fun out of making up stories about men who could do jobs that could
just not be done, and in an impossibly short time with one hand tied
behind them. The dreams of American workers, naturally enough, have
never been delicate, exquisite, or polite – like most fairy stories. They
have been big and powerful, and a strong wind is always blowing behind
them (Marckwardt and Dillard, 1980, p. 109).
Paul Bunyan could cut down two trees with a single blow of his
double-bladed axe, one with the chop, and the other with the return to his
shoulder. Strap Buckner could knock down bulls with one hit of his iron
pestle. Mike Fink could jump across rivers. John Henry could carry a bale
of cotton under each arm and two on his head, and could drive steel better

than a steam-powered machine. But Pecos Bill was best of all. He once
dug out the Grand Canyon just to get water to his stock. On his
gravestone it reads: "Here lies Pecos Bill. He always lied and always
will. He once lied loud. He now lies still."
The second characteristic, according to Blair and McDavid in their
collection The Mirth of a Nation: America's Great Dialect Humor
(1983), is that Americans between 1830 and 1900 savored the writings
of dialectal humorists. They read their stories in almanacs, newspapers,
and magazines. They pasted them in scrapbooks, mailed them to their
friends, and quoted them from memory. During the dark nights of the
Civil War, Abraham Lincoln was said to read them to [162] relieve
tension. He especially appreciated the writings of David R. Locke, who
made political observations through the personna of Petroleum V.
Nasby, an uneducated, backwoods preacher. Lincoln increased the
prestige of the genre by retelling many of the stories and even adapting
their style into his public statements as when in the election campaign of
1864 he cautioned voters against swapping horses while crossing the
stream.
British critics questioned the poor taste and the sacrificing of "graver
considerations" of the American dialectal writers, but at the same time
they credited the stories with being the first truly American contribution
to the world's literature. After the Civil War, the best of these authors
became fairly prosperous, presenting comic lectures, writing syndicated
newspaper columns, and publishing best-selling books.
The most famous, of course, was Mark Twain, who went west looking
for gold and instead became a newspaper reporter. When he published
"The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" in 1865, he
became instantly famous. Four years later he used a tour of Europe and
the Near East as subject matter for Innocents Abroad, which poked great
fun at the Old World and the sentimentalism attached to a trip to Europe.
In 1872 he published Roughing It, a hilarious collection of tall tales and
exaggerations about life among Nevada miners. The Adventures of Tom
Sawyer was published in 1876 and that same year was banned from the
public library in Denver and from the children's room in the Brooklyn
Library. Huckleberry Finn, published in 1884, was even more
controversial and has remained so to this day, partly because of readers'
varying reactions to the inclusion of the runaway slave, Jim as a major
character.
Blair and McDavid classify the dialectal writers as "Rustic Yankees," who
specialized in understatement (Seba Smith, Thomas Chandler Haliburton,
James Russell Lowell, and Frances Miriam Whitcher); "Frontier
Storytellers," who specialized in exaggeration (Hamilton C. Jones, James
Kirke Paulding, Thomas Bangs Thorpe, Henry Clay Lewis, Johnson Jones
Hooper, Phillip B. January, John S. Robb, William Tappan Thompson,
William C. Hall, William Penn Branan, Harden E. Taliaferro, and George
Washington Harris); "Funny Fellows," who would play with words and
say anything to attract attention (Charles Farrar Browne; Charles H.
Smith; David Ross Locke, who wrote as Petroleum V. Nasby; Henry
Wheeler Shaw, who wrote as Josh Billings; and Finley Peter Dunne); and
"Local Colorists" who were people- and situation-oriented (Harriet
Beecher Stowe, George Washington Cable, Joel Chandler Harris, F.
Hopkinson Smith, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Charles W. Chesnutt, James
Whitcomb Riley, Alfred Henry Lewis, and Edward Noyes Westcott).
American author Bret Harte has credited this nineteenth-century humor –
"as distinct and original as the country and civilization in which it was
developed" – with first breaking the literary bonds that British writers held
over Americans. He described it as presenting not only the speech, but
"the habits of thought of a people or locality. . . . By degrees, it developed
character with incident, often, in a few lines, gave a striking photograph of
a community or a section, but [163] always reached its conclusion without
an unnecessary word" (Blair and McDavid , 1983, p. ix).
Humor in the Visual Arts
In 1754 rumors of a possible war with France inspired Benjamin Franklin
to draw what has been called the first American cartoon. It was a picture
of a snake cut into parts, the head labeled New England and the other parts
labeled with the initials of the rest of the colonies. The caption was "Unite
or Die." Franklin used a picture because many of the colonists could not
read. The cartoon, published in the Pennsylvania Gazette, became a

allying cry for those wanting a federal government as opposed to
independent colonies.
Franklin, a man of many talents, has quite rightly been labeled the father
of America's humorous literature. As the country's first postmaster
general, he founded a system that enabled publishers to get their
magazines and newspapers out to the public. His example of including
humor and drawings in his own papers and almanacs was followed by
other publishers and continues to this day in the mass media.
Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, cartoons were
published in almanacs and in satirical newspapers such as Leslie's
Illustrated Weekly and Harper's Weekly. And by the late 1800s
following the Civil War, cartoons became an established part of regular
newspapers. In the 1884 presidential election cartoons were credited
with winning the election for Grover Cleveland. By the early 1900s
every major city had its own newspaper, and political cartoons became
influential in local as well as national politics.
The most famous political cartoonist of the 1800s was Thomas Nast. His
1871 cartoons about Boss Tweed and the Tammany Hall corruption in
New York City so infuriated Tweed that he ordered "Stop them damn
pictures! I don't care so much what papers write about me. My
constituents can't read. But, damn it, they can see the pictures!" Tweed
is said to have offered Nast a half million dollars to "study art in
Europe" (Robinson, 1984, p. 20). Nast refused, and ironically it was
Tweed who eventually fled to Europe. However, a Spanish official
recognized him because of one of Nast's drawings, and Tweed was
arrested and sent back to the United States. In a more playful vein,
Thomas Nast was the first one to draw the elephant that today stands as
the symbol for the Republican party and to draw the American
interpretation of Santa Claus (Robinson, 1974, p. 21).
In 1863 Frank Leslie immigrated from England and established the first
American graphic humor magazines: Budget of Fun, Comic Monthly, and
Phunny Phellow. The San Francisco Wasp and Wild Oats were soon
competing. Puck was founded in 1877 by Joseph Keppler, an immigrant
from Vienna. Judge was founded in 1885 and Life in 1883. These
publications, along with companies such as Currier and Ives, which
printed comic lithographs, provided a medium for such artists as A. B.
Frost, C. Jay Taylor, Palmer Cox, E. W. Kemble, [164] T. S. Sullivant,
Walt Kuhn, S. D. Ehrart, Walt McDougall, James Montgomery Flagg, and
Charles Dana Gibson.
At the turn of the century a new art form was born in America. It was the
comic strip, described by William Laas in the Saturday Review of
Literature as "one of the liveliest cultural offshoots of our slam-bang
civilization" (Robinson, 1974, p. 12). Newspaper giants Joseph Pultizer
and William Randolph Hearst had a bitter rivalry, and in 1893 Pulitzer
bought a color press with which he intended to print great artworks for his
Sunday paper. However, the technology was not refined enough for
artwork, and the editor encouraged Pulitzer to try using the press for
comic art. Pulitzer brought in a relatively unknown artist, R. F. Outcault,
who drew Down in Hogan's Alley, in a city setting filled with children,
animals, and squalor. One of the street urchins was a baldheaded kid
dressed in a floppy shirt. In what was almost a printer's accident, the
pressman tested out a new ink on the floppy shirt. "That Sunday, a splash
of pure, vivid yellow attracted every eye to Outcault's cartoon. The Yellow
Kid, as he was soon known, was born and with him an indigenous
American art form that is now read by more than 200,000,000 people
every day, nearly 75 billion a year, making its authors and graphic artists
the most widely read and seen in the world" (Robinson, 1974, p. 12).
The Yellow Kid was such a star attraction that Hearst bribed Outcault away
from Pulitzer. Pulitzer offered more money and got him back, and then
when he again lost out to Hearst, Pulitzer hired artist George Luks to

