How the Other Half Laughs: The Comic Sensibility in American Culture, 1895-1920

Abstract

They say you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but the cover of How the Other Half Laughs by Jean Lee Cole suggests that what lies inside will be well worth looking into. The cover illustration—a loving parody of Richard Outcault's Hogan's Alley by Rudolph Dirks using characters from his own Katzenjammer Kids—is proof itself that this is the work of an author with a good knowledge of the early years of American comic strips and an interest in making connections that go beyond the merely obvious.What is obvious from the outset is that How the Other Half Laughs is very readable. Cole has an engaging way of presenting new concepts and information that makes the reader feel like a partner in her process of discovery. Her assessment of the work that her book adapts its title from makes it quite clear that this is a particular goal of hers. While appreciative of the efforts taken by Jacob Riis in his 1890 exposé of slum life, How the Other Half Lives, she is not shy about taking Riis to task for his aloof and condescending manner of presentation. For Cole, Riis's “acute desire to manipulate and separate” (15) himself from his working-class subjects led to his “depicting them from a position of superiority” (14).There are more helpful and hopeful ways, Cole believes, to give a sense of the lives led by the strangers in America's midst during the great wave of immigration that began in the latter years of the nineteenth century. One of these is an appreciation of what struck these new Americans as funny about life in general and about the new places they were living in in particular. The core of Cole's argument is that a top-down view of the immigrant as the hapless butt of jokes is misplaced; what is called for instead is an inclusive approach that treats such jokes “as expressions of solidarity, commiseration, and communal empowerment” (7).After outlining general observations about this ethos—the “comic sensibility” of the book's title—in the introductory chapter, Cole goes on to offer case studies that illustrate its integrating power. She combines a series of individual pen portraits of the lives and works of artists and writers who brought together disparate elements of culture to build up a larger picture of early twentieth-century America as a society defined by liminality, contestation, and flux. Within this fluid context, smaller “sites of negotiation and play” emerged, and with them opportunities for the old and the new to mix with and catalyze one another (69).As the cover of How the Other Half Laughs indicates, one of the most significant of these informal cultural laboratories was itself a new development: the newspaper comics section. The vitality and vibrancy of the down-to-earth and earthier humor of the “funnies” is personified by cartoonist George Luks, a personage who could have drawn himself right into the pages of Damon Runyon. Luks's newspaper comics display the characteristic early conventions of the art form: staged as if framed by a proscenium, they are exercises in organized mayhem that are equally indebted to the traditions of magazine cartooning and vaudeville. It can be hard to find a main focal point in such a welter of verbal byplay and physical horseplay, but sheer unbridled “gleeful chaos” is the point of the exercise, as well as a considerable part of its charm (54).Calling the sensibility displayed by Luks and his fellow cartoonists “comic” does not imply that it was confined to the comics pages or even to the world of “low” popular culture. To demonstrate this, Cole employs one serendipitously positioned artist, William Glackens, as a sort of tour guide who introduces the reader to his various acquaintances in the interlocking circles he traveled in. She could have hardly chosen better. Glackens's artistic pedigree is elite, progressive, and rarefied: his greatest claims to fame are that he was a member of the Ashcan School of painters and the chair of the 1913 Armory Show that served as the American coming-out party for modernist and abstract art. At the same time, he was a significant contributor to popular culture, illustrating magazine stories about New York's Jewish, German, and Irish immigrant experience by Bruno Lessing, Abraham Cahan, Myra Kelly, and Edward Raphael Lipsett.Lessing, Cahan, Kelly, and Lipsett are the subjects of a chapter in which Cole outlines the development of a new kind of dialect humor based on the immigrant experience, which may have taken some cues from the dialect humor of blackface minstrelsy but in fact was something else entirely. Rather than simply mocking the untutored speech patterns of the “other,” it also made sport of the assumptions and pretensions behind the very idea of “proper English.” To document the slam-bang violence done to English in the name of comedy, Cole drops in on vaudeville and burlesque theater, giving readers a sampling of the contributions to this linguistic deconstruction made by Weber and Fields and other Jewish and “Dutch” comic doubletalk acts.In her concluding chapter, Cole concentrates on another pair that will be familiar to comic strip history buffs but situates them in a context that may not be quite so familiar. Although we now know about George Herriman's Creole ancestry, many of his contemporaries did not, and while its possible impact on his legendary Krazy Kat has been well worked over, a part of his career that has received less exhaustive study concerns his pre-Krazy portrayals of the Black experience. Cole's look at Herriman's short-lived strip Musical Mose and his sports-page cartoons about boxer Jack Johnson reveal the cartoonist's outlook on race relations to be sometimes unconventional, sometimes self-contradictory, and always thought provoking. Not encumbered with the same personal baggage as Herriman, his colleague James Swinnerton nonetheless produced work that evinced a similar ambivalence toward questions of race. Better known for The Canyon Kiddies, Little Jimmy, and the prototypical “funny animal” strip Mr. Jack, Swinnerton also drew Sam and His Laugh, a burlesque on racial hierarchies whose titular character's sense of the absurd routinely caused him to be stripped of employment but never of dignity or hope.It's a shame that Cole's survey of the comic sensibility has to end in 1920, before the full flowering of Herriman's creative powers: much could be made of the various ways Herriman interrogates race and ethnicity in the panels of Krazy Kat through later additions to the strip's cast of characters. Cole's discussion of Herriman's understanding of his own African American origins could have been enhanced by a look at Krazy's Uncle Tomkat. Krazy's acquaintances the Chinese Mock Duck and the occasionally seen but always immanent Irish brick merchant Kolin Kelly also have stories to tell about their creator's understanding of the American melting pot.Other lines of investigation not pursued in How the Other Half Laughs offer opportunities for equally fruitful study. The extent to which Herriman's use of line and composition in Krazy Kat drifted toward an expressionist aesthetic invites a comparison between his work and that of Lyonel Feininger, creator of Wee Willie Winkie's World and later a master of expressionism on canvas. Much remains to be said as well about the different ways the stars of the early comics pages made the move to the silent screen. Animated versions of strips such as Mutt and Jeff, Happy Hooligan, and Krazy Kat laid the groundwork for Felix the Cat and later made-for-animation cartoon superstars, while live-action adaptations of Bringing Up Father and others started a tradition that continues in today's Marvel and DC superhero blockbusters. In a brief epilogue to How the Other Half Laughs, Cole suggests that a comparison of the effects of prejudice and marginalization on the comic sensibilities of Blacks and women during the twentieth century's opening decades is a topic requiring further attention. Noting the lingering and devastating effects of both slavery and patriarchy, Cole ends on a note of hope that continues to resound through Black and feminist humor: “The comic sensibility provides a way to respond to trauma … through shared recognition of the forces that have caused those emotions to accumulate” (151). No matter which group or groups she sets her focus on, I look forward to Cole's further explorations of the comic sensibility as “a performative act” (7) that reveals “common wisdom by cracking wise” (25).