2018 Martin

The Year's Work in American Humor Studies, 2016
Gretchen Martin
Studies in American Humor, Volume 4, Number 2, 2018, pp. 216-283 (Article)
Published by Penn State University Press
For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/703918
Access provided at 26 Mar 2019 13:51 GMT from Concordia University Library
The Year’s Work in American
Humor Studies, 2016
G r e t c h e n M A RT I N
A B S T R A C T:“The Year’s Work in American Humor Studies,” an annual feature of Studies

in American Humor since 1999, reviews humor scholarship and related materials published
during the specified year on a wide range of topics from many disciplinary perspectives,
including humor theory. The review gives special emphasis to studies of humor in American
culture, broadly conceived.
KEYWORDS: humor studies, American humor
Studies on humor, humorists, wit, comedy, and laughter in American culture

and literature drew scholars from a wide range of fields, often interdisci-
plinary in nature, in 2016. Many of the year’s studies focus on traditional
aspects of humor in their examination of irony, satire, and parody; yet, as
these projects demonstrate, scholars offer innovative and nuanced analyses
that focus on politics, political rhetoric, civic engagement, literature, linguis-
tics, postmodernism, old Hollywood, slapstick film, contemporary movies,
TV programs, and stand-up comedy as well as particular writers or perform-
ers. Examinations of race and racial humor drew a number of fascinating
inquiries and attention to the work of black stand-up comediennes and
comedians, film stars, and political satirists. Other studies include several
important projects that work to debunk the myth of a postracial America.
Lisa Guerrero, in her article “Can I Live? Contemporary Black Satire and the
State of Postmodern Double Consciousness” recaps the ideology most suc-
cinctly. She challenges the view that due to Obama’s election in 2008, “it
must logically follow that the country was now beyond race,” that “the nation
no longer needed to be concerned with bearing responsibility for its racial
Studies in American Humor, Vol. 4, No. 2, 2018

Copyright © 2018 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
The Year’s Work in American Humor Studies 217
pasts, its racial present, or racial presence at all.”1 Guerrero and a number of
other scholars demonstrate not only how absurd the notion of a color-blind
society is but how dangerous the concept is as well.
I should also note that I limited my reviews of works on Mark Twain
to those that dealt at least tangentially with aspects of humor. Additional
projects were not reviewed because of the unusually short lead time for
this installment of the annual review; they are, however, listed at the end of
the review. This year’s review is organized in three categories: politics and
culture, media, and literary studies.
Politics and Culture
This year’s review opens with Angus Fletcher’s Comic Democracies: From Ancient
Athens to the American Republic, a unique and engaging study that draws from
the classics. Fletcher astutely observes that a significant problem with promot-
ing contemporary democracies has been the universalizing approach that has
been adopted. Rather than focus on developing ways to broaden the franchise,
Fletcher suggests that the new liberal-electoral method, modeled on similar
principles evident in the ancient comedies, has the potential to broaden global
democratic principles. The first principle is pluralism, a rejection of universal-
ism in favor of the view that the local and regional serve to more accurately
reflect the needs of the citizenry. The second principle is pragmatism, a prob-
lem-solving approach utilized to relieve public suffering. This approach is nec-
essary to identify social and political problems rather than abstract theories of
an ideal democratic social order. The third principle is the empirical approach
and works in conjunction with pluralism and pragmatism. Fletcher contends
that “in support of pluralism, empiricism provides a method for recognizing the
distinctive details of other cultural forms of self-rule. And in support of prag-
matism, it offers a way to gauge the effectiveness of individual problem-solving
attempts: When we apply a democratic remedy, do we see a decrease in hunger,
infant mortality, and other measureable symptoms of popular suffering?”2
Fletcher sees the ancient comedies as a guide we can use to reinforce mod-
ern democracies. He notes that the ancient demokratia as a form of govern-
ment did not simply use the franchise to elect officials but also to gauge the
citizens’ material satisfaction and the public’s “bodily happiness . . . marked
by three core practices, empiricism, problem-based pragmatism, and plu-
ralism” (8). Similarly, ancient comedies also focus on evaluating society’s
218 STU D IES IN AM ERIC AN H U M O R
crises with plots that present problem-solving resolutions. Drawing on new

political and cognitive science studies, Fletcher examines Greek comedy as
a “response to public problems,” describes its influence over time, and traces
the “role of comic forms in encouraging tolerance, collaboration, curiosity,
and other democratic behaviors” (12–13). He then examines the narrative
techniques of ancient comedies to explore the ways in which authors from
the medieval, Renaissance, colonial, and early American eras drew from the
practices of impetuoso, imitatio, indolentia, and quixotic governance. In par-
ticular, he finds that the practice of self-revision is shared by Aristophanes,
Machiavelli, Shakespeare, and Henry Fielding, among others. American
political leaders are also shown to have utilized these techniques, for exam-
ple, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Frederick Douglass. Comic
Democracies is a well-written and accessible interdisciplinary study of the
ways in which ancient comedy provides useful tools to advance modern
democracies globally.
A number of studies focus their analyses on politics and political culture
in the antebellum and Civil War eras. In her essay “‘Anti Societies Are Now All
the Rage’: Jokes, Criticism, and Violence in Response to the Transformation of
American Reform, 1825–1835,” Maartje Janse examines a wide range of satir-
ical responses to the reform movements in the late 1820s and early 1830s. She
notes that the term “anti” was not widely used in American culture until the
late 1820s but became much more prevalent in the 1830s, particularly as part
of the “evangelical revivalism of the Second Great Awakening.”3 What began
as a general moral reform branched into societies that addressed specific
“sins” or moral transgressions, such as anti-Masonic, anti-Sabbath breaking,
anti-Indian removal, antigambling, antidueling, or anti-card-playing societ-
ies. The most significant of these moral anti societies grew into the antislav-
ery movement. In response to what many felt were overarching moralists,
newspapers featured a number of satirical mock anti-societies, such as the
“Anti-poke-your-nose-into-other-people’s-business Society,” “Anti-going-to-
sleep-with-a-candle-burning Society,” or the “Anti-sending-your-children-to-
Church-to-sleep-through-the-service Society” (247, 249, 265). Furthermore,
due to the important role women played in the reform movements, they
became an easy target of satire for anti-reformers and prompted move-
ments for the “Anti-too-tight-lacing Society,” the “Boston Young Married
Women’s Anti-forgetting-to-put-the-pot-on-the-fire-at-11-o’clock Society and
“A-Ladies-anti-ambition-to-figure-in-the-newspaper-under-pretence-of-
religious-or-charitable-purposes-with-no-useful-result-to-the-neglect-of-
your-own-domestic-duties-society” (267, 266). Janse also examines more

serious responses to reform societies, particularly the antitemperance and
anti-abolition societies, and explains how the activities of these groups often
led to mob violence. Janse looks in particular at the ten years between 1825
and 1835 as an especially prolific period for antimovements as patriarchal
elite traditionalists clashed with moral reformers who in turn clashed with
Jacksonian populists. Janse notes that “despite the polarization, Americans
still had a shared discourse and a shared national culture: the discourse and
culture of anti” (282).
Daniel Burge parts company with long held historical assumptions
regarding Americans’ unified commitment to the creed of manifest destiny
and presents American expansion during the period between 1846 and 1858
as a contested ideology that was challenged most notably through humor
and satire. In his essay “Manifest Mirth: The Humorous Critique of Manifest
Destiny, 1846–1858,” Burge examines a wide range of humorous poems,
sketches, and novels published in newspapers, journals, and publishing
houses in this era and identifies four thematic counterarguments to pro-
ponents of manifest destiny: “Those hostile to Manifest Destiny believed it
was the moral equivalent of robbery; an ideology that demagogues put forth
to win votes; only appealed to those who were gullible enough to believe
in politicians; and blasphemous because it assumed that a new revelation
from God gave the continent of North America to the United States.”4 These
themes led to corresponding “character types—the robber, demagogue,
the drunk, and the prophet” (10). The stock character of the robber is typ-
ically depicted as a thief, but one who cannot evade inevitable justice, and
humorists tended to use gallows humor to ridicule this character type. Seba
Smith’s character, Major Jack Downing, is one example of the demagogue
who dismisses the moral implications of territorial expansion in favor of the
possibilities of personal and/or political gains. The most susceptible charac-
ter type to the demagogue’s rhetoric is the drunk. Humorists conflated the
excesses of alcohol abuse with the ambitions for North American expansion
to suggest a lack of control, propriety, and morality. The prophet is the final
character type that Burge identifies, and he notes that authors used humor
to present “the idea that the followers of Manifest Destiny were deluded
radicals—individuals who believed that either a prophetic word had been
spoken to them or who otherwise believed they were tasked with a prophetic
message to deliver to the rest of the world” (295). While Burge points out
that manifest destiny had many adherents, he also notes that historians have
tended to overlook those who challenged this ideology, particularly critics

who used humor and satire to contest its expansionist tenets. Burge thus fills
in a gap in the historical record though a wide range of interesting sources
and his astute analysis of them.
Historian Michael D. Pierson examines an obscure letter written by Union
officer Stephen Spalding in his book Lt. Spalding in Civil War Louisiana: A
Union Officer’s Humor, Privilege, and Ambition. Spalding served as an officer
in Company B of the Eighth Vermont Regiment and wrote a lengthy letter to
his former college roommate James Peck from his post in Algiers, Louisiana
on July 8, 1862. What makes this letter so distinctive and compelling is
Spalding’s use of humor, often rather sarcastic humor, to address topics not
often found in Civil War correspondence. Pierson notes that “our history,
our understanding of who fought the Civil War and how they thought about
their experiences, has been tainted by the fact that letters about drinking
and self-interest, let alone ones about fear or sexual misadventures, have
tended to find their way into people’s fireplaces.”5 Pierson reprints the full
text of Spalding’s letter, and in each chapter, he situates aspects of the letter
in broad historical contexts as well as analyzes it in terms of the limited
biographical information available about Stephen Spalding’s life. After grad-
uating from the University of Vermont, Spalding spent time studying the
law in New York City and in his hometown of Derby, Vermont. In 1861, he
enlisted in the Seventh New York State Militia, and he was promoted to lieu-
tenant of Company B of the Eighth Vermont in spite of questionable train-
ing and preparation. Pierson notes that promotions were often made due to
family wealth and influence rather than merit, which for many Americans,
created the fear that “this was going to be a war of amateurs” (33).
In his letter to Peck, Spalding complains about the Louisiana heat and
humidity and the region’s mosquitoes, flies, alligators, and snakes. His
account documents the boredom (he would not engage in battle for close to
two years), loneliness, homesickness, and depression that plagued him, the
drinking he indulged in, and the death he feared, as well as attitudes that
reflect his views on class, race, gender, and personal ambition. Pierson exam-
ines Spalding’s privileged background and the ways in which the advantages
of class, race, and gender would have shaped his sexist, racist, and hierarchi-
cal worldview. As a conservative northern Democrat, Spalding’s distasteful
joke about abusing his black servant suggests that his racism helped buttress
his sense of superiority, and Pierson examines how such jokes reveal racially
oriented power politics. Spalding also reinforced his sense of superiority
and masculinity through behavior that signified manliness. He bragged

about excessive drinking, sexual encounters with women, most notably
prostitutes, and how much these activities cost him. During one visit to New
Orleans on the Fourth of July, Spalding spent an exorbitant $57.00. When
his company finally saw action, Spalding’s eagerness to distinguish himself,
likely in the hope of a promotion, motivated him to lead the charge, and
he was quickly shot and killed. He was just twenty-three years old. Pierson
concludes the book with the discovery of two additional letters written by
Spalding, one to his father and another to his sister. In stark contrast to the
bawdy, humorous, and uninhibited letter to Peck, the tone of the letters to
his family is respectful and deferential. As Pierson points out, in these let-
ters, “Spalding’s sense of humor vanishes without a trace” (135). The family
letters are also much more representative of Civil War collections and thus
highlight the rare insight Pierson’s examination of the letter to Peck reveals
about class, race, gender, and private forms of humor between men of privi-
lege in mid-nineteenth-century America.
In studies of the early twentieth century, scholars explore the ways in
which humor and satire helped shape the political and cultural environ-
ment. Beth Innocenti and Elizabeth Miller explore how political humorists
design their humor to engage and influence audiences in their essay “The
Persuasive Force of Political Humor.” They use Anna Howard Shaw’s 1915
suffragist speech “The Fundamental Principle of a Republic” to illustrate
their claims that effective political humorists design their work by mak-
ing their intent clear and reliable and that they observe social norms. The
authors provide a brief review of rhetorical theories of humor and note that
one strategy rhetors employ is unification and division, which results in four
functions: “identification (building support by identifying message creators
with their audience)”; “clarification (encapsulating message creators’ views
in memorable forms)”; “enforcement (leveling criticism while maintaining a
degree of identification with the audience)”; and “differentiation (contrast-
ing message creators with opponents, or some views or social groups from
other views or social groups).”6
Innocenti and Miller blend normative pragmatic theory and communica-
tion design theory to demonstrate the persuasive effects of political humor.
They examine Shaw’s use of ridicule to challenge the notion that granting
the vote to women would undermine norms of female modesty, which
enabled her to deflect antisuffragists’ arguments. For example, Shaw recalls
an experience on the campaign trail and notes: “I was followed from place to
place by an anti-suffrage speaker from New Jersey. She was a very agreeable
young woman who had left her husband and home and gone forth to tell
women that their place is at home, that they have not time to vote, and that
they must not go out in public because it is unwomanly” (372). Shaw points
out the hypocrisy of lecturing women to stay at home by leaving home and
claims “they have either abandoned their principle or widened their views”
(372). Shaw’s witty observations demonstrate how she fashions her political
humor to make a responsible case designed to persuade men and women to
support women’s suffrage. By design, political humorists ridicule opponents’
inconsistencies, which functions to motivate audiences to evaluate the issue
seriously rather than simply dismissing it as a joke by making their intent
clear and adhering to accepted social norms.
Another study of grassroots political humor concerns a congressional bill
to provide veterans a bonus in 1936 in spite of the nation’s economic chal-
lenges during the Great Depression. In “‘This thing has ceased to be a joke’:
The Veterans of Future Wars and the Meanings of Political Satire in the 1930s,”
Chris Rasmussen focuses attention on a group of Princeton undergraduates
who created a satiric organization, the Veterans of Future Wars (VFW), and
published their manifesto in the Daily Princetonian. In the manifesto, they
contend that due to the prospect of another European war, as future service-
men, they were entitled to a bonus they could enjoy: “Many will be killed or
wounded in the next war, and hence they, the most deserving, will not get
the full benefit of their country’s gratitude.”7 The manifesto was picked up
by news wires and quickly spread across the country, particularly on col-
lege campuses, and within a few months, membership grew to sixty thou-
sand. The organization also spawned similar political and cultural satiric
groups such as “the Future War Spinsters” for women who were “destined to
remain unwed because their future husbands would be killed in war” (93).
The manifesto also provoked anger from veterans’ groups, college admin-
istrators, and political leaders who questioned VFW members’ masculinity
and dismissed them as cowards and traitors. An attempt to form “the Future
Gold Star Mothers” organization drew an especially vitriolic reaction, and
the idea was quickly abandoned. The VFW eventually lost momentum when
leader Lewis Jefferson Gorin Jr. left Princeton for Harvard Law School, but
as Rasmussen points out, the group’s use of political satire and parody was
a popular method for critiquing militarism and the prospect of another war
in the 1930s, which would “largely vanish from American political discourse
in the 1940s and 1950s” (105). Parody and the “biting satire of militarism”
surged again in the 1960s “as writers, filmmakers, comedians, cartoonists,

and antiwar activists dared to ridicule war and the military brass” (105),
paving the way for contemporary political satire in the work of, for example,
Stephen Colbert, the focus of Elizabeth Benacka’s new book.
In Rhetoric, Humor, and the Public Sphere: From Socrates to Stephen Colbert,
Benacka explores Socrates’s, Aristotle’s, Cicero’s, and Quintilian’s views of
humor as a rhetorical tool, particularly in its use of parody, irony, and satire.
She traces how these theories have been utilized historically and how they
have influenced contemporary culture as well, paying special attention to the
work of Stephen Colbert. These techniques, she contends in chapter 1, enter-
tain, but more importantly, they encourage the engagement of the audience
through the use of, for example, enthymemes that require the audience to
fill in information and thus participate in interpreting the rhetorician’s mes-
sage. This participation leads to a more informed citizenry that is better able
to assess and critique institutions like the media and Congress. In chapter 2,
“Damn Yankees,” Benacka provides a brief overview of “the history and prac-
tice of humor in the United States.”8 She briefly addresses colonial culture
and moves quickly to early American examples, notably Benjamin Franklin’s
particular brand of common sense humor and wit. Her reference to the term
“Yankee,” however, overlooks its history in southern culture, and she tends
to conflate Yankee humor with that of southern humorists, overlooking the
important genre of frontier humor, written predominantly by southerners,
which was popular throughout the nation during the three decades leading
to the Civil War.
In the following three chapters, Benacka addresses various events
attended or manufactured by Stephen Colbert, examining each through
a specific rhetorical lens. She calls on parody to examine Colbert’s com-
ments at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, particularly the
dual nature of the audiences’ reaction to his remarks. Those in attendance
(politicians and reporters) failed to appreciate Colbert’s humorous parody,
but his internet audience was much more receptive to his ridicule of the
media and politicians, which created catharsis for the online audience and
encouraged participatory democracy. Benacka uses the rhetorical trope of
irony to analyze Colbert’s attempt in a 2010 congressional hearing to expose
the injustices of low pay for (often undocumented) immigrant farm labor-
ers as well as to tease out the hypocrisy of congressional leaders engaging
in partisan politics rather than working across the aisle in the interest of
American legal and cultural issues. During his testimony, Colbert suggested
that “a potential solution to the problem of immigrant labor would be to

simply stop eating fruits and vegetables” (84). Throughout his testimony,
Colbert “directed his irony at both political parties”; he ended it by thanking
his audience, adding that he trusted that “both sides” would “work together
on this issue in the best interest of the American people, as you always do”
(89). Many of the attending members of Congress were not amused. In chap-
ter 5, Benacka examines the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling in 2010
and Colbert’s subsequent creation of his satiric super PAC “Americans for a
Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow,” whose goal was to “mock both media and pol-
itics” (99). Benacka stresses that political context was more important than
content to the satirical success of Colbert’s super PAC as well as to its gar-
nering extensive coverage by mainstream media. The segments ultimately
earned Colbert a Peabody Award, and Benacka contends that the popularity
of Colbert’s satiric organization has led to “lessons in civics [that] are vital in
maintaining a healthy democracy” (125). Benacka concludes her book with
a short chapter contrasting the styles between then Republican presidential
candidate Donald Trump and Stephen Colbert, characterizing Trump as an
“insult comic” and Colbert as a more sophisticated rhetorician adept at irony,
satire, and parody (140). Colbert’s style functions, as Benacka notes, discur-
sively to bring “forth individuals united by their concern over the state of the
nation,” and indeed, Colbert is no longer critiquing a candidate but now a
president and for many, concern has given way to panic (144). Benacka ends
by noting the important work satirists perform in articulating the nation’s
issues regarding the health of the democracy.
In a broader application of political humor, in his essay “A Sense of Humor
for Civic Life: Toward a Strong Defense of Humor,” Jonathan P. Rossing
debunks the conventional notion that humor functions to simply enter-
tain or to ridicule and considers the way in which this view tends to down-
play humor’s potential as a tool for motivating engagement in civic life.
Rossing compares a “weak defense” of humor to the “weak defense” binary,
as Richard Lanham terms it, of limiting rhetoric to categories of good or bad.
Rossing notes that in this perspective, “people use good rhetoric virtuously
for just causes; people use bad rhetoric to manipulate, deceive, and flatter.”9
Humor also tends to fall into a similar binary and is often viewed simply
as a tool used for positive or negative ends, but Rossing postulates that
humor has the potential to serve a much more significant role in civic life.
He then presents what he terms “a strong defense of humor” and explains
that like other rhetorics, humor as a tool is creative, playful, and purposeful
and participates in the community’s engagement with knowledge, con-
ceptions of reality, and perspectives that constitute meaning, indeed often
multiple meanings (9). Language games, riddles, puns, and signifying con-
stitute contests of wit and encourage competition and participation and
are often utilized to address rather serious issues as well. Also like rhetoric,
irony and satire are used by humorists to promote “serious public debate,
dissent, and consciousness-raising activities. Such instances not only blend
contest with serious purpose, but they represent ways to find pleasure in
processes of struggle” (12). Rossing broadens the notion of a sense of humor
as more complex than simply being able to understand or create a joke and
contends that
a sense of humor is characterized by ways of thinking and acting that are nec-
essary for responsible participation in civic life. First, a sense of humor should
be understood as an ability to conceive reality as continually under construc-
tion, and thus contingent. . . . Second, a sense of humor means possessing the
ability to overcome fixed categories, to imagine rather than foreclose new and
multiple possibilities. (16)
In his “strong defense of humor,” Rossing presents a compelling case that