continue drawing The Kid. The Yellow Kid's appearance in both
newspapers gave rise to the term "yellow journalism" to refer to
unscrupulous press practices.
With the success of The Yellow Kid, editors began looking for other
characters who could be the susbject of a continuing story. Hearst had
brought back from Germany Wilhelm Busch’s Max und Moritz, stories
of two young pranksters. A staff artist, Rudolph Dirks, used them as the
basis of the Katzenjammer Kids, Hans and Fritz, who made their debut
in December 1897.
Dirks made his stories revolve around the actions of the characters
instead of having them be observers of society as Outcault's were. He
added to the humor by giving them German accents, and most
importantly he developed the speaking balloon, which gave a feeling of
immediacy and enabled him to show the thoughts and speech of
characters, inanimate as well as animate.
Popular Forms
DEVELOPMENT OF HUMOR IN THE
EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY
Writing humorous limericks was in vogue at the turn of the century.
Newspapers printed hundreds of limericks inspired by:
There once was a man from Nantucket
Who kept all his cash in a bucket; [165]
But his daughter, named Nan,
Ran away with a man,
And as for the bucket, Nantucket.
In 1905 "Everybody Works but Father" was a popular song relating to
people's fears that with women working there wouldn't be enough jobs
to go around. As skirts became shorter, a frequently told joke was about
a policeman asking a little lost boy why he didn't keep hold of his
mother's skirt. The child's answer: "I cou-cou-couldn't reach it."
Expressions from this period that found their way into American English
include Theodore Roosevelt's 1912 way of announcing his candidacy,
"My hat is in the ring," statesman Thomas R. Marshall's 1915 comment
during a tedious Senate debate "What this country really needs is a good
five-cent cigar," and the 1917 expression "Pie in the Sky," which came
from a hobo folk song adapted into a labor movement song. In 1923
opponents in Louisiana coined the phrase "It won't be Long now" to
combat the political threat of a 30-year-old upstart, Huey Long, who was
running for governor. He came in third in the election, but the phrase
brought him to the attention of the public and he went on to become a
political institution.
Among the songs that are still famous because of their playful lyrics are
"Yes, We Have No Bananas" from the 1920s and "Mairzy Doats"
(translated into "Mares eat oats") from the 1940s. Best-selling books that
were popular at least partially because of their humor include Irving
Bacheller’s Eben Holden (1900), Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902), O.
Henry’s collection of short stories The Four Million (1906), Betty Smith’s
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943), and Marion Hargrove's early 1940s See
Here, Private Hargrove, humorous sketches which sold over two and a
half million copies.
Humor in the Literary and Performing Arts
Humor writer Robert C. Benchley died in 1945, but in the 1980s nine of
his books were still in print. He made people see the funny side of
everyday life. Representative titles include The Early Worm (1927) and
My Ten Years in a Quandary (1936). Ogden Nash, perhaps the most often
quoted American poet, began publishing his humorous verse in the 1930s.
A classic example: "Candy is dandy / but liquor is quicker." Nash was a
frequent contributor to the New Yorker, a sophisticated magazine founded
in 1925 by Harper & Brothers. Whitney Darrow, Jr., Helen E. Hokinson,
William Steig, and Charles Addams are among its well- known
cartoonists. E. B. White, James Thurber, and Clarence Day were early
contributors of essays. The play Life with Father was based on sketches
that Day wrote for the New Yorker.
An American contribution to the entertainment of the world was the

development of the musical comedy, a blending of a humorous play and
a light opera, soon adapted to film and shown around the world. Popular
early musical comedies [166] included No! No! Nanette by Vincent
Youmans (1923), A Connecticut Yankee by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz
Hart (1927), and Pins and Needles (1937), produced by a group of
garment workers in New York with its most popular song being "Sing
Me a Song of Social Significance."Some of the most successful
American plays (comedies, satires, and farces) are listed below:
Early Twentieth Century
Langdon Mitchell, The New York Idea (1906)
The Twenties
George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber, The Royal Family
(1927)
Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, The Front Page
(1928)
The Thirties
Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, You Can't Take It
with You (1936)
Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, The Man Who Came
to Dinner (1939)
William Saroyan, The Time of Your Life (1939)
The Forties
James Thurber and Elliott Nugent, The Male Animal
(1940)
Joseph Kesselring, Arsenic and Old Lace (1941)
Thornton Wilder, The Skin of Our Teeth (1942)
Garson Kanin, Born Yesterday (1946)
The Fifties
Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows (music and lyrics by Frank
Loesser), Guys and Dolls (1950)
John Patrick, The Teahouse of the August Moon (1952)
William Inge, Bus Stop (1955)
Ira Levin, No Time for Sergeants (1955)
George Axelrod, The Seven Year Itch (1956)
William Saroyan, The Cave Dwellers (1957)
Almost all these plays were made later into successful movies.
Humor in the Visual Arts
By 1900 comic strips were an expected part of every major newspaper, at
least on Sundays. Cartoonists had freedom to experiment with styles and
subject matter, several drawing more than one strip. In 1902 Outcault
created the Buster Brown strip, which became even more famous than The
Yellow Kid, partly because in an entrepreneurial venture he set up a booth
at the St. Louis Exposition and sold commercial rights to advertisers.
Common themes in comic strips of the early 1900s were immigrant and
racial [167] humor. One of Outcault's experiments was Lil' Mose about a
black man. Today, it looks terribly prejudicial but for its time was
considered a sympathetic portrayal. In 1905 James Swinnerton produced a
comic strip about a black man named Sam, who while working in menial
positions would end up seeing his "betters" appearing foolish. He would
laugh and at the end of each strip be punished, usually kicked or struck,
but he continued laughing.
In 1907 Mutt and Jeff by Bud Fisher was the first strip to run horizontally
across the pages of a newspaper and the first to appear as a true daily, six
times a week. Fisher was also the first cartoonist to copyright his
characters and the first to become wealthy.
Jerry Robinson says that the golden age of the comic strip was between
1910 and 1919 when Krazy Kat, Toonerville Folks, Gasoline Alley,
Harold Teen, and The Gumps were created. This is also when a young
engineer, Rube Goldberg, talked the San Francisco Chronicle into hiring
him as a sports cartoonist. He became famous for his "Inventions," wildly
complicated contraptions designed for the simplest tasks. Today any
overly complex item is known as a Rube Goldberg, and the National
Cartoonist Society's highest award "The Reuben" is named for him. Other
1920s comic creations included Moon Mullins, Little Orphan Annie, Buck
Rogers, Tarzan, and Popeye.

During the Depression years of the 1930s, cartoons took on a new look
and a new seriousness with such adventure stories as Prince Valiant,
Dick Tracy, The Phantom, Superman, and Batman, marketed in both
comic books and newspapers. The two strips from this era that were
truly funny and that influenced other genres of humor were Chic
Young’s Blondie, which is credited with being the model for television's
family sitcoms, and Al Capp’s Li'l Abner, a social satire that set the
stage for Walt Kelly’s Pogo in the 1950s and 1960s and for Gary
Trudeau’s Doonesbury in the 1970s and 1980s.
Cartoonists began experimenting with more "adult" topics, and in 1954
comics came under attack for their violence. In some states, legislation
was passed, and nationally the industry made an effort at self-regulation.
A 1955 University of California report estimated that in a single year a
billion comic books were sold, and that the money spent was four times
greater than the total book budget of all U.S. public libraries combined.
Public or Specialized Places for Humorous Expression
Through the late 1800s, vaudeville theatres were a popular place for live
entertainment featuring comedians, dancers, and musicians. But near the
turn of the century, the managers organized and through a gentleman's
agreement conspired to keep wages low. In England performers
belonged to a union called the Water Rats. In 1900 American performers
organized a similar union, but either in retaliation or simply because
they could not make a profit and pay the higher wages, many managers
closed their theatres while others began showing motion pictures
exclusively. Contrary to their intentions, the White Rats contributed
[168] to the demise of live theatre and gave a boost to film as the
medium of entertainment for the masses.
American soldiers in World War I found humor in a most unlikely place,
on the sides of French railroad boxcars inscribed with "Hommes 40 –
Chevaux 8," meaning the cars could hold 40 men and 8 horses. Soldiers
thought the label so funny that when they returned home and formed a
section of the American Legion devoted to fun and practical jokes, they
called it the "Forty and Eight Society."
In World War II, American soldiers created their own humor all over the
world by writing "Kilroy Was Here!" on fences, walls, rocks, and
wherever else they thought someone might see it. Usually it was
accompanied by a simple drawing:
Humor in the Mass Media
During the late 1920s and 1930s, radio broadcasting began to include
variety shows adapted from a vaudeville format. Eddie Cantor, Ed Wynn,
and Edgar Bergen and his puppet Charlie McCarthy were favorite
performers. Faithful audiences were attracted to stories told about
permanent casts of characters as in "The Rise of the Goldbergs," which
debuted in 1929 and was last seen on television in 1954. The most famous
was "Amos 'n' Andy," which ran from 1928 to the 1950s. Other programs
remembered with nostalgic smiles include "Fibber McGee and Molly,"
"The Honeymooners," "Henry Aldrich," "The George Burns and Gracie
Allen Show," "The Jack Benny Show," "The Red Skelton Show," and
Fred Allen "Allen's Alley."
Comic strips, discussed earlier, provided the most popular form of
newspaper humor, but columnists also had a place. In the 1920s and early
1930s, Will Rogers's humorous observations ran in approximately 350
daily newspapers. He also gave radio and live performances, beginning
with the often-repeated line, "All I know is what I read in the papers."
When in 1935 he was killed in a plane crash near Point Barrow, Alaska,
he was mourned as a national hero.
The movies, with such stars as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold
Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy, and the Marx Brothers, deserve considerable
credit for the development of an "American sense of humor." What the
comic strips were to the newspapers, animated cartoons were to the
movies. In 1928 Walt Disney released his first cartoon, Plane Crazy

