The Editor's Drawers

Abstract

Dear Readers:Three things: first, we're very happy to release this special issue on empire and American humor. When Judith Lee first mentioned the Quarry Farm symposium that she was organizing on the topic and asked about the prospect of a special issue, we didn't have to think twice about taking her up on the opportunity. After a little discussion, we decided collectively that she should write an essay that would lay out the topic in a way that established the historical and critical premise while still providing plenty of latitude for humor scholars inclined to follow the lead in directions that may not have been anticipated. The breadth and depth of her “American Humor and Matters of Empire: A Proposal and Invitation” successfully launched this multiform project.1 The symposium in October 2020 was a day-long event, rich with diverse and deeply insightful presentations that spurred probing conversations, all of which proved the merits of Judith's vision. Her introduction here and the four articles on the topic bring that vision to fruition. Nonetheless, we hope that these efforts are not the end of the matter. We encourage our readers to continue to ponder how the complexity of American identity and its role in transnational contexts continue to provoke varieties of laughter.Second, the success of this special issue (and I don't think I'm jumping the gun in declaring it a success) bodes well for our next one, tentatively titled “Black Laughs Matter.” In adopting and revising the name of the most recent social justice movement, we hope to signal both the solidarity of the American Humor Studies Association (AHSA) with the Black Lives Matter movement (#BLM)—as articulated in the statement of commitment posted on the AHSA website in the summer of 2020—and the importance of African American humor as distinct from the genre known as “black comedy,” an ambiguous term that perhaps should be replaced with the label “dark comedy.” We anticipate an issue of essays that focuses on African American humor and its explorations of the experience of race in the United States, emphasizing the ways in which comedy articulates cultural identity and promotes social justice. Our call for submissions encourages critical investigations from any period and of any form from literary and popular culture—in print, performance, cinema, or new media—and we hope to include humor that connects to the rise of the #BLM movement. Although the deadline for submissions was posted as October 1, 2021, we would be happy to continue to receive essays that fit the topic. Should the volume of submissions exceed the space for the special issue, subsequent issues of the journal can accommodate the abundance of good work that we hope to see.Finally, we want to take the opportunity to remember Tom Inge, a founding member of the AHSA and a former editor of this journal, who died in May of this year. Tom earned the esteem of members in the humor studies community for his pioneering work on nonliterary comic art and, perhaps even more importantly, his generosity to other scholars, especially emerging scholars. Those of us who knew him or were fortunate enough to have his support know the value of his contributions to the field, to AHSA, and to StAH; indeed, all humor scholars, regardless of whether you ever met him, have benefited from his groundbreaking scholarship and support to the discipline.Until then, I remainYr Obdt Svt,—LH