distinguishes humor as a vital tool for encouraging sociopolitical commu-
nity engagement that can provoke greater awareness of national matters.
In addition to national concerns, scholars also examine the use of humor
to explore issues of gender and race. Richard Mocarski and Sim Butler
address men’s mental health and cite the Centers for Disease Control to
point out that “men account for 79% of all suicides in the United States,”
depression most often being the cause, and they note that due to cultural
expectations of masculinity, men tend to be far less inclined to seek men-
tal health assistance. In their essay “A Critical, Rhetorical Analysis of Man
Therapy: The Use of Humor to Frame Mental Health as Masculine,” Mocarski
and Butler analyze the Colorado Office of Suicide Prevention’s “man therapy”
campaign and the use of humor to undermine the notion that seeking help is
antithetical to masculinity, particularly what they refer to as hegemonic mas-
culinity, an extreme form of the strong, unemotional, protector and provider
ideal. They focus on an online program, mantherapy.org, featuring a ficti-
tious therapist, Dr. Rich Mahogany, and his virtual office space decorated
with absurdly exaggerated signs of manliness, such as sports trophies and

paraphernalia, taxidermied animals and heads mounted on the wall, leather
furniture, and pipes. Mocarski and Butler contend that “the office creates a
space where men are supposed to identify with the trappings of masculin-
ity” and that the therapist “presents himself as someone who his audience
should feel comfortable talking to and with about their problems.”10 Viewers
are invited to take a quiz; one question, for example, asks “Did you know that
koalas sleep more than 18 hours a day? Lazy little bastards. Tell me about
your sleep habits” (136). The disarming question encourages respondents
to disclose problems without the use of more clinical terms like insomnia
and sleep deprivation. These questions, however, pose a risk for participants
who do not identify with specific questions related to “sports, hunting, or
heterosexuality,” and visitors are therefore vulnerable to being “systemati-
cally abjected by the site” (137). This type of humor can inadvertently reify
hegemonic masculinity and runs the risk of further marginalizing visitors
the website is designed to help. Mocarksi and Butler’s study of hegemonic
masculinity and the risky use of humor to satirize extreme gender ideals
in order to encourage men to seek mental health advice demonstrates the
potential of the man therapy campaign to undermine its own goals, yet their
study also sheds a glaring light on the high male suicide rate in the United
States and the need for further work to combat this insidious problem.
Racial discourse and audience reaction is the focus of Aaryn L. Green
and Annulla Linders’s examination of the stand-up comedy of Chris Rock
and Dave Chappelle in their essay “The Impact of Comedy on Racial and
Ethnic Discourse.” They utilize black and white focus groups to explore sim-
ilarities and differences in the ways that comedy impacts audiences’ under-
standing or misunderstanding of racial issues, particularly in the context of
an alleged colorblind society. They found that all participants considered
the subject of race in comedy to have the potential to entertain, amuse, and
educate and that in particular they felt more comfortable laughing at racial
humor delivered by professional comedians in a professional setting, for
example, a comedy club, than in more casual settings, which had the poten-
tial to increase racial tensions. Green and Linders note that white partici-
pants concerned with promoting greater racial awareness and equity were
apprehensive about the humorous use of stereotypes as a way to under-
mine negative images and feared that laughing at race-based jokes could be
regarded as racist, particularly in a mixed-race setting. Black participants,
on the other hand, worried that “they might be implicated if they shared a
laugh with whites who may not know enough to understand the meaning
and purpose of the stereotype.”11 Green and Linders also found consensus
that ethnic stand-up comedy has the potential to educate audiences about
racial issues in a culture that perpetuates the notion of a colorblind society.
Their study indicates “a need for sociological research to consider the ways
in which racial and ethnic humor impacts individual dealings of race as well
as how it reflects structural framings of race,” particularly in more broad
forms of media and popular culture (264). Their study of racial humor and
the different perceptions and interpretations of white and black participants
also demonstrates how powerful, if often fraught, humor can be as a weapon
in undermining negative racial stereotypes and as a tool in debunking the
myth of a colorblind society.
Jonathan P. Rossing also tackles the postrace myth in his essay
“Emancipatory Racial Humor as Critical Public Pedagogy: Subverting
Hegemonic Racism.” Drawing on the work of Trevor Noah, Jon Stewart, Dave
Chappelle, Wanda Sykes, Hari Kondabolu, Richard Pryor, Keegan-Michael
Key, and Jordan Peele, Rossing explains that these comedians use an “eman-
cipatory racial humor” as a pedagogical tool to expose how dominant narra-
tives reinforce racial hegemony. This liberated form of racial humor provides
counternarratives, creates community, and undermines the specious notion
of a postracial society, which discounts issues of racial oppression and social
and political injustice. Rossing explains that he uses the term “emancipa-
tory racial humor” to describe these comic discourses “because it brings to
the forefront perspectives and knowledge that challenges dominant reali-
ties; therefore, it bears the potential for promoting critical questioning and
reflection about racial oppression,” which in turn may transform audiences’
perspectives and belief systems.12 The counternarratives that this humor
produces, Rossing argues, have three pedagogical functions:
First, revealing the “character of the oppression,” critical humor exposes dom-
inant meaning-making practices that legitimize existing power relations as
common sense. Second, counterhegemonic racial humor offers defiant “coun-
teraction to oppression” by providing a forum where counternarratives might
gain a hearing. Third, emancipatory racial humor features cunning, inventive
retaliation by interrogating the assumptive, naturalized racial constructions,
particularly manifestations of Whiteness. (620)
Rossing notes that networks like Comedy Central and online outlets serve
as particularly important vehicles for the pedagogy of emancipatory humor-
ists to address issues such as disparities between news coverage regarding
black and white children either victimized by or accused of crimes, personal
experiences with racial profiling and police brutality, and the myriad ways in
which whiteness is presented as natural, proper, and safe while blackness is
understood to signify criminality, suspicion, and danger. Rossing also notes
that it is important for scholars, humorists, and educators to work together
in examining emancipatory racial humor to promote further work in this
crucially important field.
Religious humor, as Beretta E. Smith-Shomade points out, plays an import-
ant role in the history and culture of the black church. In her spirited essay
“‘Don’t play with God!’ Black Church, Play, and Possibilities,” she notes that
while the black church is not homogeneous, it has played a central role as an
institution in the lives of African Americans and is often a featured subject
of black humorists. Smith-Shomade draws on theories of superiority, incon-
gruity, and parody to demonstrate the ways in which humor is used to expose
religious hypocrisy, express humanity, and to provide cathartic release. She
examines how vehicles as divergent as “Issa Rae’s Mis-Adventures of Awkward
Black Girl web series, entertainer Rickey Smiley, and the Preachers of LA real-
ity television series mix black religiosity and humor. These pop cultural forms
and forums serve as a venue for Black audiences to not only see themselves
enacted religiously, but also to enjoy the foibles, fallacies, contributions, and
even grace of Black religious ways of being.”13 In Awkward Black Girl, the
character Sister Mary’s promiscuous past, revealing clothing, and sexual lan-
guage conflicts with her evangelical, proselytizing posture to reveal the depth
of her hypocrisy, particularly when she chastises the character J for having
sex outside of marriage. Entertainer Rickey Smiley draws from black church
experiences and uses parody, incongruity, and paradox in radio programs,
interviews, and in his impression of a black church lady to entertain and
celebrate black church traditions. The reality show Preachers of LA features
wealthy megaministers who manage lucrative megachurches, highlighting
details of their dual roles as pastors and highly successful business men. The
show also delves into their personal lives, particularly with their spouses, to
explore the connection between their spiritual and sexual lives. The show
elicited controversy, but as Smith-Shomade points out, “what makes this
program so compelling, so humorous, beyond the opening of private spaces
for public consumption and the (excessive) accouterments [sic] of success as

demonstrated by these men of God, is the sex talk,” which as Smith-Shomade
notes is what humanizes these “21st-century pastorpreneurs” (332–33). She
adds that humor in church or about church serves to “alleviate religious anx-
iety” (334) and functions as a challenge to overly rigid notions of respectabil-
ity. Ultimately, “the job of the black church is found not only in the bosom of
Jesus but also in the belly laugh of its members and outliers” (335).
Media Studies
The section on media studies includes works produced for the stage, cin-
ema, television, and internet and opens with an article that undertakes an
analysis of a popular term in the mid-nineteenth century. Christine Cooper-
Rompato focuses her attention on a neologism in the title of her essay “The
Basiliconthaumaturgist: Neologism, Magic, and Mormonism.” Examining
the unusual term in the context of popular theater performances, Cooper-
Rompato devotes her attention to a lecture satirizing Mormons by American
humorist Charles Farrar Browne, who wrote under the pseudonym Artemus
Ward. Browne as Artemus Ward capitalized on Americans’ keen interest in
the culture of the newly established Mormon church, and in particular, the
practice of polygamy.
How men were able to manage multiple wives was an especially intrigu-
ing issue and the source of a great deal of humorous commentary. Artemus
Ward tells the story of his meeting Brigham Young and the president
of the church, Mr. Kimball, whose ten wives went walking one afternoon
with a young man. In a fit of jealousy over what he regarded as infidelity,
Mr. Kimball shot himself. In his lecture, Artemus Ward notes that “the doc-
tor who attended him−a very scientific man−informed me that the bullet
entered the inner parallelogram of his diaphragmatic thorax, superinducing
membranous hemorrhage in the outer cuticle of his basiliconthaumaturgist.
It killed him. I should have thought it would.”14 In an era besieged by quacks,
con men, conjurers, sham politicians, spiritualists, and magicians, Ward
employs the neologism “basiliconthaumaturgist” to ridicule language that
“sounds impressive but is actually utter nonsense” (237). Cooper-Rompato
notes that she was unable to locate the term in a wide range of dictionaries
but that the word is “a combination of the Greek ‘Basilikon,’ or royal, and
‘thaumaturist,’ or miracle worker” (238). The term was popular on the the-
ater circuit and was often adapted by performers to suit the purposes of
their routines. The term fell out of usage by the late nineteenth century but
made a few brief appearances in the 1920s. By 1929, however, “the word was
divorced from its association with Mormon polygamy” (240).
By the early twentieth century, the nascent film industry had begun to
draw audiences away from the theater, and in order to compete, stage per-
formances developed into highly elaborate productions. In his lively study
The Shuberts and Their Passing Shows: The Untold Tale of Ziegfeld’s Rivals,
Jonas Westover examines brothers Lee and J. J. Shuberts’ Broadway musi-
cal revue The Passing Show, a popular production during the late 1910s and
early 1920s and the main rival of Ziegfeld’s Follies. In his foreword to the
book, Geoffrey Block explains that the “popular revue genre from the 1890s
to about 1930 featured skits, songs, dances, stylish sets, and female pul-
chritude within a looser narrative, albeit often constructed within a unified
thematic framework.”15 The Passing Show premiered in 1912 at Broadway’s
Winter Garden Theatre, and each year, the brothers created a new version,
“featuring new musical styles, the latest dance fads, and some of the biggest
stars of the day” (2). Westover dedicates three of the book’s nine chapters to
the wide range of individuals involved in putting this complex production
together, including the creative forces of the writers, producers, composers,
lyricists, choreographers, and designers who worked long hours behind the
scenes to plan and organize the production. The show’s comediennes and
comedians are the focus of chapter 2, “A Matchless Mélange of Mirth and
Melody,” and Westover highlights many comedy teams, duos, and solo art-
ists who were enormously popular in their day but who have largely been
lost to posterity. The comedy duo of Eugene and Willie Howard is one such
example, and Westover highlights their importance in The Passing Show and
their relationship with the Shuberts. Subsequent chapters examine the tal-
ent and appeal of the men and women who made up the chorus, choreogra-
phers, dancers, and popular composers. Musical comedy was a central draw
for the revues and featured parodies of popular plays and operas as well
as musical spoofs and burlesques. The final chapters focus on the competi-
tive and often contentious nature of the Shubert brothers’ relationship with
their rival Florenz Ziegfeld, and after his death, their involvement with pre-
serving his legacy. For readers interested in the entertainment world of New
York City in the late 1910s and early 1920s, particularly musical theater and
Broadway revues, this book offers insightful cultural analysis and highlights
many long forgotten stars of the era.
Robert S. Bader examines the careers of the highly celebrated Marx
Brothers, but unlike other studies of this comedy team, his Four of the Three
Musketeers: The Marx Brothers on Stage considers the stage careers that pre-
ceded their rise into international fame through their work in Hollywood.
Bader also examines the personal lives in the early years of brothers Julius,
Adolph, Leonard, and Herbert Marx, better known by their stage names as
Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo. Although there are a number of infor-
mative biographies and autobiographies about the Marx brothers as well as
a vast amount of scholarship analyzing their films, much less attention has
been devoted their stage careers on the vaudeville circuit and Broadway,
which helped them polish their routines and prepare them for Hollywood.
Their mother and manager, Minnie Marx, prodded her sons into show
business, particularly a reluctant Zeppo as a way to curb his enthusiasm
for trouble, and the brothers traveled the vaudeville circuit throughout
the United States and Canada from 1905 through the 1940s. What began
as a singing act soon transformed into a highly popular comedy routine,
and Bader’s exhaustive research traces the brothers’ formative years, the
creation of their routines, difficulties with powerful theater managers and
owners (who could make or break careers), their romantic lives, and the
road that led them to Broadway and on to Hollywood. The group performed
as a trio, a quartet, and occasionally as a quintet, but Milton, known onstage
as Gummo, lacked his brothers’ interest in show business, and before he
could enlist with the air force, he was drafted into the army. Bader covers
how the brothers got their stage names, the rumors and myths surround-
ing the performers (many perpetuated by the brothers themselves), as well
as the decline of vaudeville and the rise of Hollywood that would propel
the brothers into international fame. Bader also provides an extensive
appendix chronicling their individual and collective stage performances
from 1905 through 1945. Four of the Three Musketeers makes a significant
contribution to understanding one of the most important comedy teams in
American stage and film history, and for enthusiasts of the Marx Brothers,
the book is essential reading.
The stage has typically offered a fairly open space for stand-up perform-
ers to challenge the boundaries of humor, and in “Raunch and Redress:
Interrogating Pleasure in Black Women’s Stand-up Comedy,” Jessyka Finley
analyzes the careers of 1970s comedienne LaWanda Page and a number of

black women comediennes during the black comedy boom of the 1990s
and demonstrates the important role that explicit sex talk had in the per-
formances of Luenell, Adele Givens, Simply Marvelous, Sheryl Underwood,
Hope Flood, Yvette Wilson, and others. While Page’s explicit sexual references
and narratives were limited to comedy clubs and recorded performances,
the explosion of hip-hop culture in the 1990s shifted the environment of
stand-up comedy and pop culture. The ethos of “thug life” celebrated in rap
reflected urban, working-class street life and hailed antiestablishment prac-
tices through exaggerated images of sexuality, masculinity, materialism,
and danger, which sparked the need for “a new politics of black women’s
sexuality that embraces sexual desire ‘as the context for rebellion from the
beginning’” rather than treating it as an afterthought and that sees “invest-
ment in pleasure” as part of a “feminist politics of redress.”16 Finley adds
that explicit sex talk also creates powerful forms of agency and liberation
by challenging traditional discourses of “ladyhood” and conservative patri-
archal sexual norms and expectations. The black comediennes examined in
this essay mock traditional sexual and gender norms by transgressing cul-
tural taboos as a form of redress, making use of hyperbolic sexual imagery
and telling stories of explicit sexual adventures, and almost nothing is off
limits. Comediennes talk about sexual desire, oral sex, pleasure, mastur-
bation, rough sex, and dirty sex. These performances function to empower
women and undermine middle-class codes of respectability. In this way,
“black women comics transformed how black womanhood and black sexu-
ality were understood in the popular imagination, engaging in self-making
practices that audaciously reimagined the terms in which ‘ladyhood’ could
be understood” (794). Finley demonstrates the important ways in which the
erotic dimension of black women’s humor helped transform the cultural
environment of the 1990s.
Another popular forum for humor developed through one-man per-
formances, and the comic devices used to navigate the duality of self on
stage by performers engaged in humorous monologues is the focus of
Miriam Chirico’s article. Chirico examines the performances of David
Sedaris in “Santaland Diaries” (1998), John Leguizamo in Freak (1998), and
Spalding Gray in Swimming to Cambodia (1985) in her essay “Performed
Authenticity: Narrating the Self in the Comic Monologues of David Sedaris,
John Leguizamo, and Spalding Gray.” Chirico notes that David Sedaris uses
self-deprecation as a comic tool to reveal a private self in conflict with the

public performance required by his job as an elf in Macy’s Santaland. His
shame as an out-of-work actor that compelled him to take what he considers
a demeaning job is accompanied by his sharing of his personal views about
the job, the store’s customers, and his Santaland colleagues. His cynicism
regarding the commercialization and exploitation of the holiday by Macy’s
is evident by the name he adopts for his character, Crumpet, and he con-
fesses to his audience a desire to kill obnoxious customers. Chirico notes
that this type of self-deprecating confessional style functions to elevate
his status with the audience. Sedaris’s cynicism eventually gives way to a
deeper, authentic self after he learns to adopt a more sincere perspective on
the holiday: “He both discovers and reveals to the audience his recognition
of himself as a good person, neither inferior nor superior to the shoppers, but
one with them.”17 As a young Latino, John Leguizamo draws on mimicry to
suggest a split between an authentic self and a variety of masks he utilized
in his attempts to assimilate into mainstream American culture. Freak is
structured through eleven vignettes in which Leguizamo tells a series of sto-
ries about often failed attempts to fit in and “demonstrates how he adjusted
his identity to the expectations and behaviors of culturally different others”
(33). Leguizamo ends the monologue by dropping the performative mask
that he uses to expose hypocrisy and racism and speaks directly to the audi-
ence about his long struggle to find his authentic self. While Sedaris and
Leguizamo engage in a performative quest for an authentic self, Spalding
Gray’s monologue about his role as a U.S. ambassador’s aide in the film The
Killing Fields (1983) does not lead to “the emergence of an authentic self; he
succeeds only in finding a ‘straw boy’−his symbolic term for a mask, or a self
in effigy” (37). Chirico notes that Gray’s role in the film exposes his igno-
rance of American history, which positions him in the paradoxical role of the
ignorant American who simultaneously stands outside that role to ironically
critique the image using self-mockery. This functions as “an apt corollary to
the astounding obliviousness America showed in withdrawing from a coun-
try that was about to have two million of its citizens killed by the Khmer
Rogue” (38). As an actor, Gray is keenly aware of identity as a social construc-
tion, and his examination of people and roles, as well as his own life, reveals
his use of “irony as both a rhetorical and dramatic device to enact authenti-
cally the self-consciousness and isolation of living behind a mask” (42). In
the three performances addressed in Chirico’s essay, the performers share
perilous and often hilarious life stories in navigating between an authentic