starring Mickey Mouse, who immediately became an international
favorite.
By the 1940s Hollywood was making some serious films, but the public,
[169] international and American, preferred such wildly escapist
comedies as those of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. Listed below are
some of the best humorous movies, which are all considered "classics"
today, followed by the most humorous television shows, of the early
twentieth century:
The Twenties
The Gold Rush (1925), with Charlie Chaplin
The Freshman (1925), with Harold Lloyd
The General (1927), with Buster Keaton
Big Business (1929), with Laurel and Hardy
The Thirties
Duck Soup (1933), with the Marx Brothers
Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), with Charlie Ruggles and
Charles Laughton
A Night at the Opera (1935), with the Marx Brothers
Modern Times (1936), with Charlie Chaplin
The Forties
His Girl Friday (1940), with Cary Grant and Rosalind
Russell
The Bank Dick (1940), W. C. Fields's greatest film
The Ghost Breakers (1940), Bob Hope and Paulette
Goddard
To Be or Not to Be (1942), Jack Benny and Carole
Lombard
Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), Cary Grant and Raymond
Massey
Life with Father (1947), William Powell and Irene Dunne
The Fifties
Born Yesterday (1950), Judy Holliday and William
Holden
The African Queen (1951), Katharine Hepburn and
Humphrey Bogart
Singin' in the Rain (1952), Gene Kelly and Debbie
Reynolds
The Quiet Man (1952), John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara
The Trouble with Harry (1956), Shirley MacLaine and
John Forsythe
Some Like It Hot (1959), Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis
The most famous television sitcoms, comedies, satires, and farces are
listed below:
Popular Forms
1949--"The Goldbergs"
1951--"The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show" "I Love
Lucy"
1952--"Mr. Peepers" (with Wally Cox)
1953--"Topper" (with Leo G. Carroll)
1955--"The Honeymooners" "The Phil Silvers Show:
You'll Never Get Rich" [170]
1957--"Leave It to Beaver"
1959--"The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis"
CONTEMPORARY HUMOR AND TRENDS
Popular humor in the 1960s included the radio and Broadway
performances of a creative new comedy team Mike Nichols and Elaine
May, Vaughn Meader's "The First Family" record spoofing the Kennedys,
and the Smothers Brothers who in 1969 grabbed headlines by being fired
and in turn suing CBS for "mindless censorship" of their jokes. People
made up Tom Swifties:
“‘Do you want these pancakes?’ she asked flippantly.”
The play on words was based on the overuse of adverbs in the Tom Swift
children's books, popular in the 1930s and 1940s.
Black humor of the period is illustrated by the story about the little boy
complaining that he's tired of going around in circles. His mother

esponds, "Shut up or I'll nail your other foot to the floor!" In the 1970s,
lightbulb jokes reflected America's preoccupation with ethnicity,
professional affiliations, and the feminist movement. For example:
How many Polacks does it take to change a lightbulb?
Three: one to hold the lightbulb and two to turn the
ladder around.
How many psychologists does it take to change a lightbulb?
Only one, but it really has to want to change.
How many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb?
That's not funny!
In the 1980s contemporary folklore became popular as collected in such
books as Jan Brunvand’s The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban
Legends and Their Meanings and Paul Dickson and Joseph Goulden
There Are Alligators in Our Sewers and Other American Credos. The
stories all could have happened and are usually told by someone who
just heard the story from someone who knows the person that it really
happened to. An example is the story of the cement-truck driver who
drives by his own house and notices a shiny black Cadillac parked in
front. He peeks in the window of his house and when he sees a man
talking to his wife is overcome with jealousy. In a fit of rage, he empties
his load of cement in the open window of the man's Cadillac, only to
find that his wife was going to surprise him with the car for his birthday.
The salesman was making final arrangements.
A characteristic in American humor, perhaps in all humor, is for people
to make jokes about things they are somewhat nervous about. Learning
to work with computers is one such area as shown by the 1980s
publication of Rich Tennant and John Barry’s The Unofficial I Hate
Computers Book, Jeffrey Holmes's Shakespeare Was a Computer
Programmer, Ann Bishop’s Hello, Mr.Chips: Computer Jokes and
Riddles, [171] and Patty Bell and Doug Myrland’s The Official Silicon
Valley Guy Handbook. Traveling on airplanes is another area of
apprehension, and Americans relieve their fears by making up humorous
airline names. For example, they call Cascade “Crashcade,” Mohawk
“Slow Hawk,” Allegheny “All Agony,” Air France “Air Chance,” and
TWA “Try Walking Across.”
Humor in the Literary and Performing Arts
Authors not mentioned elsewhere but whose work is not only
anthologized and analyzed but also enjoyed by contemporary readers
include the following listed with a sample title:
Richard Armour, Twisted Tales from Shakespeare;
Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March;
Ray Allen Billington, Limericks Historical and Hysterical,
Plagiarized, Arranged, Annotated, and Some Written by
Ray Allen Billington;
Morris Bishop, The Best of Bishop;
Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America;
Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding, From Approximately Coast to
Coast . . . It's the Bob and Ray Show;
Nora Ephron, Crazy Salad;
Jeff Greenfield , Book of Books;
Piet Hein, Grooks;
Jim Henson, Miss Piggy's Guide to Life;
John Irving, The World According to Garp;
Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest;
Benjamin Lee, It Can't Be Helped;
David Macaulay, Motel of the Mysteries;
Don Marquis, archy and mehitabel;
P. J. O'Rourke, National Lampoon: Sunday Newspaper Parody;
Michael Palin and Terry Jones, Ripping Yarns;
Paul Rhymer, Vic and Sade: The Best Radio Plays of Paul
Rhymer;
Jean Shepherd, Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories and
Other Disasters;
Max Shulman, Barefoot Boy with Cheek;
Fritz Spiegl, A Small Book of Grave Humor;
Frank Sullivan, The Night the Old Nostalgia Burned Down;
Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Breakfast of Champions;
E. B. White, The Second Tree from the Corner; and

Leonard Wibberley, The Mouse That Roared.
In 1962 Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, which poked great fun at the military
establishment, was so popular that its title came into the language to
refer to any situation where no matter what you do, you are in the
wrong. In 1966 the New York Drama Critics Circle gave a special
citation to Hal Holbrook for his Mark Twain Tonight!, a one-man show
in which Holbrook impersonates Mark Twain on his 1800s lecture tours.
Holbrook continued with the show, taking it around the country. In the
1980s he was still drawing large and enthusiastic crowds. Another
successful one-man show was P.D.Q. Bach in which Professor Peter
Schikele does a wonderfully funny musical spoof under the guise of a
professor of music giving a lecture. Humorous plays offered in more
traditional settings are listed below.
1960s
1970s
Tom Jones (music by Harvey Schmidt), The Fantastiks
(1960) [172]
Abe Burrows, Jack Weinstock, and Willie Gilbert (lyrics
and music by Frank Loesser), How to Succeed in
Business without Really Trying (1961)
Arthur Kopit, Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in
the Closet, and I'm Feeling So Sad (1961)
S. J. Perelman, The Beauty Spot (1962)
Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart (music by Stephen
Sondheim), A Funny Thing Happened on the Way
to the Forum (1962)
Herb Garner, A Thousand Clowns (1962)
Neil Simon, Barefoot in the Park (1963)
Joseph Stein, Enter Laughing (1963)
Jules Feiffer, Little Murders (1967)
Clark Gesner, You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown (1967)
George Furth (music by Stephen Sondheim), Company
(1970)
Bob Randall, 6 RMs RIV VU (1972)
1980s
Lanford Wilson, Tally's Folly (1980)
Neil Simon, Brighton Beach Memoirs (1982), Biloxi Blues
(1984)
An important trend in twentieth-century American humor is that it is
becoming a legitimate subject for serious academic study by
anthropologists, educators, linguists, mathematicians, doctors,
philosophers, psychologists, and scientists, with much of their work being
interdisciplinary in nature. Victoria Bricker (1973), Johan Huizinga
(1962), Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1976), and Mahadev Apte (1985)
are all anthropologists who have written books on humor. Courses in
humor are offered at many universities. Evan Esar and Willard Espy have
done books on wordplay. Linguist Victor Raskin’s Semantic Mechanisms
of Humor (1985) describes humor in terms of linguistic incongruity and
resolution. In 1976 Norman Cousins published "Anatomy of an Illness" in
the New England Journal of Medicine and in 1983 The Healing Heart:
Antidotes to Panic and Helplessness. Raymond Moody (1978), Laurence
Peter (1973), Laurence Peter and Bill Dana (1982), and Vera Robinson
(1977) have also written books exploring the concept of humor as a
healing device. Psychologists writing on humor and mental health include
John Y. Greig (1923), Boris Sidis (1933), Edmund Bergler (1956), Martin
Grotjahn (1957), William Fry Jr. (1963), Philip Sterling (1965), Jacob
Levine (1969), William Willeford (1969), Harvey Mindess (1971), Jeff
Goldstein and Paul McGhee (1972), William Fry Jr., and Melanie Allen
(1975), Seymour Fisher and Rhoda Fisher (1981), Norman Holland
(1982), Thomas Kuhlman (1984), and Elliot Oring (1984a and 1984b).
Books investigating the importance of humor in sociological research
include Patrick Mahony’S Barbed Wit and Malicious Humor (1956),
Lucille Nahemow, [173] Kathleen McCluskey, and Paul McGhee’s
Humor and Aging (1985), and Marvin Koller's Humor: A Sociological
Perspective (1985).
Representative titles in the visual arts include Walter Brasch’s Cartoon
Monickers: An Insight Into the Animation Industry, (1983) and Roy
Nelson’s Humorous Illustration and Cartooning: A Guide for Editors,
Advertisers, and Artists (1984). In 1983 the University of Minnesota Press

published The Mirth of a Nation: America's Great Dialect Humor,
edited by Blair and McDavid, and Of Huck and Alice: Humorous
Writing in American Literature, by Neil Schmitz.
Other important books include E. B. and Katharine White’s A
Subtreasury of American Humor, Sarah Blacher Cohen’s Comic, Relief:
Humor in Contemporary American Literature (1978), Jessica Milner
Davis’s Farce, and Mordecai Richler's The Best of Modern Humor.
Books written about humor in American politics include From Bussing
to Bugging: The Best in Congressional Humor (Gingras, 1973), Malice
in Blunderland: A Foolproof Guide for the Aspiring Bureaucrat (Martin,
1973), So This Is Depravity (Baker), Theodore Roosevelt Among the
Humorists (Gibson, 1980), What's Cooking in Congress?, vols. 1 and 2
(Barba and Barba, 1979, 1982), and Who's in Charge Here? (Gardner,
1984). These representative titles give some indication of the irreverent
tone humorists take toward American politics.
Humor in the Visual Arts
In keeping with the hurry-up approach to life in the last half of the
twentieth century, comic strips have turned away from the continuing
adventure story and back to humorous incidents that can be told in one
day's allotment of space. The humor is more sophisticated and in many
cases seems to be designed to comfort people's lack of control as they
face a modern, complex society. Mort Walker's Beetle Bailey satirizes
the military. Charles Schulz’s Peanuts shows an adult world peopled
exclusively by children whose psychological and philosophical
observations coming "from the mouths of babes" are put into new and
funny perspectives. Jim Davis's cat named Garfield gives readers the
feeling that he's someone they know well but just can't recognize
because he's hiding behind a striped fur coat.
Jules Feiffer's illustrations "of man groping hopelessly in psychological
turmoil and neurotic anguish" (Robinson, 1974) are syndicated under the
heading Feiffer, much as a political cartoonist would be. Yet his subject
matter, the way he lays it out, and his style keep him from being thought
of as a political cartoonist. The same could be said of Gary Trudeau,
who uses his Doonesbury strip to make political and psychological
observations based on current events.
In the introduction to the 1980 edition of Best Editorial Cartoons of the
Year, Daniel Patrick Moynihan described political cartoons as "a totally
relaxed art form which nonetheless nourishes . . . healthy disrespect for
pretense and pomposity" (Brooks, 1980). The best cartoons sound "a
repeated call for civic [174] honesty and set forth an almost instinctual
standard against which the behavior of government can be measured"
(Brooks, 1980).
Since 1922, the Pulitzer Prize Editorial Board has included the political
cartoon as a category, and since 1942 the Sigma Delta Chi journalism
honorary society has chosen an outstanding cartoon of the year. Selections
are also made for various collections identified as "the best." Among those
cartoonists whose names are often seen on honored cartoons are Herb
Block, Etta Hulme, Bob Englehart, Jeff MacNelly, and Dick Wellmeyer.
Public or Specialized Places for Humorous Expression
A new place to look for humor is on electronic billboards such as those in
sports arenas where a clever computer programmer will make a figure
resembling the video game Pac-Man move across the screen gobbling up
the name of the opposing team. Or when a good play is made the word
"Look" is written with the o's resembling blinking eyes. This is simply an
update of the kind of playful writing of such words as de8our, l!ve,
dollar$ and ¢ents.... In a rebus, a picture stands for a word, as in this
bumper sticker:
America: Get your ! in it or your out of it.
T-shirts, campaign buttons, and posters are used in similar ways. A slight
variation is the individualized license plate. By paying an extra fee, car
owners are allowed to make up their own license plate as long as they use
a limited number of letters, do not repeat one that someone else already

has, and are not obscene. For example, 10S NE1 is asking "Tennis,
anyone?"
A few advertisers use humor on billboards, but it is usually more
successful on packages or on restaurant menus which people can read at
their leisure. Food and humor seem to go together, with nearly every
large American city having at least one comedy supper club, while New
York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas have several. Many of
today's successful Jewish comedians got their starts by performing
during the summers in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York.
They worked in the borscht-belt hotels catering to Jewish families
coming from New York City for vacations.
Humor in the Mass Media
Today's television comedy can be divided into two categories: the
stand-up hostile kind of humor practiced by Don Rickles, Richard Pryor,
Eddie Murphy, and Joan Rivers, and the more gentle sit-down kind of
humor practiced by Steve Allen, David Letterman, Johnny Carson, and
Ed McMahon. For example, in one of the Carson-McMahon routines,
Carson gives an answer like "Catch-22" [175] and then Ed opens the
envelope to read the question, "What would the Los Angeles Dodgers do
if they were hit 100 fly balls?" Comedy writer Robert Orben explained
in an interview with Melvin Helitzer that when he first started in the
business in 1945, the put-down humor was a simple kind directed at
such traditional topics as mothers-in-law, bad cooking, wives who were
bad drivers, etc. Then in the 1950s Alan King began talking about
troubles with insurance companies, the airplanes, the problems that hit
close to home, to which we therefore respond with vehemence. Toward
the end of the 1950s, "tell it like it is" social satire got rolling with Mort
Sahl and Lenny Bruce. Dick Gregory came in with a racial viewpoint, so
that with the hostile humor of the 1970s nothing was sacred. This was
evident in such popular television productions as "The Sonny and Cher
Comedy Hour," "Saturday Night Live," and "The Dean Martin Show."
Equally popular, but with a gentler kind of humor, were "Candid
Camera" and "Laugh-In."More important on television are the situation
comedies as described by Larry Mintz in an article entitled "American
Humour and the Spirit of the Times." He quoted John Leonard, who said
that in that flabby decade of the fifties "the sitcom proposed as a paradigm
the incompetent father, the dizzy mother, the innocent child." The 1960s
were similar except that war was shown "as a fun thing" and there were
"young women with supernatural powers (witch, genie, magical nanny,
flying nun) who could take care of their men and their children, look cute
and never leave the house." In the 1970s this cast of characters all sat
around "discussing abortion, infidelity, impotence, homosexuality, drug
addiction, and death." What has been constant has been "the inability of
the American father to lace up the shoes of his own mind without falling
off his rocker" (Chapman and Foot, 1977: 17-21). Leonard's statement
that this perfectly reflects and perpetuates our cultural expectations is just
one of the criticisms leveled at situation comedies. Nevertheless, they are
the mainstay of American television. The most successful sitcoms are
listed below:
1960--"The Andy Griffith Show"
1961--"Car 54, Where Are You?" "The Dick Van Dyke Show"
1964--"The Addams Family" "Bewitched"
1966--"Get Smart"
1970--"The Mary Tyler Moore Show"
1971--"All in the Family"
1972--"Sanford and Son" "The Bob Newhart Show" "M*A*S*H"
"Maude"
1974--"Rhoda" [176]
1975--"Barney Miller" "Phyllis" "Hot 1 Baltimore"
1977--"Soap"
1978--"Taxi"
1982--"Bob Newhart"
1983--"Cheers"
1984--"The Bill Cosby Show"
Popular humorous movies are purposely listed here beneath the television
shows because even the most popular movies are seen by only a fraction
of those who see the most popular television shows. On the other hand,
most American comedies are seen all over the world and enjoy great
popularity.