self and a public self, and they use self-deprecatory humor, mimicry, or irony
to expose the artificial nature of public masks in order to find and reveal to
the audience an authentic self. The audience “laughs not in mockery, but in
the relief at the loss of pretense” and in “the joyful achievement of integrity
and self-unity as the basis for humor” (43).
In the early years of the new film industry, as movies began to eclipse the
theater as a popular form of entertainment, a host of new stars emerged in
the silent-film era. In his book She Could be Chaplin! The Comedic Brilliance
of Alice Howell, film historian Anthony Slide reviews the life and career of
silent film comedienne Alice Howell. Slide identifies a number of scholarly
studies of the silent-film era yet notes there is little mention of Howell in
these works. Slide’s book fills in an important gap not only for the era of
slapstick comedy but in the field of feminist recovery work as well. Although
many of Howell’s female comic peers drew from their unconventional
appearances to exaggerate their humor, Howell tended to camouflage her
conventional beauty under a pile of disheveled hair, heavy stage makeup,
and ill-fitting clothing in her depiction of, most often, the role of a servant or
scrub lady. Her humor derived from her timing, physicality, and expressive
face, and unlike her female peers, she was, as a review from 1917 quoted
by Slides notes, “one of the few performers totally unafraid to take all the
bumps and thumps that make up the life of a slapstick performer.”18 Slide
also differentiates Howell from other actresses who took both comedic and
dramatic roles and notes that Howell “was strictly a comedienne” (6). Slide
provides chapters detailing Howell’s early years, her introduction to film as
well as her passion for the real estate business, her relationships with star and
director Charlie Chaplin and other costars, and the end of her film career.
The volume includes insightful interviews with Yvonne Stevens, Howell’s
daughter with whom she maintained an important relationship, and a fore-
word written by Alice Howell’s grandson, George Stevens Jr., whose father,
Yvonne’s husband, was George Stevens, one of Hollywood’s most acclaimed
movie directors. She Could be Chaplin! pays homage to an important but
largely overlooked figure in the world of silent slapstick comedy in an era
dominated by male stars and directors, men who depended on the hilarious
performances of women like Howell to round out their films. This book is
a refreshing reminder of the important contributions women made to the
entertainment industry of the 1910s and 1920s.
While Hollywood could be an unwelcoming environment for women in

the early twentieth century, African American performers faced the addi-
tional hurdles of wide-ranging discrimination and a paucity of limited roles.
Miriam J. Petty examines the careful balance between the personal and
professional lives of four black actors and actresses working in Hollywood
during the Jim Crow era in her engaging book Stealing the Show: African
American Performers and Audiences in 1930s Hollywood. Petty begins the
project by noting a tale common in African American folklore and literature
known as “stealing the shoat,” the story of a hungry slave who when con-
fronted by his master for stealing a pig, as Lawrence Levine notes, “mock-
ingly rationalizes his act by arguing that since both the animal and the slave
were the master’s possessions nothing was lost,” or who claims, as Toni
Morrison’s Sixo does, that his act was not theft but rather “improving” the
master’s property.19 Petty uses the anecdote to serve as a metaphor for her
title Stealing the Show, explaining that in the 1930s, the menial, domestic,
and servile roles available to black performers nonetheless provided oppor-
tunities to “steal the show” with compelling performances. At the same time,
she notes that
however successful such performances may have been in increasing a single

actor’s visibility, or in engaging Black audiences in celebration or critique, they
ultimately served primarily to “improve the property” of the Hollywood studios
for which these performers worked. . . . Thus, “stealing the shoat” acts as a kind
of shadow figuration for “stealing the show”—it is always there, undermining
the phrase’s celebratory connotations and reminding one of the specific social,
political, cultural, and historical terms of Black cinematic performance. (5)
Petty examines the different responses of the media and black and white
audiences to black performers. While ostensibly praising black performances,
white journalists tended to reinforce racist ideology, whereas the coverage in
African American outlets often made an important distinction between the
performance and the performer, typically condemning the limitations of the
stereotypical roles available to black performers while simultaneously prais-
ing the performer’s acting ability and talent. In chapter 1, Petty examines the
complexities of life as an actress for Hattie McDaniel and looks in particular
at several scene-stealing moments in McDaniel’s Academy Award–winning
performance in Gone with the Wind in the context of black and white women
reformers’ views of the iconography of black womanhood. Bill “Bojangles”

Robinson is the focus of chapter 2, and while often associated with his costar
Shirley Temple, Petty focuses primarily on Robinson’s special appeal and
influence with young black moviegoers. The stars of Imitation of Life, Louise
Beavers and Fredi Washington are examined in chapter 3, and Petty notes
that the film and the performances indicate a shift between notions of the
Old Negro and of the New Negro and what these concepts meant to black
audiences. In chapter 4, Petty teases out the complexities of the toll Lincoln
Perry’s popular character, Stepin Fetchit, took on his personal life and the
ways in which Perry was victimized by Hollywood’s exploitative publicity
machine. Through the metaphor of “stealing the shoat,” Petty provides an
absorbing examination of the cultural, professional, and social perils faced
by black performers and audiences in 1930s Hollywood in her meticulously
researched and highly informative study.
Other stars emerged from the tradition of slapstick comedy films popular
in the early twentieth century, and the genre significantly influenced several
modern authors. In his book Slapstick Modernism: Chaplin to Kerouac to Iggy
Pop, William Solomon explores the aesthetic and thematic impact of comic
films on American authors ranging from the 1920s through the 1960s. He
describes his book as
a study of a process of cultural transformation that, beginning in the early

decades of the twentieth century, led to the rise after World War II of the phe-
nomenon I call slapstick modernism. Manifesting itself in literature, (under-
ground) film, and popular music, the rise of slapstick modernism signaled the
coalescence in cultural practice of the artistic experimentation associated with
high modernism and the socially disruptive lunacy linked to the comic film
genre.20
Solomon examines films starring the Keystone Kops, Mabel Normand, Fatty
Arbuckle, and Charlie Chaplin and explores their influence in the work of
William Carlos Williams, D. H. Lawrence, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Kurt
Vonnegut, and others, demonstrating the ways in which slapstick humor
contributed to various countercultural discourses. The book is organized
chronologically into three parts. Part 1 contains three chapters examining art
and comic film in the mechanical transportation age, the poetics of John Dos
Passos, the comedy of silent-screen producer and actor Harold Lloyd, and
the appeal of childish and immature behavior in silent film. Part 2 includes
chapters that analyze the slapstick modernism of Depression-era authors
Louis-Ferdinand Celine and Witold Gombrowicz, and Walter Benjamin’s
work on slapstick film and modernist poetry. In Part 3, Solomon explores
slapstick modernism in the 1950s and 1960s in the countercultural work of
Jack Kerouac and Joseph Heller. Slapstick Modernism uses a fresh and inno-
vative methodology to examine the ways comic films influenced the exper-
imental principles of artists and thinkers from the high modernism of the
early 1920s through the Beat generation.
Cinematic treatments of gender and sexual identity are the issues
explored in Victoria Kronz’s article “Women with Beards and Men in Frocks:
Gender Nonconformity in Modern American Film,” in which she examines
depictions of gender nonconformity in thirty-six American films released
between 2001 and 2011. Kronz points out that, notwithstanding a vast
amount of research demonstrating that the traditional binary of male and
female does not do justice to the complexity of gender and sexual identity,
most Americans still see gender in this simplistic way, and American films
tend to reinforce this binary. She draws on feminist research regarding the
definition of gender, gender performance, and gender policing in her anal-
ysis of mainstream and independent films with at least one nonconforming
character. She makes the distinction between sex as a biological factor and
gender as a cultural construction, as well as a performative category, and
notes that “gender nonconformity means behavior that does not fit what is
expected in terms of the gender binary.”21 She focuses her analysis on seven
aspects: the kind of transgression, the gender, race, class, and appearance of
the character, the purpose of the character in the plot, and the relationship
of the character with other characters (91). Kronz notes that over half of the
films she studied are labeled as comedies and that the most common gen-
der transgression was male cross-dressing for the purpose of deceiving other
characters, typically at the expense of femininity. She claims that this type of
humor tends to reinforce traditional gender norms and is more commonly
featured in mainstream films than in independent films, which are more
likely to depict characters seriously exploring gender identity issues. Kronz
found that most of the transgressions were from male to female and that the
characters were predominantly white and middle class, and she asserts that
“this result does not paint a positive image of how gender nonconformity
is portrayed in films and may reflect or show how individuals view gender
nonconformity” (106). However, she also notes that her study serves as a
starting point for continued research in how films and other forms of media
can broaden our understanding of the ways in which gender conformity and
nonconformity is systemized by the entertainment world.
Although films provide a useful index by which to gauge Americans’
shifting perspectives regarding race, gender, politics, and culture, television
programs also reflect changing attitudes. Raúl Peréz notes that the spirit
of revolution that ignited the civil rights movement led to vast changes in
Americans’ understanding of comedy and humor, particularly changes in
what was considered appropriate or offensive. In “Brownface Minstrelsy:
‘José Jiménez,’ the Civil Rights Movement, and the Legacy of Racist Comedy,”
Peréz uses comedian Bill Dana’s character José Jiménez to explore the
decline of negative images of African Americans during the civil rights era
and the rise of Latinx caricatures. Peréz draws from superiority, incongruity,
and relief theories of humor to suggest that caricatures work to reinforce the
assumption of white superiority inherent in racist jokes. They create a sense
of solidarity among Anglo-Americans against a stereotyped “other,” which
functions to marginalize nonwhites. In the black minstrel tradition, buffoon-
ish and dehumanizing stereotypes that performers enacted by blackening
their faces and engaging in “Negro dialect, song, and dance,” as well as mal-
apropisms, perpetuated the notion “that blacks were inferior, ill-equipped
for civilization, and content with slavery.”22 African American political and
civil rights leaders and groups condemned these representations as racist
and demeaning, and by the early 1960s, they began to disappear from radio
and television shows. Yet in the same period, ridicule of Latinx Americans
was on the rise, and as Peréz points out, paralleled black minstrelsy in many
ways. Like black minstrels, Latinos were depicted as “‘child-like’ and ‘unfit
for civilization,’” and common stereotypes portrayed Latinos as “criminal,
unintelligent, un-assimilable, and not-American” (46–47). Peréz explains
that Hollywood perpetuated six recurring anti-Latino stereotypes: “el ban-
dido, the harlot, the male buffoon, the female clown, the Latin lover, and
the dark lady” (46). While black and brown minstrelsy share many features
and themes in common, one important difference is that comedians like Bill
Dana did not darken their skin while performing “brownface minstrelsy.”
The most important parallel, however, between these entertainment genres
is, as Peréz notes, the distortion of language that was utilized to ridicule
nonwhites. Peréz explores news articles, audio and visual media, and oral
histories related to Bill Dana to examine the context that led to the rise and
subsequent fall of his Latino spoof. He points out that in the 1960s, Latinos
made up only 4 percent of the U.S. population and were therefore an easy
target for white ridicule. However, Dana’s depiction drew a strong reaction
from the Latinx community. Dana responded defensively, claiming that he
had many Latinx friends and supporters, in an “effort to legitimize his por-
trayal of Latinos to quell opposition to the character, appease the critics, and
make the character acceptable to a predominantly white audience during a
period of increasing racial contestation” (54). During the wave of protests,
marches, and sit-ins for racial equality, Dana’s justifications, as well as the
television show featuring José Jiménez, which lasted only a brief year and a
half, were destined to fall on deaf ears. Peréz points out that this type of racial
ridicule is now considered bad taste, yet he sounds the alarm regarding the
rise of a new type of postmodern minstrelsy in the work of contemporary
comedians who employ “a wide range of ethnic and racial stereotypes, dia-
lects and insults” (62). Peréz cautions that “the re-emergence of conventional
and novel racialized depictions of Latinos and other non-whites, by white
and non-white comedians, also contributes to strengthening a ‘white racial
frame’ in an ostensibly ‘color-blind’ society.’ Understanding this process
makes visible an “‘invisible grammar’ and humor” of domination (62). In
other words, as Peréz’s valuable study so aptly demonstrates, postmodern
minstrelsy is simply no laughing matter.
Contemporary television programs elicited a number of interesting inqui-
ries in 2016, and Jennifer Keishin Armstrong explores the creative impe-
tus and seemingly infinite afterlife of the series Seinfeld in her New York
Times bestseller Seinfeldia: How a Show About Nothing Changed Everything.
Armstrong opens the book by describing a Seinfeld-themed baseball game in
2014, sixteen years after the end of the show, attended by superfans dressed
like their favorite characters who celebrated Festivus, handed out Vandelay
business cards, and reenacted Elaine’s “Can you spare a square” dilemma
in, according to Armstrong, “a special dimension of existence, somewhere
between the show itself and real life, that I’ve come to call ‘Seinfeldia.’”23
Armstrong describes the aimless banter between stand-up comedians Jerry
Seinfeld and Larry David one evening in 1988 at an Upper East Side deli that
led to the idea of a TV sitcom about, according to Seinfeld, “two guys talking”
(9). Armstrong reviews the comedians’ careers leading up to the breakthrough
show and the meetings with executives that helped form what was in the early
stages called The Seinfeld Chronicles. “The Players” chapter introduces the
actors and comedians who would eventually constitute the main cast mem-
bers, many of whom were based on real people with plots drawn from real life
events, particularly Larry David’s fraught existence. Executives were mildly
impressed with the pilot and offered David and Seinfeld a four-episode deal.
Thinking this was as far as the project would go, David was content to “make
his twenty-five grand and move on” (19). In chapters that cover the ins and
outs of the network negotiations, production, writers, and audience recep-
tion, Armstrong demonstrates how many of the most important roles were
given to people with little to no experience other than a hasty and success-
ful pitch regarding an awkward or amusing life experience. Personal anec-
dotes became memorable episodes like “The Jacket,” “The Parking Garage,”
and “The Rye,” which attracted a cult-like following, particularly after the
show was moved to the coveted Thursday night lineup and “its ratings rose
by 57 percent” (54, 77, 84). In the chapter “The Bizarros,” Armstrong elabo-
rates on many of the show’s characters based on real people or at least their
names. “Crazy” Joe Davola emerged as the result of David greeting Davola:
“Joe Davola, Joe Davola, Joe Davola, Joe Davola,” to which Davola responded:
“What the fuck are you doing, Larry?” (107). J. Peterman is based on John
Peterman, owner of a clothing catalogue company in Kentucky, and Festivus
grew from the stories of writer Dan O’Keefe about his father’s invention of a
rebellious holiday “built around an annual ‘airing of grievances’” (119). The
show maintained its freshness by purging most of its writing staff every year,
which seems rather heartless, but many of the writers were fairly inexperi-
enced when they arrived in the Seinfeld offices and after leaving, they were
able to parlay their experiences writing for a hit show into lucrative contracts
with other networks and sitcoms. Further, in spite of the constant turnover
of writers and wide array of guest spots, one golden rule was consistently
followed throughout the tenure of the show, which was Larry David’s unique
caveat: “No hugging, no learning” (61).
After the show ended in its ninth season in 1998 with its highly anticipated
yet dissatisfying finale, the cast was given the opportunity to reunite for a
“do-over” for Larry David’s show Curb Your Enthusiasm. Reality, hyperreality,
and surreality merge into a dizzying dimension in the episode created on
the set of a set of an earlier TV production that brings the cast together to
work on a pseudo-reunion that left Seinfeld fans, disappointed by the orig-
inal finale, swooning with gratitude. This retake was what the finale should
have achieved the first time. The final chapters of the book examine the
afterlife of the show through syndication, social media, online fact pages, and
careers built out of connections to the show, such as the mayor of Seinfeldia
Kenny Kramer, the inspiration for the character Cosmo Kramer, and “Soup
Nazi” actor Larry Thomas. Armstrong also addresses the difficulty the cast’s
actors had in breaking free from their association with their characters in her
chapter “The Legend of the Curse.” Keishin Armstrong’s Seinfeldia is as witty,
smart, and entertaining as the TV show she documents and offers Seinfeld
devotees yet another layer in the multidimensional world of Seinfeldia.
Silas Kaine Ezell also turns his attention to the small screen in his book
Humor and Satire on Contemporary Television: Animation and the American
Joke, in which he examines the influence of earlier humorists on the genre of
animated television programs The Simpsons, South Park, Family Guy, King of
the Hill, Daria, American Dad!, The Boondocks, The PJs, and Futurama. Ezell
frames his main questions in reference to aspects of “the Great American
Joke,” defined as “the incongruity between the rhetoric that promises equal-
ity, wealth, and prosperity in American culture and the failure of America
to fulfill those promises.”24 Humorists have consistently employed tropes
such as irony and incongruity to critique religion, politics, economics, the
American dream, and American exceptionalism since the era of the early
republic. Ezell examines the ways in which animated programs draw from
past influences to carry these critiques into the postmodern era. In his first
chapter, Ezell maps out common American humor tropes and provides an
overview of the writers, characters, and air dates of the programs he ana-
lyzes. In chapter 2, examining the influence that the genre of Southwest
humor had on animated humor, Ezell contends that both traditions “empha-
size divisive partisan political conflicts, market economy forces, and religion
as primary sources of humor in American life. To critique these conflicts,
both movements rely on unique settings that expose the incongruity
between American ideals and the realities of American life” (13). Ezell draws
on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque, particularly the language
of the carnival, to demonstrate the ways in which Southwest humorists and
animated programs use setting and episodic structure to expose the absur-
dities and ideological contradictions of life in villages and the marketplace
on the frontier for the Southwest humorists and life in modern American
suburbs for the characters of South Park, The Boondocks, Family Guy, and
The Simpsons.
National tragedies like 9/11 and Katrina are the focus of chapter 3,
“No Laughing Matter: The Relationship Between American Humor and
American Collective Memory.” Ezell notes that while tragic events help
shape America’s collective memory, humor has been used as a tool to
relieve tensions in the aftermath of national distress. Ezell notes the ways
in which Mark Twain, E. L. Doctorow, Kurt Vonnegut, and Ishmael Reed
use satire and irony to critique slavery, racism, oppression, war, and social
injustice, as well as how they use humor “as a salve” for the injuries caused
by them (49). The programs South Park, The Simpsons, Family Guy, and The
Boondocks similarly employ “playfully ironic, often irreverent humor” to
address slavery, anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and Vietnam, yet not with-
out the significant risk of offending audiences or failing to promote relief
(50). A similar risk is identified in chapter 4 in Ezell’s analysis of the dual
function of African American humor in critiquing both white culture and
issues within the African American community. Rudolph Fisher, Richard
Pryor, Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle and others, comic artists who set the
stage for the controversial humor of The PJs and The Boondocks and their
exposure of new forms of racism in an ostensibly postracial era, take a par-
ticular gamble in using stereotypes as a tool of satire. In chapter 5, Ezell
examines the postmodern methods that “animated programs have used to
comment on their restrictions from within, particularly in their resistance
to their own commodification and the rejection of commercial culture,
their use of intertextuality to carve out a discursive ideological space to
provide their unique satire, and their use of irony to address American
concerns” (115). Irony, parody, intertextuality, and the collapse of the dis-
tinction between high and low forms of art and humor are the focus of
the final chapter, “Irony and Nihilism: Postmodern, or American?” Derived
from influences such as Mark Twain, Dorothy Parker, and Nathanael West,
these discursive modes and tropes in contemporary animated television
programs function to critique religion, politics, and culture, often from a
caustic, nihilistic perspective. Ezell notes that nihilistic satire threatens to
undermine the potential solutions to the problems that irony exposes. Still,
although irony and humor may not have the capacity to solve problems,
Ezell notes that “it might be more desirable than falling into despair” (147).
Furthermore, animated programs have the potential to “provide a shared
outlook in which users use the shows as a starting point to discuss import-
ant cultural and political topics that are common to them” (149). Humor
and Satire on Contemporary Television identifies many points of similarity

between earlier American humorists and the genre of animated programs,
particularly in their common critique of the incongruity between American
ideals and reality. Ezell also provides an innovative methodology for under-
standing how traditional humorists’ use of satire and irony influences and
informs contemporary forms of humor.
Marta Dynel focuses her study on the television show House and consid-
ers conversational humor in the context of (im)polite theory in her essay
“Conceptualizing Conversational Humor as (Im)politeness: The Case of Film
Talk.” “Film talk” refers to the “characters’ conversations in films, series, and
serials,” which Dynel contends is more reliable than spontaneous dialogue
due to aspects of production and audience and makes intention and eval-
uation of the humor more clear.25 Examining examples of “film talk” from
House, Dynel demonstrates the importance of context in analyzing conver-
sational humor. The speaker’s intent to offend or not offend, raising expec-
tations regarding whether the humor will insult or amuse, and the hearer’s
interpretation and reaction to the humor are highlighted as indices of polite-
ness, (im)politeness, mock impoliteness, or mock politeness (a subtype of
impoliteness). The register of film talk as polite or impolite (mock or oth-
erwise) is determined by context, the speaker’s intention, and the hearer’s
reaction, and whether the humor results in amusement or offense can like-
wise be determined by the hearer’s interpretation and reaction. Dynel also
examines the role audiences play in the dynamics of film talk; she notes that
some hearers do not approach a scene with the depth of context that others
do. Examining the role that irony and sarcasm play in conversational humor,
Dynel explains how politeness or impoliteness can be invoked depending
on whether the humor is face saving or face threatening. Dynel’s analysis of
the interdependence of humor and theories of (im)politeness by focusing
on film talk in media helps unravel the complexities of (im)politeness as a
humorous tool.
The internet is another valuable tool for contemporary humorists and
humor scholars, and Jane Fife, in her essay “Peeling The Onion: Satire and
the Complexity of Audience Response,” draws on Kenneth Burke’s comic
frame and incongruity theories to demonstrate how she engages students
in evaluating satire as a comic tool of social critique. Examining a range of
examples from the Onion, Fife teaches students how to recognize and ana-
lyze the use of satire, parody, and irony as well as how to anticipate audience
reaction and reception. Her students evaluate the benefits of using satire
over direct argument and what the barriers to understanding or interpreting
satire are, particularly when audiences lack the proper framework to under-
stand the satirist’s message. Satire can be especially problematic due to the
way satirical texts are often detached from their original contexts when they
are disseminated online. Other obstacles arise when satirical texts are seen
as offensive or inappropriate, and Fife encourages her students to analyze
examples that provoke controversy. Her approach helps familiarize students
with common tools used by satirists, such as “ironic reversal, incongruity of
discourses and action, and the mimicry or parody of familiar genres, exag-
geration and minimization.”26 Fife requires her students to choose a topic
and write their own satires and then to carry out a rhetorical analysis of
their projects. Fife contends that “teaching satire involves peeling the onion,
not only in terms of interpreting the rhetorical elements of satirical texts−
like those in The Onion−but also helping students peel back the layers of
reception to understand what factors affect reaction to the content, the mes-
sage, and the satirist’s ethos” (331). Fife maps out an engaging pedagogical
approach designed to help students understand how satire can be used as a
powerful form of political and social critique.
Other innovative contributions to contemporary humor scholarship are
included in the collection of essays that make up a special issue of Studies
in American Humor titled “American Satire and the Postmodern Condition.”
James E. Caron introduces the issue with “The Quantum Paradox of
Truthiness: Satire, Activism, and the Postmodern Condition.” Beginning
with the question of “the usefulness of the postmodern condition as a rubric”
for examining recent satire studies, he asks, “How might the concept demar-
cate a poetics of contemporary American comic art forms that use ridicule to
enable critique and promote the possibility of social change?”27 Other issues
he raises include the distinction between postmodernism and contempo-
rary culture in an age of technology and the unprecedented access to satiric
material available on television programs, the internet, and social media
platforms such as Twitter and Vine. Caron claims that twenty-first-century
satire blurs the line between genres with discursive integration that merges
entertainment, politics, news, and other forms of media and creates a “mixed
or mashed-up quality” (155). Caron provides a working definition for under-
standing satire in the twenty-first century, which also serves to explicate the
title of his essay:
Satire signifies a comic attitude and a comic tactic, and names a mode within
the discourse of The Comic. Satire entails an act of judgment based on an
implicit or explicit (moral) value often made with an intent to reform or change
the comic butt (target) of a ridiculing presentation. Reform does NOT refer-
ence a real-world social or political policy change, but rather entails a potential
metanoia, a change in thinking, perception, or belief, even a repentance of the
old way of thinking, perceiving, believing. As with all comic artifacts, satire
must be understood within a play frame. However, satire displays a paradox-
ical structure. Analogous to light at quantum levels behaving as both wave
and particle, satire registers as both serious speech and nonserious (comic)
speech—apparently stepping out of and back into its play frame. (156)
Drawing on Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, as well as

Jean Baudrillard’s simulacra theory and Julia Kristeva’s intertextuality,
Caron contends that the contemporary postmodern condition is carnival,
an essence best captured by Stephen Colbert’s term “truthiness,” a hybrid
discourse “of current media practices that render politics as sport and lodge
political events in the theater of show business” (161). The use of satire to
engender reform and foster change is, Caron notes, what Sophia McClennen
and Remy Maisel call “satiractivism.” Caron provides four theses for under-
standing satire and draws on these in his review of the articles included in
the special issue:
1. Satire is marked by a methodological paradox, one committed

ethically to promote the process of social change, yet also committed
comically to use the symbolic violence of ridicule and artful insult.
2. The postmodern condition exacerbates the dilemma of ethical ridicule
that has concerned Western thought for centuries: its apparent lack
of centering norms or standard values for making comic judgments
inevitably complicates the contemporary production and reception
of satire.
3. The paradox of satire behaving like light at quantum levels, with a
dual nature of being both serious and nonserious speech, enables a
potential for social (i.e., real-world) impact well beyond other forms of
comic art, despite the postmodern condition.
4. Satire may function as comic political speech, but it is not political
speech. Therefore, satire’s intent to reform the body politic through
ridicule, its claim to pursue truth as an act of parrhesia (speaking truth

to power), even its real world impact, does not place it into the realm
of the serious speech acts of policy statements and civic actions. (157)
Caron notes that while the authors of the special issue consider “the performa-
tive quality of truthiness satire as satiractivist speech, as an apparent fusion
of comic speech with political speech, such satiractivist speech should not be
claimed as either political speech or political action. Such speech, including
[Rebecca] Krefting’s category of charged humor, may have the rhetorical
effect of a protest, but it is not equivalent to protest in the street” (165).
Truthiness satires work through the use of nonserious speech, although
often to critique a very serious subject. Satiractivism can address racial
and gender stereotypes, social injustices, and political corruption, thereby
informing audiences and eliciting change. Satiractivism cannot reform but
can be used to promote reform, and the articles included in this special issue
examine a wide array of postmodern topics.
The special issue begins with “After Politics/After Television: Veep,
Digimodernism, and the Running Gag of Government.” Joe Conway exam-
ines the digimodernist political satire of the television shows Parks and
Recreation and Veep that purport to offer a “glimpse of political life behind
the curtain” in a digimodernist culture.28 Other digimodernist programs, for
example, Amazon’s Alpha House and Netflix’s House of Cards, began stream-
ing their programs in 2013, and as Conway points out, serve as an indication
of mainstream networks’ diminished control over programing and content
in a new postnetwork era. The dominant aesthetic of the shows mimic non-
fictional programs to present a sense of the “apparently real” (185). Conway
explains that “vines, reality TV, mockumentaries, docusoaps, found-footage
horror films, and single-camera sitcoms are just some of the genres that
operate according to the digimodernist logic of the apparently real” (185).
The four programs under review all utilize a single-camera technique to cre-
ate the effect of exposing the inner workings and behind-the-scenes world of
politics, and Conway identifies them as instances of a postmodern genre he
calls “political satire vérité” (187). While House of Cards, Parks and Recreation,
and Alpha House present an array of self-interested, often incompetent pol-
iticians and staffers obsessed with Twitter and Instagram and preoccupied
with watching, reading, and texting on their cellphones, they also depict
strong character personalities able to successfully navigate Washington’s
political corruption. House of Cards character Frank Underwood’s confes-

sional approach, the basic decency of Leslie Knope and Ron Swanson of
Parks and Recreation, and Alpha House’s Gil John Biggs’s underlying sincerity
humanize the characters and engender sympathy in spite of their willing-
ness to opportunistically exploit humanizing moments. For example, Biggs
escapes the political grind for a day of fishing and beer at the beach and is
spotted by a rival. He strikes a deal to allow her to film him as he offers a
monologue about the sincerity of his high principles. The video goes viral,
and because it is presented as if he were unaware he was being recorded,
Biggs is reelected. Conway notes that “behind the curtain, there is no ideol-
ogy, just individuals whom, in the manner of Facebook, you can either like
or not. A feeling of consensual patriotism is encouraged to reign when the
depoliticized virtue of earnestness emerges and the vérité aesthetic of the
apparently real is there to capture it” (193). Unlike the other shows, Veep
lacks characters with fundamental decency and features “a world of hapless,
information-saturated politicians and bureaucrats whose lack of respect for
everything, most especially the voting public, overwhelms any illusion of
either competent public servants or an informed voting public” (197). The
mockumentaries’ “satiric absurdities become even more pronounced when
encountered at the periphery of power” in the form of “middle managers
and subordinates” (194). Veep’s vice president Selina Meyer and her staff are
concerned with the optics of a given situation, and despite their commit-
ment to “folksy populism,” Meyer’s wealth disconnects her from the ability
to relate to the people she and her staff “derisively call ‘the norms’” (200).
The insider, behind-the-scenes point of view demonstrated by the genre of
political satire vérité in a range of programs registers the ways in which tech-
nology and the use of technology have recreated the political landscape. The
shows that emerge to ridicule and satirize political parties, leaders, staffers,
and reporters reflect a new post-politics and post-television version of post-
modern satire that Conway’s insightful essay skillfully highlights.
Stephen Colbert’s testimony in September 2010 before a House subcom-
mittee regarding a bill addressing immigrant farm laborers and his appli-
cation to the FEC for his super PAC, “Americans for a Better Tomorrow,
Tomorrow” in 2011 is the focus of Marcus Paroske’s essay “Pious Policymaking:
The Participatory Satires of Stephen Colbert.” Paroske explains that “when
Colbert took his satire into government institutions, he moved from exter-
nal critic to participant,” and he characterizes this boundary-shifting move as
“participatory satire.” The transition from stage to real-world locales required

audiences to pay close attention to the context of the location and the nature
of the satiric performance. Colbert’s satire, Paroske notes, is not simply exter-
nal critique but active engagement with the goal of fostering change, which
he defines as neomodernism. Colbert’s focus on immigration and campaign
finance reform in government spaces are examples of stable ironies, and
Paroske contends that “even though the technique is postmodern, the true
meaning is discernable, thus neo-modern. Colbert’s neo-modernism would
have the audience not only agree with his critique, but also take political
action to fix the problem.”29 Paroske explains that an important aspect to con-
sider regarding participatory satire is the role that context plays in the form
of pieties, which “provide sets of rules about how to act in the world” (216).
Colbert’s transgression of the accepted norms of Congress demonstrates how
his neomodern approach plays out in public hearings on immigration yet
also risks reinforcing legislation his satire is intended to undermine, such
as finance reform law. When Colbert created his super PAC, “he qualified
for a so-called press exemption to the reporting rules for political donation”
(222–23). This consequence created the problem that the FEC could treat the
application without regard to irony and take Colbert seriously, which had
the potential to “make campaign finance law worse” (224). Indeed, Donald
F. McGahn “used Colbert’s blurring of satire and journalism to argue in favor
of his advisory opinion request, knowing that it would further McGahn’s goal
of expanding access to campaign cash” (227). By a vote of five to one, Colbert’s
super PAC was approved within the confines of his network. Paroske notes
that “this time, McGahn did not get yet another expansion of secret money
in politics, even as Colbert’s participatory satire opened the door for such
expansion” (228). Colbert’s move from the Comedy Central studio to the
congressional hearing room signals a shift from postmodern techniques to
neomodern participatory satire, and “the result exposed both the workings
of these policymaking venues and the inner workings of satire itself ” (231).
Paroske maps new terrain in his neomodern analysis of Stephen Colbert’s
forays into government agencies and his risky satire of policy and reform in
this illuminating and engrossing study.
Jessyka Finley examines the underexplored work of African American
women’s postmodern humor, which functions to destabilize historical nar-
ratives that “relegate black women to the margins of United States society”
in her essay “Black Women’s Satire as (Black) Postmodern Performance.”30
She examines the performances on Saturday Night Live of Danitra Vance

and Leslie Jones, Azie Mira Dungey’s “Ask a Slave,” and Issa Rae’s “The Mis-
Adventures of Awkward Black Girl” web series. Finly contends that black
women’s satire “becomes a postmodern performance tactic for compre-
hending, and engaging with, their personal and political interventions.
Contemporary black women have taken up a brand of satire that privileges
emotion and experience, and is infused with postmodern aesthetics—
particularly techniques of antinarrative, parody, citation, and intertextual
bricolage permeated with disgust” (237). Finley draws on the example of
civil rights activist Shirley Chisholm, who battled sexism and racism, par-
ticularly the animosity of white male peers resentful of her presence in
the male-dominated world of American politics in the late 1960s and early
1970s. Chisholm’s cool demeanor and expression of humorous disgust
exposed the artificial nature of “racial and gender logics that held ostensi-
bly rational white men as the sole arbiters of political discourse” (239). In
the 1980s, Finley notes, black comediennes “were less concerned with using
satire to secure equal rights for African Americans and more concerned with
exposing the fallacies of racial and gender stereotypes that permeated pop
cultural representations” (243). The first black woman to join the main cast
of Saturday Night Live, Danitra Vance, satirized the stereotype of the welfare
queen with her character Cabrini Green Harlem Watts Jackson, a seventeen-
year-old-mother of two and leader of the STOP (Single Teenagers Oppressed
by Pregnancy) organization, a satiric parody of the DARE program. Finley
points out that Vance’s “adroit juxtaposition of the socially conscious black
teenage mother is not an effort to transcend the Welfare Queen stereotype,
but a performance that brings her to life and humanizes her” (247). Vance
left the show in disgust after one season because she wanted to portray more
complex characters and represent real black women rather than the clichéd,
stereotypical roles available to her. Vance’s satirical song “I Play the Maid,”
a parody of Barry Manilow’s “I Write the Songs,” demonstrates her disgust
with black women’s “marginalization in film and television” (247).
Leslie Jones also became frustrated by the negative response to her
comments regarding standards of beauty and her reference to the sexual
exploitation of black women during slavery. The audience “seemed to miss
not only the point that Jones was using satiric critique to force the public to
grapple with the reality of black women’s crisis of representation, but also
the fact that her commentary was based on her own experience” (251). Finley
notes that the audience’s resistance to understanding Jones’s satire was due
to the discomfort engendered by the topic of black women’s exploitation
during slavery and, on another level, the result of ignorance on the part of
predominantly white Americans of black history and culture. This lack of
awareness is on spectacular display in “Ask a Slave,” based on comedienne
Azie Mira Dungey’s “experience being employed as a historical re-enactor
at historic Mt. Vernon” (252). Indeed, a clip featured in the opening scene
of “Ask a Slave” notes that the “names have been changed to protect the
guilty.”31 Dungey’s character Lizzie Mae is asked what her favorite part of the
plantation is, why she is a slave, where her kids go to school, and whether
she found her “position” through a newspaper advertisement. Her disgust
with the stupidity of the question is evident by her satirical response: “Why
yes . . . It said: WANTED: One housemaid. No pay. Preferably mulatto, saucy
with breeding hips. Must work eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, no
holidays. But, you get to wear a pretty dress. And if you’re lucky you just
might carry some famous white man’s bastard child. So, you better believe
I read that and I ran right over and said sign me up!” (255).
Issa Rae’s character J also fields a number of moronic questions in “The
Mis-Adventures of Awkward Black Girl,” particularly those posed by her
white boss after J cuts her hair. Her emotional disgust is evident in the fan-
tasy scene of her shouting at her boss: “Seriously, something’s wrong with
you, what the fuck is wrong with you?” (259). This popular online character
is the female version of the black nerd trope precipitated by the election of
President Barack Obama for comedians such as Key and Peele, and the inter-
net provided a freer forum for the more avant-garde postmodern humor of
black women satirists than cautious TV executives. Finley’s analysis breaks
new ground in the field of postmodern studies of black comediennes and
opens the door for further examinations generated by this illuminating
inquiry.
Lisa Guerrero explores the myth of a postracial America that emerged
in the wake of Barack Obama’s election to president of the United States
in 2008, an event that “was celebrated by some as the definitive proof of
America’s racial progress and a clear fulfillment of its promises” (268).
Because “Americans had seen fit to elect a black man to run the country,” so
the argument ran, “then it must logically follow that the country was now
beyond race” (268). The sense of racial enlightenment has, however, led to
African Americans “being cut off from claiming the significance of their
racial identities while being singularly defined by society through their race,
which supposedly, society has ceased to see anymore” (269). The clash of
myth and reality creates a unique postmodern condition for black satirists in
navigating the complexities of black subjectivity in the twenty-first century.
In her essay “Can I Live?,” Guerrero examines the satiric work of comedi-
ans Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele in their Comedy Central show
Key and Peele, particularly the series of sketches “Negrotown” and “Obama’s
Anger Translator, Luther.” Key and Peele play on the trope of black male
anger in America’s racial simulacra through the character Luther (played by
Key) translating the checked anger of Obama (played by Peele) “through the
lens of a legible imagined blackness” (270). Luther functions as “Obama’s
black conscience, embodying signs of blackness that the post-racial myth
renders off limits to Obama. This version of the mind/body split of black
masculinity is necessary because, while Obama and Luther exist as a singu-
lar identity in the public’s imagination, the performance of that integrated
blackness is disallowed in the actual public sphere” (270). Actual black rage
threatens to unravel the tranquilizing myth of post-racialism and is therefore
acceptable as parody yet paradoxically “also reifies real black anger” (271).
Guerrero examines the duo’s play on hyperreality in the sketch “Negrotown,”
which features a black man stopped by a police officer due to racial profiling.
After innocently asking why he is being detained, he is handcuffed, escorted
to a police car, and hits his head as the officer attempts to place him in the
car, knocking him unconscious. The character Wally intervenes and takes
him to the black utopia, Negrotown. Key and Peele signify on aspects of
black life that expose the artificiality of theories of a post-racial America. In
Negrotown, “cabs always stop for black people, loans are always approved for
black people; they don’t get followed in stores; and they can wear their hood-
ies and not get shot” (274). The sketch ends when Key’s character regains
consciousness in the police car, and he tells the officer, “I thought I was going
to Negrotown,” to which the officer replies, “Oh, you are!” (275). Guerrero
notes that “the satire that is found in the sketch lies in the impossibility of a
place like Negrotown existing. That is also the tragedy of the sketch. This is
the point of black satire in the twenty-first century” (275). Guerrero claims
that the symbols and signs of black identity that have obscured real iden-
tity demonstrate “that postmodern blackness is still very much a satiric con-
dition” (278). Her essay skillfully debunks the myth of post-racial America
through her examination of the project of black satire in the work of Key and
Peele, a myth to which many still ascribe. However, with the 2016 election of
a president who makes Luther’s rage seem tame in comparison, a whole new
set of inquiries emerge on the horizon for the question first posed in Caron’s
introduction and revisited by Guerrero: “Is satire still in a postmodern con-
dition?” (278). Where black satirists go from this post-postracial point will be
fascinating to see.
The final essay in the special issue is Layne Neeper’s “‘To Soften the Heart’:
George Saunders, Postmodern Satire, and Empathy.” Neeper identifies an
aesthetic shift from the postmodern work of late-twentieth-century satirists,
which Steven Weinsenburger calls “degenerative satire,” toward a new breed
of practitioners of what has been labeled the new sincerity in American fic-
tion, a term coined by Kelly Adams.32 Neeper modifies the term relative to
Saunders’s fiction, calling it “sincere satire,” which he defines as “a reformu-
lated satire of a different order” (284). While traditional satirists identify a
specific vice or error and employ ridicule with the intent to provide a cor-
rective through shared norms or ethical values, postmodernism is “by its
very nature disruptive and antagonistic to tradition” and “typically disavows
the championing of grand moral sentiments or seriously derides or even
abdicates the belief in any derivable, ennobling good to be had through the
interaction of texts and readers, and that the most one could hope to find
within the postmodern text is that ‘radiant play of signifiers’” (284). Neeper
claims, however, that “when we turn to the short fiction of Saunders, we find
a curious reworking of the age-old satiric formula at the hands of a writer
who shares most of postmodernism’s abiding concerns, but who, unlike his
twentieth-century peers, is in the end committed to a definable, cumulative
effect on readers that is unmistakably intended as moral, remedial, and
salutary,” most notably through “the empathetic improvement of his audi-
ence” (284–85). Saunders creates deeply flawed characters who appear to
function to elicit disgust and contempt but emerge as profoundly broken,
victimized by social expectations beyond their control, and who ultimately
elicit empathy.
In the first story of Saunders’s Tenth of December, “Victory Lap,” teenager
Kyle Boot is the child of helicopter parents who are well meaning but have
overly regimented lives, which leads to tragedy when neighbor Alison Pope
is threatened with abduction, and Kyle runs to rescue her armed with a dec-
orative rock that he uses to hit the perpetrator on the head. As he runs, the
excessive house rules of his parents play through his mind, suggesting the
outburst is the result of Kyle using the moment to release pent-up hostility.
Neeper notes that “rather than functioning as a satiric short story cautioning
a generation of parents about the potential for disastrous consequences for
children reared in such hyperattentive households, we are instead invited
to consider that misguided parents, confused about the proper methods by
which to raise children to whom they are devoted, are motivated by noth-
ing less than love and the best of intentions” (289). Saunders addresses class
antagonism in “Puppy,” when middle-class Marie, an indulgent mother, visits
the lower-class Callie to purchase a puppy for her children, but sees Callie’s
little boy in the backyard tied to a tree. Marie leaves in disgust at Callie’s
parental neglect. Callie, however, has her reasons; she sincerely believes
that it is the only way she can ensure her mentally challenged son’s safety.
Saunders’s “moral vision,” Neeper argues, “is for readers to strive to attain
a beneficent receptivity that can somehow make allowances for the flawed
but guileless acts that often motivate human behavior” (292). “The Semplica
Girl Diaries” addresses another family’s life in an elite suburb and the social
pressure to keep up with their more wealthy neighbors. Their inability to do
so causes shame and humiliation. An important sign of status in the com-
munity is the use of “Semplica Girls” who serve as yard ornaments. In this
story, “Saunders burlesques the outlandish acquisitiveness that motivates the
super-wealthy, signaling again his commitment as a gambit to the traditional
and accepted targets of satire” (293). Yet the story is not a traditional satire
because “Saunders radically destabilizes the simplistic satiric method in ‘The
Semplica Girl Diaries,’” so that “in the end what Saunders demands from
readers is not the censuring of the story’s narrator but our empathetic under-
standing” (295). Neeper draws from traditional definitions of satire as well as
more recent theories of postmodern aesthetics to persuasively demonstrate
that Saunders does not ask readers to identify a common value that would
help establish a particular corrective but rather to recognize the humanizing
aspects of his flawed and misguided characters in order to evoke empathy.
Literary Studies
The year’s work in literary studies adds a number of projects to the