The Sixties
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
(1960), Zero Mostel and Phil Silvers
Dr. Strangelove, Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying
and Love the Bomb (1964), George C. Scott and
Peter Sellers
A Thousand Clowns (1965), Jason Robards and Barbara
Harris
The Great Race (1965), Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis
The Graduate (1967), Dustin Hoffman and Anne
Bancroft
You're a Big Boy Now (1967), Peter Kastner and
Elizabeth Hartman
The Producers (1968), Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder
The Seventies
Bananas (1971), Woody Allen
M*A*S*H (1971), Elliot Gould and Donald Sutherland
Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex
(1972), Woody Allen
The Sting (1973), Paul Newman and Robert Redford
Young Frankenstein (1974), Gene Wilder and Madeleine
Kahn
Harry and Tonto (1974), Art Carney
Love and Death (1975), Woody Allen
Annie Hall (1977), Woody Allen and Diane Keaton
Movie Movie (1978), George C. Scott and Red Buttons
Manhattan (1979), Woody Allen and Diane Keaton
The Eighties
Airplane (1980), Leslie Nielsen and Robert Stack
Tootsie (1982), Dustin Hoffman and Jessica Lange
My Favorite Year (1982), Peter O'Toole and Joe Bologna
Local Hero (1983), Burt Lancaster and Peter Riegert
[177]
Broadway Danny Rose (1984), Mia Farrow and Woody
Allen
The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), Mia Farrow
Back to the Future (1985), Michael J. Fox and Christopher
Lloyd
Compromising Positions (1985), Raul Julia and Susan
Saradon
The only humor heard on radio is that provided by advertisers in
commercials. However, until 1987, until its creator decided to move to
Norway, there was one genuinely funny radio program being broadcast by
National Public Radio. It was Garrison Keillor "A Prairie Home
Companion" about the fictitious town of Lake Woebegon, Minnesota, "the
town that time forgot and the decades cannot improve."
Newspaper humor comes in comic strips, editorial cartoons, and
humorous columns. Erma Bombeck is the most famous for close-to-home
humor. Her columns have been gathered into books including Aunt Erma's
Cope Book, I Lost Everything in the Post-Natal Depression, and If Life Is
a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits? Art Buchwald is the
best and most famous of the political satirists. His books include And Then
I Told the President, Down the Seine and Up the Potomac, Getting High
in Government Circles, I Never Danced at the White House, and
Washington Is Leaking. Russell Baker and Andy Rooney are other
syndicated columnists who consistently add a light touch to the serious
points they make.
Aggressive Humor
UNIVERSAL FUNCTIONS OF HUMOR
AND THE NATIONAL MANIFESTATIONS
People use humor to bond themselves with their friends and to exclude
outsiders as when children shout "Two's company, three's a crowd, four on
the sidewalk is never allowed!" Folklore collector Alvin Schwartz has
found that nearly all children use antiteacher humor to relieve their
frustrations about being in a subservient role. For example, he has heard
children singing, "Row, row, row your boat, Gently down the stream.
Throw your teacher overboard, And you will hear her scream." San
Francisco children sing "Throw your teacher in the bay. The sharks will
eat today" (Nilsen, 1983: 198).

Schwartz says that children in southern Ohio tell jokes about Briars,
migrants from Appalachia newly moved to Ohio in search of jobs.
Montana children joke about North Dakotans, Maine children about
French Canadians, and children all over the United States about Poles,
Italians, and blacks. During the 1979 political crisis when American
hostages were being held in Iran, children jumped rope to "eeny, meeny,
miney, mo. Catch Khomeini by the toe. If he hollers make him say, 'I
surrender U.S.A.'"
Much of the aggressive humor that adults use relates to sex. An obvious
example is the sign on a brothel door: "Out to lunch. Go fuck yourself!"
As [178] in this joke, hostile humor is usually aimed at a target,
probably someone whose behavior deviates from the norm, as in the
following stories about prostitutes, virgins, and homosexuals,
respectively.
A woman goes into a bank to cash a fifty-dollar check. The teller
returns her check saying, "I'm sorry, Miss. This man has
no account here."
"Oh, my God!" screams the woman. "I've been raped!"
Judging by the large number of jokes told about virgins, their behavior is
enough different from the norm to arouse degrees of hostility varying
from the belligerent graffito "To the virgins--thanks for nothing!" to
such playful college folklore as the following. At the University of
Wisconsin in Madison the most notable landmark is a statue of Abraham
Lincoln sitting atop Bascom Hill. Every time a virgin walks up the hill,
Lincoln is said to stand up. Rising from the center of the campus of the
University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls is a majestic bell tower.
Local legend says that every time a virgin graduates a brick falls from
the tower. It is in perfect condition. One year at Brigham Young
University there was no homecoming parade. The committee cancelled
it because all the school's virgins were going to march in it. However,
one became ill and the other one did not want to walk alone.
The most hostile jokes are told about homosexuals. When AIDS was
first diagnosed as a disease prevalent among homosexuals and Haitians,
a popular joke was about a young AIDS victim worrying about how he
could convince his mother that he was Haitian.
Sexual Humor
American sexual humor can be classified into at least four categories: an
"innocent" kind of humor that relies on surprise, sexual innuendo, hostile
humor (discussed above), and sex-related humor that is interesting
because it reveals and/or teaches cultural attitudes.
The innocent kind of humor expresses surprise at the whole amazing
system of human reproduction. For example, the story about the little boy
who asks his mother where he came from. After she gives him a lengthy
lesson on the birds and the bees, he shrugs and says, "Oh, I just wondered.
Bobby comes from Boston." On an adult level, this kind of humor may
give listeners an insight, as when Brendan Francis remarked, "The big
difference between sex for money and sex for free is that sex for money
usually costs a lot less" (Evans, 1985: 5).
In terms of frequency of use, sexual innuendo is probably the largest
category of sex-related humor. It can be used over the airwaves and in
public places where nonambiguous humor would be frowned upon. With
double entendres, those who would disapprove may not catch on, or if
they do they can pretend not to. The long-running television show, "The
Newlywed Game," which is a [179] combination interview and game
show, gets its humor from the way the writers devise questions so that the
respondents are likely to answer in ways that will arouse sensuous
thoughts. Television talk shows, especially the late-night ones, are similar.
Guests try to be as amusing as comedienne Jeanne Robertson, who in a
"Tall Is Beautiful" monologue tells how as a teenager she practiced
basketball instead of learning to twirl the baton. She ended up as "the only
hooker in the Miss America pageant."
Virtually hundreds of bumper stickers are suggestive because of the
double meaning of it; for example, "Nurses do it with patience," "Teachers
do it with class," "Pilots keep it up longer," "Photographers develop it
better," and "Architects plan it better."

An example of humor revealing and perhaps shaping cultural attitudes is
that related to differing role expectations for males and females. In the
early 1970s as the feminist movement garnered public attention, a
popular riddle was about an automobile wreck in which a father was
killed and his son rushed to a hospital for emergency care. The surgeon
called to the operating table took one look at the patient and said, "I can't
operate on this boy. He's my son!"
The joke teller would then ask how this could be. The answer was that
the surgeon was the boy's mother. There would have been no surprise,
no joke, if listeners hadn't thought that all surgeons were male. Two
popular paperbacks making fun of strict sex-role expectations are Bruce
Feirstein’s Real Men Don't Eat Quiche and Joyce Jillson’s Real Women
Don't Pump Gas.
Social Humor
"Men will confess to treason, murder, arson, false teeth, or a wig, but
will not own up to a lack of a sense of humor," quipped Frank Morre
Colby in the July 4, 1976 edition of the New York Daily News. Charles
Lindner expressed a similar belief: "A person has two legs and one sense
of humor, and if you are faced with the choice, it's better to lose a leg"
(Witty, 1983: 28).
These succinct statements about the value of humor are similar in form
to such popular social rules or observations as Murphy's Law, "If
anything can can go wrong, it will, and even if it can't, it might";
O'Toole's corollary, "Murphy was an optimist"; and the Peter Principle,
which states that in every hierarchy – government, business, or whatever
– each employee tends to rise to a level of incompetence, that is, as long
as people are doing well, they will continue to be promoted. The result is
that every post is filled by an employee not quite competent to execute
the duties. C. Northcote Parkinson apparently founded this kind of
humor in 1957 when he published Parkinson's Law, e.g., "Officials
advance subordinates, not rivals." People like these laws because they
are witty, compact, and unequivocal. It is very satisfying to reduce
complexity to simple and understandable terms.
Capitalism is one of the complexities that Americans must cope with, and
they are grateful for any observations which will help, such as those
offered by [180] Dave Broadfoot at the 1983 convention of the National
Speakers Association. He pointed out that frankfurters come twelve to a
pack while buns come eight to a pack. In order to make everything come
out even, one has to have a minimum of twenty-four guests (Moormon,
1983).
Jere Moorman deals with economics on an even grander scale describing
various political systems.
Capitalism is when you have two cows and sell one and buy a bull.
Communism is when you have two cows and you give them to the
government and the government gives you some milk. Fascism is
when you have two cows and you keep the cows and give the milk
to the government and the government then sells you back some of
the milk. New Dealism is when you have two cows and you shoot
one and milk the other one and then pour the milk down the drain.
Socialism is when you have two cows and you give your neighbor
one. And finally, totalitarianism is when you have two cows and
the government shoots you and keeps the cows (1983).
Until fairly recently, humor and religion were kept separate, but the SALT
(Salvation and Laughter Together) organization now publishes a
newsletter named Light (Laughter in God, History and Theology), while
ISAAC (Institute for Sharing Amusing Anecdotes in Church/ Synagogue)
publishes a journal Red Rubber Noses. In 1974 Conrad Hyers published
Zen and the Comic Spirit followed in 1981 by The Comic Vision and the
Christian Faith. Robert Polhemus published Comic Faith in 1980, and Cal
Samra published Jesus Put on a Happy Face in 1985.
Humor as a Defense Mechanism
James Thurber wisely observed that "Humor is emotional chaos
remembered in tranquility." This explains why people can look back on
traumatic events and laugh about them. It also explains the satisfaction
derived from self-disparagement. Americans will take whatever trait
makes them feel different from the majority of the population and then by
laughing at it, make themselves feel better. They hesitate to joke about

such "real" flaws as their own alcoholism, dishonesty, or emotional
illness. More likely they will joke about things which listeners can
identify with in a comfortable way. For example, comedian Jack Benny
made himself famous by joking about his own stinginess, Sam Levenson
joked about the poverty of his childhood, and Rodney Dangerfield joked
about his lack of respect.
Dangerfield's humor is the kind that Derek Evans and Dave Fulwiler
used in their book Who's Nobody in America? (1981), a spoof on Who's
Who books. In it Lyle Davis of Huntsville, Alabama, explains that she
applied for a job as a dishwasher and finally got called two and a half
years later. The boss asked if she could be there at five o'clock. It was
already six-fifteen. Dare to Be Dull is another book that's funny as a
counterbalance to prevailing expectations. Its author, Joseph Troise, is
president of the Dull Men's Club.
Modern politicians use disparaging humor to gain the support of the
electorate. [181] Many people distrusted the wealth of the Kennedy
family, and so when John F. Kennedy was running for president, he
combated this mistrust by announcing that he had just received a
telegram from his father saying "Don't buy one vote more than
necessary. I'll be damned if I'll pay for a landslide." Kennedy knew that
once people have laughed at something, they aren't so afraid of it.
This is why President Ronald Reagan would joke about his age. For
example, at a Gridiron Club dinner in Washington, D.C., he noted that
the club had been founded in 1885 and then expressed disappointment
that he had not been invited to their first dinner. Former presidential
candidate Morris Udall is writing a book on political humor and has
chosen the disparaging title of We Were Laughing About It This
Morning. When Udall was campaigning in Maine, he poked his head in
the door of a barbershop and as a way of introducing himself said, "Mo
Udall, running for President," to which the barber replied, "Yeah, we
were laughing about it this morning."
Intellectual Humor
Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Austrian philosopher, once remarked that a
serious and good philosophical work could be written that would consist
entirely of jokes. John Paulos I Think, Therefore I Laugh (1985) is an
application of Wittgenstein's theory. Paulos explains:
Open any book on analytic philosophy and you will find clarifying
distinctions that, if utilized differently, could be the source of
humor. The following pairs of phrases serve as examples of what I
mean. "Going on to infinity" versus "going on to Milwaukee";
"honesty compels me" versus "my mother compels me". . . . The
first phrase in each case shares the same grammar as the second
phrase, yet the logic (in a broad sense) of the two is quite different
(69).
Richard Aquila (1981) and John Morreall (1983) also look at humor from
a philosopher's viewpoint.
Scientist Ralph Lewin, author of The Biology of Algae and Other Verses,
pointed out that natural scientists are as interested in humor as are
psychologists, linguists, and philosophers. He gave as evidence the name
Diogenes rotundus for an algae found living in a barrel, Hummbrella
hydra for a parasol-shaped algae named in honor of Professor Humm, and
Didemnum ginantonicum named in honor of Lou Eldredge's favorite
beverage (Lewin, 1983: 399).
The Journal of Irreproducible Results, edited by Alexander Kohn in Israel
but published in the United States, is popular because of the way it
satirizes academic jargon and pomposity. Humor allows academics and
intellectuals to stand back and take a look at their own foibles. J. Frank
Dobie observes that "The average Ph.D. thesis is nothing but the
transference of bones from one graveyard to another" (Peter, 1976, p.
128), and William Glasser observes, "There are only two places in our
world where time takes precedence over the job to be done: school and
prison" (Peter, 1976: 126). [182]
Douglas Hofstadter's Pulitzer Prize-winning Gödel, Escher, Bach: An
Eternal Golden Braid exemplifies another kind of intellectual humor. The
book explores visual, oral, and statistical illusions. Hofstadter uses the
work of Dutch graphic artist M. C. Escher, who lived from 1902 to 1972,
to represent the "eternal braid" in art. For music he considers Johann

Sebastian Bach "Endlessly Rising Canon," for mathematical logic K.
Godel's translation of an ancient paradox in philosophy into
mathematical terms. The paradox is the statement made by Epimenides,
a Cretan, who said "All Cretans are liars" (Hofstadter, 1980: 16-17).
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Caleb Crain, “What's So Funny about Americans Anyway?” Boston
Globe (March 28, 2004).
What's so funny about Americans anyway?
By Caleb Crain, Globe Correspondent | March 28, 2004
IN "INTOLERABLE CRUELTY," last year's screwball comedy by the
Coen brothers, Billy Bob Thornton won't shut up. Thornton plays a
Texas oil tycoon besotted with a femme fatale. George Clooney, playing
an amoral Los Angeles divorce attorney, tries valiantly to silence him, or
at least abbreviate him, but he can't. No sentence leaves Thornton's
mouth without first meandering through a census of his character's
hometown and at least a modest tour of his genealogy. The lawyer is
sure that the tycoon is an idiot. And so he comes to the sort of end that
usually comes to supercilious lawyers in the movies.
If only he had read the work of Constance Rourke! The author of
"American Humor: A Study of the National Character," first published
in 1931 and just brought back into print as a New York Review Books
paperback, would never have made the mistake of underestimating a
character like Thornton's. In fact, she would have prized him as a
national treasure. In her day, critics like Van Wyck Brooks and Lewis
Mumford were lamenting that America's artists lacked a "usable past."
In "American Humor," Rourke answered that they had one, if they
would only condescend to acknowledge it. It consisted of Americans
themselves – the funny ones, anyway.
The funniest American types, in Rourke's opinion, were the Yankee, the
frontiersman, and the minstrel. To explain the rise of these three
archetypal American characters, she quoted the philosopher Henri
Bergson: "The comic comes into being just when society and the
individual, freed from the worry of self-preservation, begin to regard
themselves as works of art." Europe might have castles, cathedrals, and
rock sculpture by druids, but the United States had garrulous hicks who
were canny enough not to mind being mistaken for fools.
Rourke considered that her "comic trio" of archetypes "must for lack of
a better word be called a folk-lore." The term wasn't an exact fit. Folklore
has traditionally been defined as culture passed on by word of mouth; one
imagines peasants gathered around a hearth. In contrast, most of those
who purveyed the culture that interested Rourke were literate, many were
urban, and not a few were out to make money. Her sources were
pamphlets, joke anthologies, newspaper anecdotes, sporting weeklies,
burlesques, unrevivable plays, and comic almanacs. Today we would
probably call what she found popular culture. Nonetheless Rourke claimed
for it virtues associated with folklore. She believed that it expressed
something authentic and unique about the spirit of the United States and
that it could be the soil out of which serious literary art might grow. It had
already been that soil in the cases of Whitman and Melville, she believed,
and had nourished even fastidious writers like Emerson and Hawthorne.
The first of Rourke's archetypes, the Yankee, had grown up under the
watchful eye of his fellow Puritans and had learned to hide his playfulness
beneath a social mask. His speech was quirky by design. He drawled out
such lines as "If you catch me there agin, you'll catch a white weasel
asleep, I tell you." He typically answered one question with another, in
order to prolong conversation without giving anything away.
The second figure, the frontiersman, shared the Yankee's evasive speech
patterns and added, when he told a story, a studied indifference to
plausibility, which was at once a tribute to the outsize grandeur of the
West and a send-up of it. If the frontiersman's crops were growing
quickly, then to hear him tell it, the corn had set off an earthquake, the
potatoes were grumbling to one another about the crowded living
conditions, and "one of our squash vines chased a drove of hogs better'n
half a mile, and . . . one little pig stubbed his toe and fell down and never
was heard of afterwards."
Like the Yankee's poker face, the blackface makeup of the minstrel,
Rourke's third character, disguised the insolence of the humor, enabling it
to go farther than open satire could have. Rourke insisted that minstrelsy
was more than a white theft of black culture – or rather, she insisted that it
really was a theft, not just a travesty, and thus the goods that had been
stolen were authentic. Like the frontiersman, the minstrel exaggerated. His
special contributions to the American character, in her opinion, were a