field of Mark Twain scholarship including studies that address his pen
name and reputation, point to potential source material, and undertake
character and gender analyses. Additional authors under review include

Henry James, Marianne Moore, Nathanael West, and Flannery O’Connor,
as well as some less well-known writers such as Ring Lardner. Broader
studies examine the southern literary tradition and children’s literature,
and three important theoretical publications provide meaningful source
material in the field of American humor. The first is a collection of essays
edited by Patricia Gherovici and Manya Steinkoler. In the introduction
to their collection Lacan, Psychoanalysis, and Comedy, they begin with
a review of Freud’s theories regarding humor and how jokes, dreams,
and language provide an avenue by which to access the unconscious and
shed light on why we laugh at inappropriate, morbid, and absurd humor.
Jacques Lacan’s rereading of Freud “amplified Freud’s linguistic theories,”
emphasizing that “successful psychoanalytic interpretation” depends not
only on “a word’s meaning” but also “its polysemy and its connotations.”33
They reexamine Lacan’s mirror stage and contend that “the child identi-
fies with his or her mirror image and marks it with jubilatory laughter.
This decisive turning point in the infant’s ego formation via identification
with the mirror image is a joyful moment of triumphant illusory mastery
over the body, punctuated by laughter. Laughter is the origin of the ego”
(3). And, as Gherovici and Steinkoler point out, infants are able to smile
and laugh before learning to speak or walk. They examine Lacan’s views
regarding sex, love, and romantic excess as highly comic and note that
these are adult topics that children tend to view as hilarious, particularly
when adults attempt to engage with children in the typically uncomfort-
able sex talk, which to children “sounds preposterous” and “who respond
to ‘the sperm and eggs story’ with peals of laughter” (5). They also examine
Lacan’s humorous perspectives on desire, power, mortality, the phallus as
hidden signifier, and the unruly nature of the body and note that “Lacan
puns on the relation between laughter, love, death, and comedy as ‘tightly
entwined with the demand for love-making’” (6). Gherovici and Stenkoler
also point out that Lacan “revisited the cathartic function of tragedy and
developed the notion that comedy is a refusal or postponement of this
trajectory” (10). They note Jonathan Swift’s comic use of subversive satire
as a more powerful critique of politics than tragedy as well as as a means
of liberation and explain Swift’s important influence in Lacan’s thinking
and writing, concluding that “it is precisely comedy that makes democ-
racy possible” (13).
Gherovici and Stenkoler organize their collection of Lacanian

sychoanalytic approaches to humor into two large sections. Section 1, “The
p
Laughing Cure,” is composed of seven essays that address psychoanalytic
approaches to humor and laughter in philosophy, the Bible, economic anal-
ysis, and clinical studies. Section 2, “Comedy on the Couch,” consists of five
essays that examine literary works by Jane Austen, Henry James, and Jean
Genet and one that examines Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and
another his Measure for Measure. They close the collection with a third shorter
section, an epilogue by Simon Critchley, “Repetition, Repetition, Repetition:
Richard Prince and the Three R’s.” While psychoanalysis has been a common
approach for analyzing tragedy, Gherovici and Stenkoler stress the impor-
tance of using psychoanalysis in studies that consider the power and ethics
of humor as well as the ways in which humor and comedy provide access to
aspects of the unconscious. Their volume offers a wide range of insightful
chapters and new models for Lacanian scholars and humor theorists.
Another valuable source in humor studies is Magda Romanska and
Allan Ackerman’s Reader in Comedy: An Anthology of Theory and Criticism,
an extensive collection of primary and secondary material that traces
shifts and overlaps in definitions and attitudes toward comedy. Romanska
and Ackerman provide a lengthy introduction to the project and define
key terms, outline debates regarding the importance of comedy from the
ancient era through the twenty-first century, examine comic characters and
how they serve to structure comic plots, character types, and review theo-
ries of humor and laughter chronologically. They differentiate definitions of
wit, satire, irony, and parody and examine perennial topics for comic treat-
ment that have spanned the centuries, such as sex, gender, and romance,
as well as theories of how comedy can or should affect an audience. The
anthology is organized into five sections arranged chronologically, and each
section is presented with an extensive introduction addressing the terms,
theories, and theorists. Section 1, “Antiquity and the Middle Ages,” includes
excerpts from the work of Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Quintilian, Evanthius,
and Donatus. Section 2, “Medieval Views of Comedy,” includes work by
Hrotsvita of Gandersheim, Dante Alighieri, John of Garland, John Lydgate,
John of Salisbury, and others. Romanska and Ackerman introduce the shift
from theology to science in the Renaissance and “the new embrace of beauty
and pleasure in art” and include excerpts by Erasmus, Sir Philip Sidney,
Ben Jonson, and several others.34 Section 3, “Restoration to Romanticism,”
includes works by Samuel Butler, Molière, William Congreve, John Dryden,

Aphra Behn, Jeremy Collier, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, Immanuel
Kant and a host of additional scholars and writers. Section 4, “The Industrial
Age,” includes, for example, work by Søren Kierkegaard, Mark Twain, and
Sigmund Freud. And the final section, “The Twentieth and Early Twenty-
First Century,” includes a wide range of scholars and authors from Luigi
Pirandello to Mikhail Bakhtin, Northrop Frye, Linda Hutcheon, Glenda
R. Carpio, Ruth Wisse, and others who address politics, literary criticism,
film theory, and history. Reader in Comedy presents a rich resource in helping
students and scholars c hronologically organize theories of humor, laughter,
and comedy and demonstrates the dialogic nature of humor theories across
continents and over centuries as well as the ways in which these theories are
so often interrelated.
Another significant contribution to humor theory is Elliott Oring’s Joking
Asides: The Theory, Analysis, and Aesthetics of Humor, which draws on folk-
lore, anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, and psychoanalytic studies to
examine laughter, humor, and jokes. Oring covers Sigmund Freud’s Jokes
and Their Relation to the Unconscious in chapter 1, Victor Raskin’s Semantic
Mechanics of Humor and his semantic script theory of humor in chapter 2,
cognitive linguistics and blending theory in chapter 3, and A. Peter McGraw
and Caleb Warren’s benign violation theory in chapter 4. In chapter 5, Oring
reviews Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind by philoso-
pher Daniel C. Dennett and psychologists Matthew M. Hurley and Reginald
B. Adams. This last discussion covers the theory and use of cognitive psy-
chology and the evolution of humor, particularly with respect to incongruity
and perceptions of what is considered appropriate incongruity. In c hapter 6,
“Framing Borat,” Oring examines the film Borat: Cultural Learnings of
America for Make Benefit for Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan and its con-
troversial international reception and considers why the film was banned
in particular regions. Chapter 7 focuses on the charged nature of political
jokes, particularly in repressive regimes, and chapters 8 and 9 turn to the
internet to examine online jokes as lists and jokes that are defined as a nar-
rative, most notably those that reflect the humor of a residual class. In chap-
ter 10, Oring returns to Freud in his analysis of Jewish jokes and humor; he
reviews definitions, quality, origins, characteristics, impetus, and functions
and argues that it is necessary to debunk the mythology surrounding Jewish
humor in order to better ground its historical aspects. Chapter 11 examines
the aesthetics of humor and why jokes have been overlooked as a category
of art, and in his final chapter, Oring examines jokes told at a dinner party,
analyzing how the joke tellers interpret each other’s witty banter as well as
the qualities that constitute a good joke and humorous performance. Joking
Aside approaches questions of humor, jokes, and amusement from a wide
range of theoretical angles and disciplines and poses as many questions for
continued analysis as it answers. Oring’s writing is sophisticated yet clear,
and he delivers an extensive overview of theoretical approaches in the field
of humor studies.
Several projects enrich the field of Mark Twain scholarship in significant
ways; for example, Gary Scharnhorst adds an interesting dimension to the
discussion regarding the source of Sam Clemens’s penname in his essay
“A Note on Samuel Clemens’s Nom de Guerre.” Scharnhorst recalls the com-
mon view that the name derived from the river call to signal “a depth of at
least two fathoms or twelve feet, safe water for a steamboat in a channel but
dangerous water in shallows.”35 Scharnhorst also notes the perspective from
Life on the Mississippi that Clemens stole the penname from his nemesis
Isaiah Sellers to pay homage to him after his death but points out that there
is no record of Sellers using the name and that Sellers was still alive when
Clemens first used the nom de plume in February 1863. Scharnhorst con-
tends that Sam Clemens’s explanation of his penname was a decoy to sup-
press rumors that friends had given him the moniker to suggest his capacity
to drink for two and his practice of buying drinks on credit in a number of
saloons throughout Virginia City. This barroom version adds an additional
layer to the source discussion regarding Clemens’s illustrious nom de guerre.
Tracy Wuster’s Mark Twain: American Humorist begs the question of what
more could be said on this subject. As it turns out, quite a lot. Wuster exam-
ines Mark Twain not as the penname of an author but as a performative role
by Samuel Clemens and as a cultural figure that was shaped by Clemens, his
books, his critics, newspaper articles, journal publications, lyceum perfor-
mances, and changing perspectives regarding humor and humorists. Wuster
explains that
by discussing the “meanings” of Mark Twain, I am referring to the discussion

and debates over what Mark Twain meant to the diverse national and interna-
tional audiences who encountered him both in print and in person. My aim
is to trace how the development of Mark Twain’s reputation occurred, not as
a simple unveiling of Mark Twain’s supposedly true nature as a literary artist,

but as a rough critical terrain in which critics varied widely over whether Mark
Twain might aspire to literary merit or whether he was merely a passing whim
of a debased public.36
And, as Wuster notes, “My aim is not to go behind the scenes to meet the real
Mark Twain; rather, my aim is to describe the scenes in which Mark Twain
came to have meaning” (4). To situate his study in the field, he provides an
extensive review of the scholarship addressing aspects of Twain’s humor and
reputation as a humorist. He also outlines the shifting perspectives regard-
ing humor and humorists in the mid-nineteenth century and explains the
hierarchical nature of interpretations of humor and the split between “qual-
ity” humor and popular culture. High culture literary figures at the time were
Washington Irving, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet
Beecher Stowe, and others, while the new middling popular humorists
included, for instance, Artemus Ward (Charles Farrar Browne) and Petroleum
Vesuvius Nasby (David Ross Locke); at the bottom of the hierarchy were the
clowns and minstrels. Wuster traces Twain’s early years as a minor figure
through his rise in status as the nation’s most celebrated American humorist.
He demarcates three stages in Twain’s development in extensive and metic-
ulously researched chapters. The first stage addresses Clemens’s earliest use
of the penname in 1863 through his move to the East in 1866 as well as the
reception of his first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,
and the development of his reputation as a humorist. The second stage cov-
ers personal and professional growth through his marriage, lecture tours,
and his first travel narrative, The Innocents Abroad. The third stage addresses
the important influence of William Dean Howells’s reviews of his work and
Howells’s role as an advisor and mentor, which helped Clemens as Twain
transition toward becoming a quality humorist by publishing his work in
quality periodicals like the Atlantic Monthly. Wuster also explores Twain’s
reputation in England, his business ventures, his subscription strategy as a
marketing tool, and the ways in which, by the 1880s, Twain as comic writer
would become the standard to which Clemens’s earlier works as well as that of
other humorists were compared. Mark Twain: American Humorist sheds new
light on Twain as a performative role and cultural figure and broadens our
understanding of how this persona developed into “the most popular humor-
ists who ever lived” and remains an enduring icon of American humor (355).
Lawrence Howe examines Twain’s polysemic use of the word “usufruct”

in his essay “Language and Property in Connecticut Yankee, or What’s the
Use of Usufruct.” In the language of the law, the term acknowledges a par-
ticular form of property right, “the right of temporary possession of anoth-
er’s property in order to obtain benefit from that property.”37 Howe notes
that Twain uses the term only two times in Connecticut Yankee but that the
idea functions to illustrate Hank Morgan’s perspective on his improvement
projects and also illuminates Twain’s frustrations with copyright laws. Howe
provides a historical, legal, and political overview of the term, particularly
in the context of American materialism and notes that “Manifest Destiny
and expropriation of land from Indians” are two of “the most aggressive, and
permanent, versions of usufruct in U.S. history” (34). He observes that when
Democratic candidate Samuel Tilden employed the antiquated word during
the presidential campaign of 1876, he was ridiculed for his obscure diction
and labeled “Old Usufruct” as a symbol of political corruption. In a letter
to William Dean Howells, Twain also uses the term “usufruct” to critique
Tilden’s political reputation. There are, Howe points out, two scenes in which
Twain employs the term in Connecticut Yankee: the first, he explains, is when
Hank Morgan criticizes Sandy’s “archaic” word choices, which functions in
a similar way to the Tilden reference, and the second is when Morgan uses
the term to befuddle a nobleman during an examination regarding a mili-
tary commission. Although both examples indicate a comic use of the term,
Howe demonstrates that the concept highlights Morgan’s use of philosoph-
ical rhetoric in a way that suggests he is advocating for improvement proj-
ects that serve the public good yet that in reality function as a screen for his
self-interested profit motives.
Howe also shows how the term reflects Sam Clemens’s attempts to protect
his literary property, secured via copyright, from piracy, a temporary use of
property by another. Howe sheds new light on Connecticut Yankee from this
perspective on the overlooked significance of this concept of property rights
in the United States.
In his essay “The Quixotic Dream of Mark Twain’s Jim,” Michael David
MacBride examines connections between Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn and Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, challenging critics who have
asserted that the most significant connection between the novels is Tom
Sawyer’s quixotism. MacBride contends that a more important but over-
looked connection is evident between Jim and Quixote and Huck Finn and
Sancho Panza. MacBride provides an extensive overview of scholarship that

has examined Tom Sawyer’s quixotic views and actions, particularly Olin
Harris Moore’s essay “Mark Twain and Don Quixote” as well as work by
Joseph Harkley, George Santayana, Stanley Williams, and others. Indeed, the
review of scholarship regarding Cervantes’s novel dominates the essay for
close to half its length. Other issues are broached through inconsistent or
problematic claims, such as the assertion that Huckleberry Finn “does not
buy into the idea of superstition” until he begins to spend significant time
with Jim. Yet Huck exhibits a wide range of superstitious beliefs long before
Jackson’s Island. Another problem is MacBride’s referring at the beginning
of the essay to the King selling Jim to the Phelps family for forty dollars
but then subsequently claiming that the King and the Duke “eventually sell
him to the Phelpses for a $200 dollar reward to fund the King’s drinking.”38
MacBride asserts that the similarities of Jim’s and Quixote’s missions (Jim’s
dream of freedom, Quixote’s dream of being a chivalric knight), the abuse
each suffer from other characters, and their roles as father figures to Huck
and Sancho, respectively, is what links them. But his assertion that Jim’s
romanticized dream is “to have the life of a free white person” is a provoca-
tive claim that lacks the support of textual evidence in his essay (100).
John H. Davis examines Twain’s treatment of gender roles in his essay
“Who Wears the Pants? Sexual Masquerade and Sexual Meaning in ‘An
Awful Terrible . . . Medieval Romance.’” Davis explains that the satirical story
was written at a time in Sam Clemens’s life when he was developing greater
interest in women’s issues, likely due to the influence of Olivia Langdon,
whom he married in “February 1870, two months after he wrote ‘A Medieval
Romance.’”39 Davis points out that Twain plays with race and gender roles
and identities in other works, but his focus in this tale is especially insightful
for its treatment of women in a patriarchal society and its probe of issues
of gender identity, sexuality, the sexual double standard, bisexuality, and
cross-dressing. Davis’s essay reveals that gender roles and sexuality were
issues Twain thought deeply about, and it is particularly illuminating given
that in many of Twain’s novels and short stories, the featured characters are
so often men and boys. As the unfinished work demonstrates, “Gender injus-
tice is a problem both illogical and absurd but not one easily understood or
solved. Women seem to be stuck in a man’s world, like Twain’s plot, with few
or no ways out” (111). Davis adds that the dangers of restrictive gender roles
remains a problem, “exemplified nowadays by murdered transvestites and
assaulted military women,” which adds contemporary relevance to Twain’s