taste for nonsense and a "tragic undertone."
Rourke saw all three as rebels: the Yankee against England, the
frontiersman against East Coast civilization, and the minstrel against
slaveholders. But the three weren't open about their rebellion and were
willing to pretend to be whatever their social superiors took them for. It
was this mask, and the way they played with it, that she most
appreciated.
. . .
One of Rourke's favorite words of praise was "careless," which she
bestowed on minstrel singers and Emily Dickinson alike. Unfortunately,
she herself never managed to be as careless as her heroes or, for that
matter, as rebellious.
Born in Cleveland in 1885, Rourke was raised in Michigan by her
mother, a kindergarten teacher who had studied with John Dewey and
whom a friend recalled as "formidable." As a child, she vowed that she
would "marry, have a baby, and get a divorce at 35," but she didn't.
After studying at Vassar and touring Europe on a fellowship, she taught
briefly and then lived for the rest of her adult life with her mother, who
survived her by four years. Perhaps she never broke free; perhaps she
was economizing in order to survive as an independent scholar, which
seems to have been as grim a life then as now. As it happens, money
was a force she failed to inquire after in "American Humor."
But she ought to have. She wasn't, after all, studying pure products of a
peasant folk. To be popular, in America, is to make a living – every now
and then, to make a killing – and American humor has never been above
it. Her archetypes were moneymakers in their day, but she never
wondered what the customers were paying for. This failure made it
difficult for her to link antebellum popular culture to the high literature
that came later."
There is an essential vagueness in the last chapters of `American
Humor,"' the critic Alfred Kazin complained in 1942. In fact, except for
a few cases, the link between high and low was impossible to establish,
no matter how hard she might have labored. In America serious literary
artists have long defined themselves in opposition to the marketplace.
Rourke was offering up her archetypes as if they weren't the market's
creatures, but they were.
Literature could never accept such a gift without hedges and
qualifications. Film, as it happens, couldn't say no. And it is in film and
television, much more than in highbrow literary fiction, that her trio has
survived, prospered, and multiplied. In Hollywood an army of joke men
and dialect fixers continue her beloved traditions. In addition to black
minstrelsy, there are now Asian and gay varieties. The frontiersman was
launched long ago into outer space. And Katherine Hepburn perfected the
movie Yankee, the attempted smothering of whose emotions was as
crucial to her success as her fine enunciation. Lately, as movies have
grown less verbal, the Yankee per se has become scarce, but the mask is
still visible in the deadpan of Bill Murray and the I-know-you-know-
I'm-having-you-on charm of Owen Wilson.
On the subject of American humor, Constance Rourke wasn't wrong about
the inheritance. She simply mistook the inheritors.
Caleb Crain teaches at
Columbia University and is
the author of "American
Sympathy: Men, Friendship,
and Literature in the New
Nation."

Constance Rourke, selections from American Humor: A Study of the
National Character (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1931,
1959).
Foreword
IN pursuing humor over a wide area, as in the nation, certain
pitfalls lurk for the unwary. An antiquarian interest is likely to develop.
An old piece of humor is discovered, and one turns it over like a worn
carving or figurine, with mounting pride if one can name it as
pre-Jacksonian, early Maine, late Arkansas, or perhaps not American at
all but of doubtful origin, say neo-French. But other interests may
transcend this beguiling pedantry, for humor is one of those conceits
which give form and flavor to an entire character. In the nation, as
comedy moves from a passing effervescence into the broad stream of a
common possession, its bearings become singularly wide. There is
scarcely an aspect of the American character to which humor is not
related, few which in some sense it has not governed. It has moved into
literature, not merely as an occasional touch, but as a force determining
large patterns and intentions. It is a lawless element, full of surprises. It
sustains its own appeal, yet its vigorous power invites absorption in that
character of which it is a part.
Of late the American character has received marked and not
altogether flattering attention from American critics. "It's a wretched
business, this virtual quarrel of ours with our own country," said
Rowland Mallett in Roderick Hudson. The quarrel seemed to begin in
that period within which James laid his story, soon after the Civil War;
traces of it may be seen even earlier. It has deepened; it has occasionally
grown ponderous; it has often been bracing; at times it has narrowed to a
methodical hilarity. Since the prevailing note has been candid, candor
may be offered in turn. This book has no quarrel with the American
character; one might as well dispute with some established feature in the
natural landscape. Nor can it be called a defense. Someone has said that
a book should be written as a debt is gratefully paid. This study has
grown from an enjoyment of American vagaries, and from the belief that
these have woven together a tradition which is various, subtle, sinewy,
scant at times but not poor.
Bibliographical Note
FEW materials are more important for a view of American humor
than those provided by the comic almanacs during the period from 1830,
when they began to appear, to 1860, when they had grown less local and
flavorsome. These fascinating small handbooks yield many brief stories
and bits of character drawing not to be found elsewhere; more than any
single source they prove the wide diffusion of a native comic lore. To list
adequately those used for this study would be to compile a small book, if
the intricacies of imprints were to be unraveled and descriptive notes
added. In general it may be said that the rich collection of comic almanacs
in the Library of the American Antiquarian Society has been examined,
including numbers of The American, The Old American, The People's,
Finn's, The Rip Snorter, the many almanacs put forth by the tireless and
sprightly Elton, such as his Whims Whams and his Tragical and Piratical
Almanac. The comic grist that poured forth from New York in the '40's
and '50's under many titles is well represented in this collection, and has
been considered, as have the highly important Crockett almanacs
published in Nashville and other places, even in Boston. These too bore
many titles, sometimes carrying the name of Crockett's mythical
companion, Ben Hardin, or suggesting a large number of other characters,
as in Sprees and Scrapes in the West; Life and Manners in the Backwoods
and Exploits and Adventures on the Prairies (1841), which contains brief
tales of many kinds.
Serious almanacs have been scanned over a period which begins
some years before the Revolution and includes the long sequence opening
with the first number of The Old Farmer's in 1793. Humor was often
contained within the pages of these staid pamphlets; they foreshadow
comic effects to be found in more complete and striking forms in later
years. They have proved invaluable in suggesting popular preoccupations
even when these were not strictly comic. The connotations of The Old
Farmer's have been discussed with a wealth of learning by Professor
George L. Kittredge in his Old Farmer and His Almanac (1924).
In most of the joke-books before 1840 only the faintest traces of a
native humor can be discovered. The preface to The Chaplet of Comus
(1811) declares that "the reader will find in this collection more specimens
of American humor than in any other publication. The palm of wit has
been unjustifiably withheld from our countrymen by foreigners, and even
some of our own writers have intimated that no good thing of a humorous

kind can come out of New England." But the title hardly suggested
American humor; and the promise was not fulfilled in the text. The
Aurora Borealis, or Flashes of Wit (1831) contains a slight tale about a
Yankee peddler and a few other localized stories; but for the most part
this, like other joke-books of these years, reveals brief tales or episodes
that are unmistakably English, with a sprinkling of others that go back to
Aesop. The early Joe Miller joke-books were often taken over bodily
from the English issues. But in 1833 one of the comic almanacs pictured
a tombstone bearing the legend, "Here lies Joe Miller"; and though the
name survived, these famous little books – some of which Lincoln saw –
contained thereafter an increasing bulk of humor that can be
distinguished as American. They are now rare; a few of them have been
seen for this study, and occasional others like the Nonpareil.
A more direct and important source has been The Spirit of the
Times (New York) from 1831 to 1861. Its files have proved a
compendium of native tales, notes, comic theatrical items, and lively
allusions to current attitudes. Scarcely an aspect of American humor is
unrepresented there. This sporting and theatrical journal, edited by a
Yankee, William T. Porter, is particularly rich in the humor of the
Mississippi Valley and the frontier.
William Jerdan's Yankee Humor and Uncle Sam's Fun (London,
1853) has yielded Yankee and Southwestern humor as seen in England,
with glimpses of English attitudes toward comic representations of the
American character. Other English reactions have been found in the files
of The Spirit of the Times, the New York Mirror, in clippings from
London papers in the Harvard Theatre Collection, and in notices
incorporated in early biographies of American comedians.
An important contemporary view of the early Yankee is offered
in Royall Tyler's A Yankee in London (1811). Papers by Albert
Matthews on Brother Jonathan (Publications of the Colonial Society of
Massachusetts, 1902), and on Uncle Sam (Proceedings of the American
Antiquarian Society, 1908) have contributed to the study of the early
Yankee, as has Oscar G. T. Sonneck's Report on the "Star Spangled
Banner," "Hail Columbia," "America," and "Yankee Doodle" (1903).
"Corn Cobs Twist Your Hair," a version of "Yankee Doodle," appears in
sheet music (1826) and was apparently first sung on the stage by Yankee
Hill. Such periodicals as The Yankee (1828-29) and Yankee Notions
(1852-60) have added stories or bits of discussion about the Yankee
character. John Neal's The Down Easters (1833) and other early literary
portrayals of the Yankee have been considered.
Plays embodying the Yankee character and Yankee humor have
been surveyed from The Contrast onward, including the popular pieces of
Woodward, Logan, Kettell, Jones, Bayle Bernard, and Stone. G. H. Hill's
Scenes from the Life of an Actor (1853) has been substantially drawn upon
for Yankee portraiture of the lecture platform and the stage, as have
Northall's Life and Recollections of Yankee Hill (1850) and Falconbridge's
life of Dan Marble. Outlines of the figure of Sam Patch appear in the latter
biography, with descriptions of the Sam Patch plays. Other brief allusions
to Sam Patch have been found in the Downing papers, in The American
Joe Miller (184o), and in contemporary notes on the Yankee character.
Perley I. Reed's Realistic Presentation of American Characters in Native
American Plays Prior to 1870 (1924) has been a helpful guide for the ess
accessible Yankee plays.
Ample studies of the Yankee oracles appear in J. R. Tandy's
Crackerbox Philosophers (1925), in M. A. Wyman's Two American
Pioneers: Seba Smith and Elizabeth Oakes Smith – which contains an
invaluable bibliography disentangling the authentic Downing papers from
those of the many imitators – and in V. L. O. Chittick's Thomas Chandler
Haliburton (1924), which is particularly rich in its handling of Sam Slick
and his times.
The darker legends of New England have survived only in
fragments. Hawthorne's tales and his notebooks have been a source for
these, as have Whittier's Legends of New England (1831) and his
Supernaturalism in New England (1847)
Since the trail of the Yankee led into the backwoods, studies of his
character have often included references to the backwoodsman; and at
times the two seemed inextricably mixed. The title of Falconbridge's life
of Dan Marble, a Yankee actor, may stand as indicative of this mergence:
The Gamecock of the Wilderness, or the Life and Times of Dan Marble
(1850). In addition to such mingled sources, backwoods or frontier
character and humor have been derived from Flint's Recollections of the
Last Ten Years (1826), Hall's Legends of the West (1832), his Harpe's
Head: A Legend of Kentucky (1833), Tales of the Border (1835), and The
Wilderness and the Warpath (1846) from Hoffman's A Winter in the West
(1835) and his Wild Scenes in Forest and Prairie (1839), from Drake's
Discourse on the History, Character, and Prospects of the West (1832) ;