medieval treatment of the hazards for those who, especially women, trans-
gress the socially inflexible boundaries of gender.
Alex Beringer focuses on another unfinished work by Twain in his essay
“Humbug History: The Politics of Puffery in Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy,” con-
tending that while many scholars place the work in the category of Twain’s
“boy stories,” the work reveals a more serious critique of American politics
and modernity and “belongs with works like Pudd’nhead Wilson and The
Mysterious Stranger.”40 Beringer zeroes in on Tom Sawyer’s penchant for
conspiracy theories in particular as a way to articulate a form of masculin-
ity that indicates his intelligence and that is characterized by his inclusion
in secret societies, and he focuses on the example of Tom’s invention of an
abolitionist threat to the community he refers to as “the Sons of Freedom”
that sparks fear and paranoia throughout the town. Beringer notes that the
conspiracy satirizes late-nineteenth-century consumer culture and histor-
ical memory and that “news, information, art, history—all of these forms
proliferate not based on how well reasoned they are, but instead on how
much they are in demand by a population looking for pleasure” (122). When
Jim is accused of murder, Tom confesses his duplicity to protect Jim, yet
the courtroom spectators are unwilling to believe him, and he changes his
story to implicate the King and the Duke, which “allows the townspeople
to maintain the illusion that a mysterious secret society exists beneath the
humdrum surface of everyday life” (123). Beringer contends that the novel
reflects Twain’s pessimism regarding populist thinking and his worry that
historical memory is created for entertainment rather than accuracy, and as
Beringer shrewdly observes, “Conspiracy thinking could be a great deal of
fun. It was carnival, a caper, a yarn. It was playing at dangers. And yet, the
thing about playing at danger is that it can become, for lack of a better word,
quite dangerous” (125).
Hamada Kassam explores the impact of southwest humorists in Twain’s
work in two new essays. In her article “Tom Sawyer Said He Was ‘a Stranger
from Hicksville, Ohio, and His Name Was William Thompson,’” she notes the
references to frontier humorist William Tappan Thompson in Twain’s novels
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer Abroad as well as his satiric
memoir “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed.” She contends that
the references to Tom Sawyer as William Thompson and Bill Thompson in
the novels suggest that Twain uses the nod to the southwest humorist as a
way to lampoon Thompson’s proslavery and secessionist politics. Kassam

examines Thompson’s career as a proslavery Whig newspaper editor and
the way in which the character Major Jones served as a spokesman for
Thompson’s political views. She also reviews several common themes and
tropes in the genre of southwest humor, such as use of backcountry vernac-
ular, humorous incidents and dilemmas, and con men and trickster types to
suggest that Twain draws heavily on the genre in his novels and endows Tom
Sawyer with characteristics similar to Thompson’s. Kassam draws on south-
west humor again in “Huck Finn as the Fictive Son of George W. Harris’s Sut
Lovingood,” tracing common connections between Sut and Pap Finn as well
as between Sut and Huck. While Pap Finn shares Sut’s penchant for whiskey,
contempt for abolitionists, and foolishness, Kassam contends that Huck is
crafted to reflect the theme commonly featured in southwest humor of sons
in conflict with their fathers.
Liam Purdon proposes a source that Sam Clemens may have drawn on in
creating his characters the King and the Duke in his essay “Early Predecessors
of the King and the Duke in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”
Purdon references letter books collected by London’s Guildhall Library
archives and examines the case of “the crack-pot chicanery of two infamous
late-fourteenth-century London confidence men, John Warde of the County
of York, and Richard Lynham of the county of Somerset,” which was available
in print by 1868. Purdon notes that “the compendium of historical records
describing London and daily London life from the Guildhall archive made
its way into history collections at many university libraries and into many
booksellers’ collections like that of Hartford’s Brown and Gross, the bookshop
at 77 Asylum St. that Sam Clemens is known to have frequented.”41 Purdon
suggests that Clemens may have discovered the account while conducting
research for The Prince and the Pauper. The letter book records the trial of
Warde and Lynham for running a scam in which they pretend to be mute and
carry a piece of leather with the sign: “This is the tongue of John Warde” (117).
Purdon notes several similarities between the pair of con artists: for example,
their pretending to be mute, their communicating through hand gestures and
noisy utterances, their using actual signs like Jim’s “Sick Arab” notice, their
choice of vulnerable targets, and similarities in the respective consequences
the two pairs of confidence men face. While Purdon concedes that there is
no evidence to demonstrate Clemens read these letter books, his attentive
comparison of the two works offers a compelling analysis of the con men.
James W. Clark Jr. also explores a document he cannot specifically link to

Twain, and he too offers a unique approach to Huckleberry Finn by exam-
ining Abraham Lincoln’s gradual abolition plan, presented to Congress a
month prior to the implementation of the Emancipation Proclamation, in
his essay “Abraham Lincoln at the Phelps Farm.” Lincoln proposed gradual
abolition over the course of thirty-seven years, and his plan also provided
for financial compensation for slave owners. Clark points out that despite
Tom Sawyer’s reliance on Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo to
orchestrate his plan, the escape in Monte Cristo occurs over the course of
fourteen years rather than Tom’s claim of thirty-seven. Clark notes that the
span of thirty-seven years to free Jim is mentioned seven times in the final
chapters, and he points to the scene in which Huck discovers a window that
would expedite the escape, but Tom’s resistance and Huck’s acquiescence
suggests a reflection of Lincoln’s plan, or as Clark puts it, “Jim is to be dug
out of Southern slavery gradually; he is not to be wrenched out of bondage
through a large window on the north side. By employing Tom’s plan, the
boys handle their challenge to free Jim in opposition to the way the Civil
War ended in a Northern victory.”42 Clark notes that just as the Civil War is
brought to an abrupt end precipitated by the Emancipation Proclamation,
Tom’s plan is likewise suddenly halted when he is compelled to reveal Miss
Watson’s death and her manumission of Jim in her will. Clark’s historical
reference redirects our attention away from European romance and toward
an interesting connection that would help explain Twain’s choice of Tom’s
insistence on a thirty-seven-year emancipation plan.
Twain’s contemporary Henry James is the focus of Karen Scherzinger’s
essay “Caricature and Mrs. Rooth’s Shawl in The Tragic Muse.” While many
scholars have characterized James’s novel as arid and humorless, Scherzinger
asserts that these critics overlook the comic elements in the novel, and she
focuses in particular on the character Mrs. Rooth. Scherzinger notes that the
elements of exaggeration in James’s depiction of Mrs. Rooth render her a
caricature of an outdated, doting mother whose shawl functions “as a met-
onymic figure for its owner’s eccentricity.”43 The fluttering, agitated move-
ments of the shawl constantly slipping out of place are used to reflect the
personality of the wearer of the garment, and its outdated style further
contributes to elements of James’s humorous portrait. Scherzinger identi-
fies three influences that she claims James likely drew from in his portrait.
The first is the performance of a shawl dance depicted in Charles Dickens’s
Sketches by Boz. The second derives from the letters of actress Rachel Felix
describing a Turkish shawl. The third is the aristocrat association created
by a shawl featured in Madame de Barrera’s Memoirs of Rachel. Scherzinger
contends that James drew from these sources to create a comic caricature of
the main character’s flighty mother in an otherwise humorless novel.
Ross K. Tangedal sheds light on a now obscure humorist popular in the
early twentieth century, Ring Lardner, in his essay “Refusing the Serious:
Authorial Resistance in Ring Lardner’s Prefaces for Scribner’s.” Lardner rose
to prominence through humorous short stories for the Saturday Evening Post
and Cosmopolitan, and his works were widely syndicated throughout the
United States. His appeal is evident by Ernest Hemingway’s adoption of the
name Ring Lardner Jr. while writing for his high school newspaper. Lardner
and Hemingway would enjoy a close correspondence over the years, as
would F. Scott Fitzgerald and prominent critics H. L. Mencken and Edmund
Wilson. As Tangedal explains, Lardner was solicited by Scribner’s editor
Max Perkins, who encouraged Lardner to expand his repertoire and develop
into a serious author. A reluctant Lardner agreed to sign with Scribner’s, but,
as Tangedal notes, the humorous prefaces that introduce two collections of
works that had been previously published, How to Write Short Stories (with
Samples) and The Love Nest and Other Stories, reveal his resistance to the
pressure to publish a novel. Unlike traditional prefaces, Lardner’s “are pieces
as textually nonsensical and arbitrary as many of his writings on the surface,
yet they are carefully constructed to expose the underside of socio-cultural
mores and the publishing industry.”44 Throughout his prefaces, Lardner sat-
irizes and lampoons publishers, preface writers, the literati, and artistic cre-
ation; characterizes publishing as a game; and mocks schools that profess to
teach the art of writing as ineffective and a waste of time and expense. He
also provides short preambles for the stories with humorous undertones.
For example, “The Golden Honeymoon” is described as a story with “sex
appeal,” but Tangedal notes that the humor in this instance derives from
the fact that the couple are “two septuagenarians who dislike each other”
(8). In his preface for The Love Nest and Other Stories, Lardner creates the
fictitious character Sarah E. Spooldripper to introduce the stories and uses
what Tangedal calls “lexical tomfoolery” throughout the preface. Lardner
eventually kills his literary persona as well as Spooldripper, and Tangedal
contends that “Lardner takes a significant jab at the various functions of
publishing and performs the ultimate act of authorial resistance” by killing
“himself in print” (10). As Tangedal’s reading of the prefaces demonstrates,

Lardner left a trail of evidence of his resistance to the pressure to transition
from a humorous author to a serious novelist through his satiric lampoon of
the very industry applying the pressure.
Cliff Mak turns his attention to slapstick comedy in his analysis of
Marianne Moore’s poetry in “On Falling Fastidiously: Marianne Moore’s
Slapstick Animals.” Mak traces Moore’s use of animals throughout her poetry
and contends that her interest in slapstick comedy, in particular the work
of Charlie Chaplin, establishes a comic referential field Moore employs to
address aspects of didactic authority, social ethics, sexuality and celibacy,
and aesthetics, particularly evident toward the end of her career in her final
volume of original poetry Tell Me, Tell Me. Drawing on Moore’s notebooks,
Mak demonstrates the ways in which she drew from slapstick as a mode
for understanding ethics, and he also examines Moore’s unpublished review
of Chaplin’s travel memoir My Trip Aboard, as well as his film career, to
show the influence this figure had on Moore’s aesthetic sensibilities, most
prominently in her comic use of slapstick animals. Poetic techniques like
writing in short staccato sentences, syllabic meter, analogues to slapstick,
and a back-and-forth structure demonstrate the influence of similar styles
of slapstick comedy and prose, and Mak contends that Moore’s “poetry as a
whole . . .constitutes a sense of modernism and celibacy neither as solely
apolitical, made up of associated aesthetes and spinsters, nor as strongly
performative, aspiring after historical action, but as a constant revision and
adaptation.”45 Mak persuasively demonstrates how Moore’s penchant for
slapstick comedy and the work of Charlie Chaplin led her into more intri-
cate and humorous ways to express her sense of authority, sexuality, and
aesthetics and how her slapstick style departs from that of her more solemn
modernist peers.
An analysis of what laughter can reveal about character is the focus of
“‘Ha-Ha and Again Ha-Ha’: Laughter, Affect, and Emotion in Nathanael
West’s The Day of the Locust.” In the essay, Frances McDonald uses a post-
structuralist approach to examine the way in which two strains of laughter
function to demonstrate character types or dismantle subjectivity. McDonald
notes that the humor in the novel does not operate in a traditional way to
demonstrate a character’s sense of humor or to evoke laughter but rather
is revealed through characters in what McDonald calls “laughter without
humor.”46 Drawing on poststructuralist theorists Michel Foucault, Gilles
Deleuze, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Catherine Clément, and others,

McDonald notes the use of laughter as a metaphor to destabilize subjectivity
and claims that this aspect of West’s fiction has been overlooked by scholars
who tend to view The Day of the Locust as signaling a shift from modern-
ism to postmodernsim. She also makes a distinction between emotion and
affect in examining West’s laughter to differentiate the laughter signified
by a character’s emotional response from laughter that indicates a form of
affect. The first stage of laughter is self-reflective and fixes the character as
a general type, “and in doing so camouflages him among the crowds of cari-
catures that inhabit West’s Hollywood” (544). McDonald notes that the pro-
tagonist Tod Hackett is most closely associated with self-reflective laughter,
and his desire to halt movement is characterized by his inertia. As a painter,
he continuously attempts to capture movement in his art. Other examples
of self-reflective humor are caricatures: “Faye Greener the h ypersexualized
femme fatale, Earl Shoop the objectively handsome romantic foil, Harry
Greener the ex-vaudeville clown, Abe Kusich the bad-tempered dwarf, [and]
Homer Simpson the domesticated cuckold” (548). Type morphs into loss of
subjectivity through grotesque laughter, and Harry Greener, the ex-vaude-
ville performer turned salesman, is adept at using his theatrical skills to
perform emotion that provokes his ontological mutation and signals the
dismantling of his subjectivity. McDonald demonstrates that viewing laugh-
ter as affect suggests an alternative mode of subjectivity and an ontological
precarity that tests the boundaries and limits of poststructuralist aesthetics.
Brent Little also examines aesthetic aspects in his analysis of the works
of southern writer Flannery O’Connor and Scottish author Muriel Spark in
his essay “A Shout or a Nudge? Laughing at Old Tarwater and Miss Brodie.”
Little analyzes O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away (1960) and Spark’s The
Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) and contends that both Catholic novelists
use humor to critique modern secularity associated with presumably non-
religious readers and questions whether these techniques indicate a shout
or a nudge. Little maintains that O’Connor takes a dialectical approach in
her novel by stressing the differences between religion and modern atheism
and that Spark uses an analogical approach to stress the similarities between
religious and secular perspectives or realities. Little notes that O’Connor’s
character Old Mason Tarwater can be superficially understood as a comic
backwoods religious zealot obsessed with his own death; whereas, his
nephew Rayber appears to be a more rational, enlightened character. The
novel ends, however, by reaffirming Tarwater’s moral character and his

Christian worldview, and Little contends that this demonstrates
O’Connor’s sharply dialectical attitude towards the presumed hostility of her

secular audience; the novel’s humor undergirds the great gulf between two
antithetical convictions regarding the physical world—either as the sum total
of reality or as a medium to experience supernatural grace. Through laughter,
O’Connor hooks her reader to expect the former, but then violently under-
mines these expectations to insist upon the latter.47
In contrast to O’Connor, Spark uses an analogical approach to demonstrate

similarities between religious understanding and Western modernity
through ambiguity in her depiction of faith. Miss Brodie’s fascination with
European fascism suggests the absurdity of her character while also implicat-
ing her morally compromised Christianity. Little contends that O’Connor’s
dialectical frame and use of violence and humor indicate a shout; whereas,
the more ambiguous style Spark employs constitutes a hard nudge.
In his essay “Laughing for Survival: Jokes of Nature and Jokes of Language
in Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger,” João Paulo Guimarães uses ecocriticism to exam-
ine Dorn’s lengthy narrative poem. Dorn published Gunslinger serially in the
late 1960s and early 1970s, and the poem features a host of odd characters
such as the eponymous Gunslinger, a whore, a mad scientist, a talking horse
with a penchant for philosophy, and the book’s villain Howard Hughes, a
wealthy character whose only regard for nature is in its potential for profit.
Drawing from Joseph Meeker’s The Comedy of Survival, Guimarães examines
the distinction between the tragic hero who ultimately falls prey to nature
but maintains his ideals and the comic hero who survives regardless of eth-
ical considerations regarding nature. Guimarães contends that the relation-
ship between people and nature in Dorn’s text demonstrates that Dorn uses
a similar type of comic hero. Guimarães traces shifts in philosophical think-
ing regarding nature and natural abnormalities, and he also argues that “in
Gunslinger language is treated as analogous to nature itself.”48 Dorn points
to analogies between language, as manifested, for instance, in the politics of
norms that structure abnormalities, and the way nature renews and recre-
ates itself. He contends that “Dorn uses his literary art as a means to produce
linguistic particulars, just as nature uses its own devices to generate singular
patterns and forms” (362). Dorn alters his use of font styles and letter sizes
to emphasize hyperbole, uses onomatopoeia to build suspense, and inserts

intentional typos, foreign words, homonym and homophone puns to serve
as linguistic jokes. Guimarães presents a persuasive analysis of the ways in
which Dorn draws on nature to create a poetics of survival.
Zohra Fatima, in her essay “Humor, Satire and Verbal Parody in The
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: A Relevance Theoretic Approach,” uses
relevance theory to examine satire and parody in Douglas Adams’s science
fiction series. Relevance theory draws on an audience’s understanding of
context as well the cognitive abilities of readers to determine whether the
audience is able to interpret the intended humor of the text. Fatima provides
an extensive review of relevance theory as it pertains to satire, parody, and
irony in her essay and points out that satire and parody are underexplored
types of humor in relevance theory. She claims that sci-fi provides an ideal
genre for examining comic techniques of satire and parody regarding futur-
istic topics like time travel as they pertain to the comprehension process of
relevance theory. While Fatima engages in an interesting study, her exam-
ination of the literary work The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy tends to
be overwhelmed by her extensive and repetitive review of the theoretical
material and, therefore, sheds only marginal light on The Hitchiker’s Guide
relative to her theoretical approach.
Questions regarding irony and the value of irony are addressed in Cool
Characters: Irony and American Fiction. Lee Konstantinou grounds his study
in cultural, critical, and political criticisms and defenses of irony over the
last three decades and questions why this trope in particular has generated
so much controversy. Konstantinou reviews shifting perspectives regarding
irony after WWII and notes that critics of irony in the postmodern era tended
to see the device as a dead-end road that had devolved into cynical snark, a
view that deviates from earlier focuses on irony’s potential for redemption.
Irony came under more intense scrutiny by the 1980s “theory generation,”
and “the project of moving beyond postmodernism for many theoreti-
cally attuned writers found a concomitant strategy,” namely, “transcending
irony,” which led to the postirony perspective of the 1990s and 2000s.49
Konstantinou uses the term “postirony” to indicate an ethos, or world
view, rather than simply a humorous tool, and he claims that this approach
reveals characterological types and rhetoric that the language theorists, crit-
ics, and philosophers have used to debate the function and value of irony.
Postironists attempt to extend irony beyond postmodern skepticism toward
the new sincerity. Konstantinou identifies the postwar hipster of the 1950s
and 1960s as a characterological type in Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro,”
Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and the early fiction of Thomas Pynchon, a
figure he claims demonstrates their opposition to “totalitarian aesthetics,”
particularly racial injustice (39). The focus of chapter 2 is the ironic figure of
the punk, in the work of William S. Burroughs’s The Wild Boys: A Book of the
Dead and Kathy Acker’s Pussy, King of the Pirates, a figure that Konstantinou
argues challenges the institutions of patriarchy, racism, religion, and polit-
ical power through semiotic anarchy. Konstantinou shifts from ironic to
postironic figures in chapter 3 to explore the secular ethos of the type he
calls the believer, a victim of postmodernity in the literary and cultural work
of David Foster Wallace, David and Diana Wilson, and Dave Eggers. In chap-
ter 4, Konstantinou examines the cool-hunter figure in the science fiction
of Alex Shakar’s The Savage Girl, William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, and
Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, arguing that these works suggest
that a postironic hermeneutic disposition is necessary to process a global
economy and capitalist culture. The final chapter takes up the occupier type
relative to the Occupy movement in Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers
and Jonathan Lethem’s Dissident Gardens in a genre Konstantinou defines
as “postironic Bildungsroman” (44). Cool Characters delivers an absorbing
new way to view irony as an ethos that enables readers to better understand
shifting perspectives regarding historical, cultural, political, and aesthetic
perspectives of irony from the postwar era to the present, a new approach
that is particularly reflected through Konstantinou’s inventive focus on the
hipster, punk, believer, cool hunter, and occupier character types.
A book-length study of the use of humor to explore or challenge tradi-
tional notions of gender and sexuality in the southern literary tradition is
the focus of Tison Pugh’s Precious Perversions: Humor, Homosexuality, and
the Southern Literary Canon. Pugh frames his study of the work of gay and
lesbian southern authors by examining the role of humor in building south-
ern community through a shared comic sensibility that simultaneously rein-
forces heterosexual norms while marginalizing homosexuality as deviant
“other.” Pugh contends that queer southern authors do not utilize humor to
simply subvert southern mores or challenge the myth of the South but to
“expand the parameters, themes, and tropes of southern literature.”50 Pugh
also addresses aspects of the southern literary cannon and questions why
so many gay and lesbian authors have been excluded from consideration.
In chapter 1, Pugh examines Tennessee Williams’s camp humor in A Streetcar

Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, Suddenly Last
Summer, and others works, identifying a comic sadomasochistic subtext of
exaggerated gender roles in what are not typically considered humorous
works. Pugh also discusses Williams’s resistance to being labeled a gay writer
on the grounds that he felt it undermined the universal appeal of his works,
an attitude likewise shared by Truman Capote, the focus of chapter 2. Like
Williams, Capote is typically not recognized as a humorous author, but Pugh
argues in his analysis of Capote’s screenplay Beat the Devil that Capote uses
camp humor to satirize tropes of southern gothicism. Pugh notes Capote’s
penchant for humor in his personal and public life and claims this humor-
ous style is also evident in Other Voices, Other Rooms as well as in his unfin-
ished novel Answered Prayers. Pugh contends that “Capote’s camp humor
aligns with many of his queer themes, and through his comic sensibility he
reassesses cultural codes of sexuality and finds them laughable” (44).
In chapter 3, Pugh analyzes the work of Florence King in the context of
second-wave feminism that left the gay conservative at odds with the norms
of southern decorum and the feminist left’s political sensibilities. Her mem-
oir Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady and other works demonstrate
“the disjunctures of gender, sexuality, and desire,,” and “her strain of queer
conservatism reveals its affinities and double disidentifications with both
queerness and conservatism, creating a unique body of southern humor dis-
ruptive of the ensconced opinions of both left and right” (90). In chapter
4, Pugh examines the comic novels of Rita Mae Brown and contends that
in Rubyfruit Jungle, In Her Day, Southern Discomfort, Sudden Death, Venus
Envy, Riding Shotgun, and Alma Mater, “Brown smashed encrusted stereo-
types of the humorless lesbian” (91). Pugh contends that Brown’s comic
sensibility vacillates “between a progressively feminist and a conservatively
southern ethos” and “upends conventional assumptions about gender and
humor” (92). Pugh notes several instances where Brown’s humor falls flat
but claims that in spite of these failings, Brown makes an important contri-
bution to twentieth-century lesbian literature and women’s humor. Dorothy
Allison’s work, the focus of chapter 5, foregrounds poverty, neglect, abuse
and homophobia, and this emphasis overshadows her use of humor to
mitigate themes of trauma. David Sedaris’s postsouthern perspective is the
focus of chapter 6, particularly the comic memoirs where he questions the
ways adherence to antiquated ideals and traditions contributes to the racism
and homophobia that marginalize nonwhite and homosexual groups in the

South. In his conclusion, Pugh challenges readers and scholars, urging them
to question the southern literary canon and why more comic authors of
gay and lesbian literature, particularly women, have largely been excluded.
Pugh’s Precious Perversions argues persuasively for a reevaluation of its con-
struction, adding an important new layer of insight through his study of
humor, region, and sexuality in the southern literary tradition.
In another contribution to the examination of the southern literary tradi-
tion, Katharine A. Burnett acknowledges the value of recent studies in the
global South and the new southern studies that challenge traditional per-
spectives of region and place, but she contends that there remains a need
to examine authors prior to the southern renascence in her essay “Mold on
the Cornbread: The Spore Paradigm of Southern Studies.” Burnett notes that
there has been comparatively little work “on authors before 1930 and much
less on authors writing before the Civil War. While many scholars have made
strides in filling this void, much remains to be done.” She adds that “broad-
ening the study of early southern literature serves to expand American lit-
erary studies generally.”51 Burnett proposes examining southern literature as
a genre not limited by region but rather connected through “a set of tropes,
characteristics, and formal patterns,” particularly in terms of human inter-
actions and similar historical, political, and economic patterns. She com-
pares Southwest humorist Johnson Jones Hooper’s collection of tales Some
Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs and Charles Dickens’s Sketches by Boz to
demonstrate their similar treatment of a shared transatlantic economy. She
analogizes the similar character types produced by these writers to the ways
in which “ferns disperse their seeds through spores: the plant shoots out a
seed, which can then germinate far away” (164). Burnett points out that the
“South” is a relative term and is not limited to a region but rather “refers to
the historical, material, cultural, and artistic patterns that emerge from such
specificity,” and “anyone can take on—or take off—these patterns as an iden-
tity” (165). Burnett makes a persuasive case for viewing southern studies as
a genre that calls for vital work that has yet to be done.
Ted Geltner also adds to the field of southern studies in his book Blood,
Bone, and Marrow: A Biography of Harry Crews and offers the only full biog-
raphy of the author of the darkly humorous works The Gospel Singer, Naked in
Garden Hills, Blood and Grits, All We Need of Hell, and other novels and short
stories in the southern gothic tradition. As Geltner’s biography demonstrates,
Crews’s life story reads like one of his novels; indeed, he drew much of his
material from his childhood community in Bacon County, Georgia, yet as
Geltner points out, “a pilgrimage to Crews’s hometown can feel like a wasted
trip. There is no Harry Crews Park, no Harry Crews High, and the local event
calendar is entirely void of Harry Crews Day.”52 Other Georgia authors are
honored by their communities, but Crews appears to have been overlooked
for personal reasons having to do with his portrait of the region and its pop-
ulation as religious, violent, and racist (6). Much of Crews’s material derives
from his childhood growing up during the Depression in rural Georgia and
his early years that were plagued by poverty, violence, and illness. After the
death of his father at the age of two, his mother married his father’s brother
Pashal, a violent alcoholic. Crews had an especially traumatic year at the age
of five when he was stricken with polio. After a slow recovery, he fell into a
boiling vat of water during the annual butchering of the hogs that left him
with burns covering over two-thirds of his body. In the first part of his four-
part biography, Geltner examines Crews’s childhood and young adult years,
including his service in the marines, his marriage to Sally Ellis, his relation-
ship with mentor Andrew Lytle, and his work on his first three novels. Part 2
examines his success with publishing, his work as a teacher and a journalist
for Playboy and Esquire, and his struggle with drinking and personal rela-
tionships. The third part addresses his professional difficulties as the result
of his excessive drinking, his confusing introduction to southern racism as
a child, which he explores intensely in his fiction, and his article in Playboy
“The Buttondown Terror of David Duke” based on a series of interviews with
his subject. In this article, Crews exposes the hazards of mistaking Duke’s
personal charm for anything other than dangerous racial rhetoric. Part 4
covers difficulties with film producers and literary agents, his battle to stop
drinking, the painful death of his mother, and the decline of his health. Ted
Geltner’s biography of Harry Crews reads like a novel from the southern
gothic tradition of grotesque yet humorous characters.
The field of children’s literature and humor found scholars examining
folklore, fairy tales, games, play, and illustration. In his introduction to
Conversations with Maurice Sendak, Peter C. Kunze pays tribute to the late
author and illustrator best known for his award-winning children’s book
Where the Wild Things Are. Kunze observes that Sendak was a “member of
the vanguard of writers, illustrators, and editors who understood that chil-
dren’s literature was, first and foremost, literature and that children as an
audience were sophisticated, intelligent, capable readers.”53 Kunze contends

that to discount Sendak as simply an illustrator or author of humorous books
for children is to miss the wide-ranging nature of his work in television,
opera, and theater and to overlook his illustrations for other authors of both
adult and children’s fiction. As Kunze notes, Sendak’s interest in nineteenth-
century authors Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson, as well as 1930s and
1940s Hollywood cinema and the Jewish folk culture of his heritage, contrib-
uted to his diverse aesthetic style and influenced his theories regarding chil-
dren’s fiction, humor, and art in general. Kunze organizes the book’s twelve
interviews chronologically to demonstrate Sendak’s changing attitudes and
thoughts on topics that range from important life events (such as the death
of his partner, the heart attack that led him to move from New York City to
Connecticut, and the loss of friends and family members) to discussions of
his own artistic style, the significance of art for children, his views on Walt
Disney and Dr. Seuss, as well as reality television. The interviews are at times
rather cynical but always informative and, more often than not, wickedly
funny. Kunze also includes a chronology of major events in Sendak’s life and
career and concludes the book with a bibliography of additional interviews,
Sendak’s publications with illustrations, and a list of illustrations for other
authors. Although Sendak contributed to the field of American art in a vari-
ety of ways, he is best remembered for his dedication to art for children,
most notably Where the Wild Things Are, which introduced countless chil-
dren to the world of art, humor, creativity, and reading. Kunze honors this
talented, witty, and complex man with this insightful volume.
Elena Massi also takes up children’s illustrations as well as a popular
anthology of reworked fairy tales presented through comic strips in her essay
“Storytelling in Contemporary Fairy Tales: Little Lit, Folklore, and Fairy Tales
Funnies by Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly.” Published in 2000, Little
Lit is a comic anthology featuring works by cartoonists and authors, and
Massi focuses on how in their versions of familiar fairy tales, the authors
represent the dynamics of their storytelling, framed as mediating between
modernity and tradition. The narrators of the new versions of stories such
as “Sleeping Beauty” and “The Gingerbread Man” perform communicative
functions through the use of second-person plural to address implied and
actual readers and to guide the reading lesson. Massi examines the function
of predictive literature to identify the ways in which real authors interact
with fictional narrators, characters, and imagined readers or listeners, as
well as the role the illustrations play in establishing genre. Massi contends
that “the result is a game of diegetic illusion, in which readers of Little Lit are
led to construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct their own fairy tale because of
the interconnection between the narrators’ utterances and the extradiegetic
voices of every story.”54 Massi also demonstrates how cognitive strategies
create meaning through an analysis of metanarrative commentaries in sto-
ries like “Fairy Tale Road Rage.”
Closing out this year’s review is a book on child’s play, specifically African
American children’s games and play in southern Louisiana from the 1960s
through the 2010s in Jeanne Pitre Soileau’s Yo’ Mama, Mary Mack, and
Boudreaux and Thibodeaux. Her project developed from studies conducted in
three cities, New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Lafayette, and she traces changes
to and continuities in games from the desegregation era and into the internet
age. Soileau examines oral narratives, songs, jokes, folktales, dancing, and teas-
ing and notes that “African American children’s games function in many ways.
They are a form of ephemeral artistic expression that conserves many elements
from past folkloric verbal art presentations. At the same time, African American
children’s folklore allows for much individual innovation within certain bound-
aries of their culture’s traditional strictures.”55 She examines the influence of the
media, the internet, and electronic games and the ways in which these plat-
forms have altered black culture and trends in games and play. She provides a
history of the project and chapters that address gender specific play. In “Boys’
Verbal Play,” Soileau considers playing the dozens, jokes, and stories, whereas,
in “Girls’ Verbal Play,” she notes the common practice of jump-rope rhymes
and ring games. She examines the role of the media in “The African American
Child and the Media” and the influence that MTV, Michael Jackson, and rap
music have had on dance styles and black culture. Her final chapter explores
the impact the internet and computer games have had on children’s play, and
she contends that the electronic age “has simply added, not superimposed, a
new play world for children” (111). She concludes the study with appendixes of
transcriptions of a number of interviews conducted with children. This study
makes an important contribution to children’s folklore research and provides a
compelling analysis of the ways in which integration, the media, and the inter-
net have altered the culture of games and play in southern Louisiana.
As the wide spectrum of topics and approaches to the study American
humor examined for 2016’s yearly review demonstrates, interest in the field
elicited attention to subjects ranging from children’s literature, games, and

play to more adult topics on sex, race, and gender. Politics and political cul-
ture inspired a number of insightful and often provocative projects, and with
the dramatic, and for many unexpected, changes in political leadership in
2016, satirists and humorous commentators are now heading into uncharted
territory, particularly with the growth of online forums like Twitter. Saturday
Night Live stars often simply repeat, verbatim, the comments of political
leaders, while serious newscasters commonly exclaim regarding day to day
events that “You just can’t make this stuff up!” The good news is that the
terrain for American humor studies is ripe for bold new approaches, and
laughter may be the best way to navigate our transformed political and cul-
tural landscape.
GRETCHEN MARTIN is a professor of American literature at the University