from Mary R. Mitford's Stories of An American Life (London, 1830),
which contains material not easily found in other forms; from Irving's A
Tour of the Prairies (1835), and from The Life of John James Audubon
by Lucy Audubon (1869), The Life and Adventures of John James
Audubon, the Naturalist, by Robert Buchanan (1869), and Audubon's
Ornithological Biography (1831-39). Herrick's Audubon the Naturalist
(1917) has been useful. Rusk's admirable Literature of the Middle West
Frontier (1925) and Venable's Beginnings of Literary Culture in the
Ohio Valley (1891) have supplied clews to material on the
backwoodsman.
Outlines of the Mike Fink legends have been drawn from Field's
Drama in Pokerville (1847), Thorpe's Hive of the Bee-Hunter (1854),
from western almanacs, and from The Spirit of the Times. Franklin J.
Meine's provisional bibliograpby of Mike Fink material has been an
invaluable guide. Only a few fragments of boatmen's songs have
survived. The Boathorn by William 0. Butler may be found in The
Western Review (Lexington, 1821).
The larger portion of the tales about Crockett in this study have
been drawn from the western almanacs; in addition, the familiar
Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee (1834)
and the Sketches and Eccentricities of Colonel David Crockett of West
Tennessee (1833) have been used, as well as An Account of Colonel
Crockett's Tour of the North and Down East (1835). Since the plays
based on the character of Crockett – and indeed the entire group of early
backwoods plays – have disappeared, their general substance has been
derived from notices in contemporary theatrical journals, biographies of
actors, and travels. Such a purely fictional work as Carruthers' A
Kentuckian in New York (1834) has furthered the effect of localized
character and of acute interaction between American types.
For the homelier stories of the old Southwest Watterson's
Oddities of Southern Life and Character (1882) provides important
critical notes. A large collection of tales about corricrackers and
rapscallions of this region will be found in Franklin J. Meine's Tall Tales
of the Southwest, 1830-60 (1930), which contains an excellent brief
bibliography. Longstreet's Georgia Scenes (1835), Baldwin's Flush
Times of Alabama and Mississippi (1853), Field's Drama in Pokerville
(1847), Harris's Sut Lovingood (1867), Thompson's Chronicles of
Pineville (1845) and Major Jones's Sketches of Travel (1847), Hooper's
Adventures of Simon Suggs (1845), and The Big Bear of Arkansas (1845),
A Quarter Race in Kentucky (1846), edited by William T. Porter, have
comprised the principal materials from which conclusions have I been
drawn as to the less inflated tall tales of the Southwest.
The literature on early minstrelsy is extremely slight. An important
work is still to be done in discovering and describing those extant minstrel
songs which bear unmistakable traces of Negro origin. For this study a
considerable body of sheet music bearing early imprints has been scanned,
in the American Antiquarian Society and the Widener Library; songs by
Rice, Emmett, Foster, and some less-known writers have been thoroughly
considered. Emmett's walkarounds – "Dixie" was a walkaround – are
particularly significant as suggesting Negro origins. In addition, minstrel
songs in pocket song-books of the '40's and '50's, usually printed without
music, have supplied interesting variations; the imprints have proved the
wide diffusion of such songs. Minstrel plays or sketches, which often
indicated the accompanying songs, in the Widener Library and the
Chicago University Library, have been used, including such early pieces
as O, Hush, or the Virginny Cupids, The Mummy, and Bone Squash by T.
D. Rice. For comparisons between minstrel songs and the spirituals, The
Slave Songs of the United States, compiled by W. F. Allen, C. P. Ware,
and Lucy McKim Garrison (1867, 1930), has been considered, with other
recent compilations of spirituals. Krehbiel's Afro-American Folk-Songs
(1914) has been invaluable for its discussion of the character of Negro
music and the origins of the spirituals.
Photographs of minstrel players over a long period, in the Harvard
Theatre Collection, have provided evidence that early minstrelsy
attempted a close impersonation of the Negro, most often of the plantation
Negro; the early photographs show a marked contrast with those of later
years with their highly stylized figures. Notes in The Spirit of the Times
and in contemporary theatrical memoirs describe the characterizations of
Jim Crow Rice and his successes throughout the country and in London.
Galbraith's Daniel Decatur Emmett (1904) has been useful as offering
Emmett's own version of his sources, and as indicating the influences
which led him to use Negro melodies, choruses, and animal fables. LeRoy
Rice's Monarchs of Minstrelsy (1911) contains biographical sketches
suggesting regional alliances of many early minstrels, with notes on their
impersonations. Cable's Creole Slave Songs in The Century (April 1886)
has been used for this study.

Theatrical histories, memoirs, and accounts of travel by strolling
players have supplied a considerable bulk of material; these writings all
but match the almanacs in importance as revealing popular humor,
popular preoccupations, and evidences of the national character. Actors
were concerned first of all with idiosyncrasies, since these added to their
art; they seldom seemed to possess strong prejudices; and they often had
a gift for concentrated mimicry and description. The writings of John
Bernard, Dunlap, Rees, Wemyss, Northall, Cowell, Vandenhoff, Sol
Smith, Ludlow, Tyrone Power, Leman, Hackett, Wallack, Jefferson,
have yielded materials on the Yankee, the backwoodsman, the Negro,
the minstrel, as well as on theatrical history. Other similar sources
include the anonymous The Actor, or A Peep Behind the Curtain (1846),
Alger's Life of Edmund Forrest (1877), Pyper's Romance of an Old
Playhouse (1928) – on the Mormon theater – and materials on the
California theater of the gold rush, collected mainly from newspaper
sources, for the author's Troupers of the Gold Coast. Josiah Quincy's
Figures of the Past (1924) contains interesting references to Mormon
theatricals at Nauvoo.
Contemporary pamphlets, tracts, sermons, biographies, memoirs,
considered for another study, have been drawn upon for an interpretation
of the strollers of the cults and revivals. For the passages on burlesque
oratory and on the American language Thorriton's An American
Glossary (1912), Mencken's American Language (revised edition,
1923), and Krapp's The English Language in America (1925) have been
used, as well as miscellaneous contemporary writings. Sandburg's
American Songbag (1927) has proved admirable not only for its rich
collection of surviving popular songs but for the notes on regional
backgrounds or connections. Esther Shephard's Paul Bunyan (1924) and
other scattered stories have provided the outlines of the Bunyan cycle.
John Henry: Tracking Down a Negro Legend by Guy B. Johnson
contains an excellent summary.
First editions and prefaces, miscellaneous writings, journals, and
letters have yielded materials on the literary figures considered in this
study. For the most part these general sources are indicated in the text.
Hervey Allen's Israfel (1927) has established facts in Poe's early life
suggesting immediate influences of his time. Lewis Mumford in The
Golden Day (1926) has pointed out that terror and cruelty dominated
Poe's mind, as they dominated many phases of pioneer expression. Apart
from its thesis, Joseph Wood Krutch's Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in Genius
contains an abundance of suggestion as to the play of inner fantasy in
Poe's tales. Franklin J. Meine has discovered Poe's review of Longstreet's
Georgia Scenes in The Southern Literary Messenger, March, 1836, thus
proving a point of contact between Poe and current Southwestern humor.
The Pilgrimage of Henry James by Van Wyck Brooks (1925) has proved
highly stimulating even though the present conclusion that the
international scene is a natural and even traditional American subject is at
variance with that of Mr. Brooks. Perhaps no one can read Bergson's
Laughter without being influenced by its definitions; some of these have
entered into the present interpretation. Meredith, Max Eastman, Freud,
and other writers on humor have also been considered; but an effort has
been made to describe American humor and the American character
without attachment to abstract theory.