of Virginia’s College at Wise. Her most recent book is Dancing on the Color
Line: African American Tricksters in Nineteenth-Century American Literature.
N o te s
1. Lisa Guerrero, “Can I Live? Contemporary Black Satire and the State of Postmodern
Double Consciousness,” Studies in American Humor ser. 4, 2, no. 1 (2016): 266–79; 267,
hereafter cited parenthetically by page number.
2. Angus Fletcher, Comic Democracies: From Ancient Athens to the American Republic
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 7, hereafter cited parenthetically
by page number.
3. Maartje Janse, “‘Anti Societies Are Now All the Rage’: Jokes, Criticism, and Violence
in Response to the Transformation of American Reform, 1825–1835,” Journal of the Early
Republic 36, no. 2 (2016): 247–82; 255, hereafter cited parenthetically by page number.
4. Daniel Burge, “Manifest Mirth: The Humorous Critique of Manifest Destiny, 1846–
1858,” Western Historical Quarterly 47 (2016): 283–302; 285, hereafter cited parentheti-
cally by page number.
5. Michael D. Pierson, Lt. Spalding in Civil War Louisiana: A Union Officer’s Humor,
Privilege, and Ambition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016), 136, here-
after cited parenthetically by page number.
6. Beth Innocenti and Elizabeth Miller, “The Persuasive Force of Political Humor,”
Journal of Communication 66, no. 3 (2016): 366–85; 368, hereafter cited parenthetically
by page number.
7. Chris Rasmussen, “‘This thing has ceased to be a joke’: The Veterans of Future Wars
and the Meanings of Political Satire in the 1930s,” Journal of American History 103, no. 1
(2016): 84–106; 85, hereafter cited parenthetically by page number.
8. Elizabeth Benacka, Rhetoric, Humor, and the Public Sphere: From Socrates to Stephen
Colbert (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 21, hereafter cited parenthetically by page
number.
9. Jonathan P. Rossing, “A Sense of Humor for Civic Life: Toward a Strong Defense of
Humor,” Studies in American Humor ser. 4, 4, no. 1 (2016): 1–21; 7, hereafter cited paren-
thetically by page number.
10. Richard Mocarski and Sim Butler, “A Critical, Rhetorical Analysis of Man Therapy:
The Use of Humor to Frame Mental Health as Masculine,” Journal of Communication
Inquiry 40, no. 2 (2016): 128–44; 135, hereafter cited parenthetically by page number.
11. Aaryn L. Green and Annulla Linders, “The Impact of Comedy on Racial and Ethnic
Discourse,” Sociology Inquiry 86, no. 2 (2016): 241–69; 264–65, hereafter cited parenthet-
ically by page number.
12. Jonathan P. Rossing, “Emancipatory Racial Humor as Critical Public Pedagogy:
Subverting Hegemonic Racism,” Communication, Culture, and Critique 9, no. 4 (2016):
614–32; 615, hereafter cited parenthetically by page number.
13. Beretta E. Smith-Shomade, “‘Don’t play with God!’ Black Church, Play, and
Possibilities,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 18, nos. 2–4
14. Christine Cooper-Rompato, “The Basiliconthaumaturgist: Neologism, Magic, and
Mormonism,” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews 29, no. 4
15. Jonas Westover, The Shuberts and Their Passing Shows: The Untold Tale of Ziegfeld’s
Rivals (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), xxv, hereafter cited parenthetically by
page number.
16. Jessyka Finley, “Raunch and Redress: Interrogating Pleasure in Black Women’s
Stand-up Comedy,” Journal of Popular Culture 49, no. 4 (2016): 780–98; 782, hereafter
cited parenthetically by page number.
17. Miriam Chirico, “Performed Authenticity: Narrating the Self in the Comic
Monologues of David Sedaris, John Leguizamo, and Spalding Gray,” Studies in
American Humor ser. 4, 2, no. 2 (2016): 22–46; 31, hereafter cited parenthetically by
page number.
18. Anthony Slide, She Could be Chaplin! The Comedic Brilliance of Alice Howell (Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 2016), 7, hereafter cited parenthetically by page number.
19. Miriam J. Petty, Stealing the Show: African American Performers and Audiences in
1930s Hollywood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), 1, hereafter cited paren-
20. William Solomon, Slapstick Modernism: Chaplin to Kerouac to Iggy Pop (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2016), 2.
21. Victoria Kronz, “Women with Beards and Men in Frocks: Gender Nonconformity
in Modern American Film,” Sexuality and Culture 20, no. 1 (2016): 85–110; 90, hereafter
cited parenthetically by page number.
22. Raúl Peréz, “Brownface Minstrelsy: ‘José Jiménez,’ the Civil Rights Movement, and
the Legacy of Racist Comedy,” Ethnicities 16, no. 1 (2016): 40–67; 44, hereafter cited par-
enthetically by page number.
23. Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, Seinfeldia: How a Show About Nothing Changed
Everything (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016), 5, hereafter cited parenthetically by
page number.
24. Silas Kaine Ezell, Humor and Satire on Contemporary Television: Animation and the
American Joke (New York: Routledge, 2016), 2, hereafter cited parenthetically by page
number.
25. Marta Dynel, “Conceptualizing Conversational Humor as (Im)Politeness: The Case
of Film Talk,” Journal of Politeness Research 12, no. 1 (2016): 117–47; 119.
26. Jane Fife, “Peeling the Onion: Satire and the Complexity of Audience Response,”
Rhetoric Review 35, no. 4 (2016): 322–34; 326, hereafter cited parenthetically by page
number.
27. James E. Caron, “The Quantum Paradox of Truthiness: Satire, Activism, and the
Postmodern Condition,” Studies in American Humor ser. 4, 2, no. 2 (2016): 153–81; 153,
28. Joe Conway, “After Politics/After Television: Veep, Digimodernism, and the Running
Gag of Government,” Studies in American Humor ser. 4, 2, no. 2 (2016): 182–207; 184,
29. Marcus Paroske, “Pious Policymaking: The Participatory Satires of Stephen Colbert,”
Studies in American Humor ser. 4, 2, no. 2 (2016): 208–35; 213, hereafter cited parenthet-
ically by page number.
30. Jessyka Finley, “Black Women’s Satire as (Black) Postmodern Performance,” Studies
in American Humor ser. 4, 2, no. 2 (2016): 236–65; 237, hereafter cited parenthetically by
page number.
31. Azie Mira Dungey, “Meet Lizzie Mae,” September 2, 2013, www.askaslave.com/
season-one.html.
32. Layne Neeper, “‘To Soften the Heart’: George Saunders, Postmodern Satire, and
Empathy,” Studies in American Humor ser. 4, 2, no. 2 (2016): 280–99; 283, hereafter cited
parenthetically by page number.
33. Patricia Gherovici and Manya Steinkoler, Lacan, Psychoanalysis, and Comedy
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 2, hereafter cited parenthetically by page
number.
34. Magda Romanska and Allen Ackerman, eds., Reader in Comedy: An Anthology of
Theory and Criticism (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016), 49.
35. Gary Scharnhorst, “A Note on Samuel Clemens’ Nom de Guerre,” American Literary
Realism 48, no. 3 (2016): 277–79; 277.
36. Tracy Wuster, Mark Twain: American Humorist. (Columbia: University of Missouri
Press, 2016), 4, hereafter cited parenthetically by page number.
37. Lawrence Howe, “Language and Property in Connecticut Yankee, or What’s the Use
of Usufruct,” Mark Twain Annual 14 (2016): 20–40; 21, hereafter cited parenthetically by
page number.
38. Michael David MacBride, “The Quixotic Dream of Mark Twain’s Jim,” Mark Twain
Annual 14 (2016): 93–103; 100, hereafter cited parenthetically by page number.
39. John H. Davis, “Who Wears the Pants? Sexual Masquerade and Sexual Meaning in
‘An Awful Terrible . . . Medieval Romance,’” Mark Twain Annual 14 (2016): 104–13; 109,
40. Alex Beringer, “Humbug History: The Politics of Puffery in Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy,”
Mark Twain Annual 14 (2016): 114–26; 114, hereafter cited parenthetically by page number.
41. Liam Purdon, “Early Predecessors of the King and the Duke in Mark Twain’s
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” Mark Twain Journal 54, no. 1 (2016): 116–24; 116–17,
42. James W. Clark Jr., “Abraham Lincoln at the Phelps Farm,” Mark Twain Journal 54,
no.1 (2016): 140–45; 143.
43. Karen Scherzinger, “Caricature and Mrs Rooth’s Shawl in The Tragic Muse,” ANQ:
A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews 29, no. 3 (2016): 153–55; 153.
44. Ross K. Tangedal, “Refusing the Serious: Authorial Resistance in Ring Lardner’s
Prefaces for Scribner’s,” Authorship 5, no. 2 (2016): 1–11; 3, hereafter cited parenthetically
by page number.
45. Cliff Mak, “On Falling Fastidiously: Marianne Moore’s Slapstick Animals,” ELH 83,
no. 3 (2016): 873–98; 893, hereafter cited parenthetically by page number.
46. Frances McDonald, “‘Ha-Ha and Again Ha-Ha’: Laughter, Affect, and Emotion in
Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust,” American Literature 88, no. 3 (2016): 541–68;
542, hereafter cited parenthetically by page number.
47. Brent Little, “A Shout or a Nudge? Laughing at Old Tarwater and Miss Brodie,”
Flannery O’Connor Review 14 (2016): 14–27; 18, hereafter cited parenthetically by page
number.
48. João Paulo Guimarães, “Laughing for Survival: Jokes of Nature and Jokes of Language
in Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger,” Western American Literature 50, no. 4 (2016): 347–74; 361, here-
after cited parenthetically by page number.
49. Lee Konstantinou, Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2016), 6, hereafter cited parenthetically by page number.
50. Tison Pugh, Precious Perversions: Humor, Homosexuality, and the Southern Literary
Canon (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016), 11, hereafter cited paren-
51. Katherine Burnett, “Mold on the Cornbread: The Spore Paradigm of Southern
Studies,” PMLA 131, no. 1 (2016): 162–66; 162, hereafter cited parenthetically by page
number.
52. Ted Geltner, Blood, Bone, and Marrow: A Biography of Harry Crews (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 2016), 5, hereafter cited parenthetically by page number.
53. Peter C. Kunze, Conversations with Maurice Sendak (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2016), viii.
54. Elena Massi, “Storytelling in Contemporary Fairy Tales: Little Lit, Folklore, and Fairy
Tales Funnies by Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly,” Marvels and Tales 30, no. 2 (2016):
309–27; 318.
55. Jeanne Pitre Soileau, Yo’ Mama, Mary Mack, and Boudreaux and Thibodeaux:
Louisiana Children’s Folklore and Play (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016), 8,
B i b li o g r a p h y
Armstrong, Jennifer. Seinfeldia: How a Show About Nothing Changed Everything. New
York: Simon and Schuster, 2016.
Bader, Robert S. Four of the Three Musketeers: The Marx Brothers on Stage. Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 2016.
Barra, Luca, and Chiara Bucaria. Taboo Comedy: Television and Controversial Humor.
Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
Bell, Nancy, and Anne Pomerantz. Humor in the Classroom: A Guide for Language Teachers
and Educators. New York: New York University Press, 2016.
Benacka, Elizabeth. Rhetoric, Humor, and the Public Sphere: From Socrates to Stephen
Colbert. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016.
Beringer, Alex. “The Politics of Puffery in Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy.” Mark Twain Annual
14 (2016): 114-26.
Bird, John. “And Then Think of Me! Huckleberry Finn and Cognitive Dissonance.” Mark
Twain Annual 14 (2016): 138–49.
Bruno, Tim. “Nat Turner After 9/11: Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner.” Journal of American Studies
50, no. 4 (2016): 923–51.
Burge, Daniel. “Manifest Mirth: The Humorous Critique of Manifest Destiny, 1846-1858.”
Western Historical Quarterly 47, no. 3 (2016): 283–302.
Burnett, Katharine A. “Mold on the Cornbread: The Spore Paradigm of Southern Studies.”
PMLA 131, no. 1 (2016): 162–66.
Caron, James E. “The Quantum Paradox of Truthiness: Satire, Activism, and the
Postmodern Condition.” Studies in American Humor ser. 4, 2, no. 2 (2016): 153–81.
Chirico, Miriam. “Performed Authenticity: Narrating the Self in the Comic Monologues
of David Sedaris, John Leguizamo, and Spalding Gray.” Studies in American Humor ser.
4, 2, no. 2 (2016): 22–46.
Clark, James W. “Abraham Lincoln at the Phelps Farm.” Mark Twain Journal 54, no.1
(2016): 140–45.
Conway, Joe. “After Politics/After Television: Veep, Digimodernism, and the Running Gag
of Government.” Studies in American Humor ser. 4, 2, no. 2 (2016): 182–207.
Cooper-Rompato, Christine. “The Basiliconthaumaturgist: Neologism, Magic, and
Mormonism.” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews 29, no. 4
(2016): 237–41.
Davis, John H. “Who Wears the Pants? Sexual Masquerade and Sexual Meaning in ‘An
Awful Terrible . . . Medieval Romance.” Mark Twain Annual 14 (2016): 104–13.
Eastman, Susan Lyn. “Mark Twain’s ‘The War Prayer’ in Film and Social Media.” Mark
Twain Annual 14 (2016): 78–92.
Elmore, Jenifer, and C. Dale Girardi. “Reversing the Curse: Slavery, Child Abuse, and
Huckleberry Finn.” American Literary Realism 49, no. 1 (2016): 1–20.
Eutsey, Dwayne. “Devil-Lore and Avatars: Moncure Conway’s Likely Influence on No. 44,
The Mysterious Stranger.” Mark Twain Journal 54, no. 1 (2016): 95–115.
Ezell, Silas Kaine. Humor and Satire on Contemporary Television: Animation and the
American Joke. New York: Routledge, 2016.
Fatima, Zohra. “Humor, Satire and Verbal Parody in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:
A Relevance Theoretic Approach.” NUML Journal of Critical Inquiry 14, no. 2 (2016):
38–53.
Fife, Jane. “Peeling the Onion: Satire and the Complexity of Audience Response.” Rhetoric
Review 35, no. 4 (2016): 322–34.
Finley, Jessyka. “Black Women’s Satire as (Black) Postmodern Performance.” Studies in
American Humor ser. 4, 2, no. 2 (2016): 236–65.
———. “Raunch and Redress: Interrogating Pleasure in Black Women’s Stand-up Comedy.”
Journal of Popular Culture 49, no. 4 (2016): 780–98.
Fletcher, Angus. Comic Democracies: From Ancient Athens to the American Republic.
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016.
Galat, Joshua R. “‘The nameless something’: Authorial Suicide and the True Body of the
Autobiography of Mark Twain.” Mark Twain Journal 54, no. 1 (2016): 33–67.
Geltner, Ted. Blood, Bone, and Marrow: A Biography of Harry Crews. Athens: University
of Georgia Press, 2016.
Gherovici, Patricia, and Manya Steinkoler, eds. Lacan, Psychoanalysis, and Comedy. New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
Green, Aaryn L., and Annulla Linders, “The Impact of Comedy on Racial and Ethnic
Discourse.” Sociology Inquiry 86, no.2 (2016): 241–69.
Griffin, Benjamin. “Mark Twain’s Apocrypha: Infant Jesus and Young Satan.” Mark Twain
Annual 14 (2016): 7–9.
Guerrero, Lisa. “Can I Live? Contemporary Black Satire and the State of Postmodern
Double Consciousness.” Studies in American Humor ser. 4, 2, no.1 (2016): 266–79.
Guimarães, João Paulo. “Laughing for Survival: Joes of Nature and Joes of Language in Ed
Dorn’s Gunslinger.” Western American Literature 50, no. 4 (2016): 347–74.
Howe, Lawrence. “Language and Property in Connecticut Yankee, or What’s the Use of
Usufruct?” Mark Twain Annual, 14 (2016): 20–40.
Janse, Maartje. “‘Anti Societies Are Now All the Rage’: Jokes, Criticism, and Violence in
Response to the Transformation of American Reform, 1825–1835.” Journal of the Early
Republic 36, no. 2 (2016): 247–82.
Johnson, Kara A. “Two Stories at the Same Time: Silent Narratives of Enslavement in
Pudd’nhead Wilson.” Mark Twain Annual 14 (2016): 41–55.
Jungyoon, Chang. “The Duplicity of ‘Honesty’: Mark Twain’s ‘The Man That Corrupted
Hadleyburg.’” British and American Fiction 23, no. 1 (2016): 79–98.
Kassam, Hamada. “Huck Finn as the Fictive Son of George W. Harris’s Sut Lovingood.”
Mark Twain Journal 54, no. 1 (2016): 125–39.
———. “Tom Sawyer Said He Was ‘a Stranger from Hicksville, Ohio, and His Name Was
William Thompson.’” Mark Twain Annual 14 (2016): 127–37.
Kiskis, Michael J. Mark Twain at Home: How Family Shaped Twain’s Fiction. Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press, 2016.
Konstantinou, Lee. Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2016.
Kronz, Victoria. “Women with Beards and Men in Frocks: Gender Nonconformity in
Modern American Film.” Sexuality and Culture 20, no. 1 (2016): 85–110.
Kunze, Peter C., ed. Conversations with Maurice Sendak. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2016.
Leatham, Jeremy. “‘I promise the public no amusement’: Governor Mark Twain, Governor
James W. Nye, and the Third Annual Message.” Mark Twain Journal 54, no. 1 (2016):
68–94.
Little, Brent. “A Shout or a Nudge? Laughing at Old Tarwater and Miss Brodie.” Flannery
O’Connor Review 14 (2016): 14–27.
MacBride, Michael David. “The Quixotic Dream of Mark Twain’s Jim.” Mark Twain
Annual, 14 (2016): 93–103.
MacDonnell, Kevin. “Mark Twain Kills a Boy.” Mark Twain Journal 54, no. 1 (2016): 17–32.
MacDonnell, Kevin, and R. Kent Rasmussen, eds. Mark Twain and Youth: Studies in His
Life and Writings. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.
Mak, Cliff. “On Falling Fastidiously: Marianne Moore’s Slapstick Animals.” ELH 83, no. 3
(2016): 873–98.
Massi, Elena. “Storytelling in Contemporary Fairy Tales: Little Lit, Folklore, and Fairy
Tales Funnies by Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly.” Marvels and Tales 30, no. 2
(2016): 309–27.
McCann, Bryan J. “Proletarian Blackface: Appropriation and Class Struggle in Mike
Judge’s Office Space.” Communication, Culture, and Critique 9 (2016): 362–378.
McDonald, Frances. “‘Ha-Ha and Again Ha-Ha’: Laughter, Affect, and Emotion in
Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust.” American Literature 88, no. 3 (2016): 541–68.
Mocarski, Richard, and Sim Butler. “A Critical, Rhetorical Analysis of Man Therapy:
The Use of Humor to Frame Mental Health as Masculine.” Journal of Communication
Inquiry 40, no. 2 (2016): 128–44.
Neeper, Layne. “‘To Soften the Heart’: George Saunders, Postmodern Satire, and Empathy.”
Studies in American Humor ser. 4, 2, no. 2 (2016): 280–99.
Oring, Elliott. Joking Asides: The Theory, Analysis, and Aesthetics of Humor. Boulder:
University Press of Colorado, 2016.
Paroske, Marcus. “Pious Policymaking: The Participatory Satires of Stephen Colbert.”
Studies in American Humor ser. 4, 2, no. 2 (2016): 208–235.
Pérez, Raúl. “Brownface Minstrelsy: ‘José Jiménez,’ the Civil Rights Movement, and the
Legacy of Racist Comedy.” Ethnicities 16, no. 1 (2016): 40–67.
Petty, Miriam J. Stealing the Show: African American Performers and Audiences in 1930s
Hollywood. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016.
Pierson, Michael D. Lt. Spalding in Civil War Louisiana: A Union Officer’s Humor, Privilege,
and Ambition. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016.
Pitre, Jeanne Soileau. Yo’ Mama, Mary Mack, and Boudreaux and Thibodeaux: Louisiana
Children’s Folklore and Play. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016.
Pugh, Tison. Precious Perversions: Humor, Homosexuality, and the Southern Literary
Canon. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016.
Purdon, Liam. “Early Predecessors of the King and the Duke in Mark Twain’s Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn.” Mark Twain Journal 54, no. 1 (2016): 116–24.
Rasmussen, Chris. “‘This thing has ceased to be a joke’: The Veterans of Future Wars and
the Meanings of Political Satire in the 1930s.” Journal of American History 103, no.1
(2016): 84–106.
Romanska, Magda. “Emancipatory Racial Humor as Critical Public Pedagogy: Subverting
Hegemonic Racism.” Communication, Culture, and Critique 9, no. 4 (2016): 614–32.
———, ed. Reader in Comedy: An Anthology of Theory and Criticism. London: Bloomsbury
Methuen Drama, 2016.
Scalia, Bill. “The Mysterious Stranger: A Religious Allegory for a Post-Christian Age.”
Mark Twain Annual 14 (2016): 56–77.
Scharnhorst, Gary. “A Note on Samuel Clemens’ Nom de Guerre.” American Literary
Realism 48, no. 3 (2016): 277–79.
Scherzinger, Karen. “Caricature and Mrs. Rooth’s Shawl in The Tragic Muse.” ANQ: A
Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews 29, no. 3 (2016): 153–55.
Slide, Anthony. She Could Be Chaplin! The Comedic Brilliance of Alice Howell. Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 2016.
Smith-Shomade, Beretta E. “‘Don’t play with God!’: Black Church, Play, and Possibilities.”
Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 18, nos. 2–4 (2016):
321–37.
Solomon, William. Slapstick Modernism: Chaplin to Kerouac to Iggy Pop. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2016.
Takeuchi, Yasuhiro. “Tracking Twain: The Unfulfilled Pursuit in Mark Twain’s Detective
Fiction.” American Literary Realism 48, no. 2 (2016): 166–82.
Tangedal, Ross K. “Refusing the Serious: Authorial Resistance in Ring Lardner’s Prefaces
for Scribner’s.” Authorship 5, no. 2 (2016): 1-11.
von Bernuth, Ruth. How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk
Tradition. New York: New York University Press, 2016.
Westover, Jonas. The Shuberts and Their Passing Shows: The Untold Tale of Ziegfeld’s Rivals.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Williams, Elizabeth C., and Chris McMillian. Lift Your Spirits: A Celebratory History of
Cocktail Culture in New Orleans. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016.
Wuster, Tracy. Mark Twain: American Humorist. Columbia: University of Missouri Press,
2016.

2018 Martin

Încărcat de

Informații document

Drepturi de autor

Formate disponibile

Partajați acest document

Partajați sau inserați document

Opțiuni de partajare

Vi se pare util acest document?

Este necorespunzător acest conținut?

Drepturi de autor:

Formate disponibile

2018 Martin

Încărcat de

Drepturi de autor:

Formate disponibile

The Year's Work in American Humor Studies, 2016

Studies in American Humor, Volume 4, Number 2, 2018, pp. 216-283 (Article)

Published by Penn State University Press

For additional information about this article

A B S T R A C T:“The Year’s Work in American Humor Studies,” an annual feature of Studies

KEYWORDS: humor studies, American humor

Studies on humor, humorists, wit, comedy, and laughter in American culture

Studies in American Humor, Vol. 4, No. 2, 2018

Politics and Culture

crises with plots that present problem-solving resolutions. Drawing on new

your-own-domestic-duties-society” (267, 266). Janse also examines more

tended to overlook those who challenged this ideology, particularly critics

and masculinity through behavior that signified manliness. He bragged

surged again in the 1960s “as writers, filmmakers, comedians, cartoonists,

that “a potential solution to the problem of immigrant labor would be to

In his “strong defense of humor,” Rossing presents a compelling case that

with absurdly exaggerated signs of manliness, such as sports trophies and

for public consumption and the (excessive) accouterments [sic] of success as

analyzes the careers of 1970s comedienne LaWanda Page and a number of

self-deprecation as a comic tool to reveal a private self in conflict with the

perilous and often hilarious life stories in navigating between an authentic

While Hollywood could be an unwelcoming environment for women in

however successful such performances may have been in increasing a single

reformers’ views of the iconography of black womanhood. Bill “Bojangles”

a study of a process of cultural transformation that, beginning in the early

and Satire on Contemporary Television identifies many points of similarity

Drawing on Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, as well as

1. Satire is marked by a methodological paradox, one committed

ridicule, its claim to pursue truth as an act of parrhesia (speaking truth

political corruption. House of Cards character Frank Underwood’s confes-

“participatory satire.” The transition from stage to real-world locales required

She examines the performances on Saturday Night Live of Danitra Vance

The year’s work in literary studies adds a number of projects to the

character and gender analyses. Additional authors under review include

Gherovici and Stenkoler organize their collection of Lacanian

includes works by Samuel Butler, Molière, William Congreve, John Dryden,

by discussing the “meanings” of Mark Twain, I am referring to the discussion

a simple unveiling of Mark Twain’s supposedly true nature as a literary artist,

Lawrence Howe examines Twain’s polysemic use of the word “usufruct”

Sancho Panza. MacBride provides an extensive overview of scholarship that

assaulted military women,” which adds contemporary relevance to Twain’s

way to lampoon Thompson’s proslavery and secessionist politics. Kassam

James W. Clark Jr. also explores a document he cannot specifically link to

“himself in print” (10). As Tangedal’s reading of the prefaces demonstrates,

Deleuze, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Catherine Clément, and others,

novel ends, however, by reaffirming Tarwater’s moral c­haracter and his

O’Connor’s sharply dialectical attitude towards the presumed hostility of her

In contrast to O’Connor, Spark uses an analogical approach to demonstrate

to emphasize hyperbole, uses onomatopoeia to build suspense, and inserts

In chapter 1, Pugh examines Tennessee Williams’s camp humor in A Streetcar

and homophobia that marginalize nonwhite and homosexual groups in the

audience were sophisticated, intelligent, capable readers.”53 Kunze contends

elicited attention to subjects ranging from children’s literature, games, and

GRETCHEN MARTIN is a professor of American literature at the University

S-ar putea să vă placă și

novel ends, however, by reaffirming Tarwater’s moral character and his