The Year’s Work in American Humor Studies, 2021

Abstract

A funny thing happened on the way to this essay–we decided to eliminate over one hundred possible entries! Why would we do such a thing? Because, dear reader, the scholarship in humor studies published in 2021 is an embarrassment of riches. Across and within disciplines, scholars are exploring fascinating questions related to humor in diverse contexts. From discerning unique rhetorical features of a stand-up comic’s discourse to generating new humor theory, humor scholars are a prolific and provocative bunch. As has been the case in recent years, two particularly popular areas of humor research are online humor (especially memes), and humor in films and television shows. Additionally, in 2021, many scholars focused on humor about Donald Trump while others offered close readings of stand-up comedy, specifically regarding race. With the interests of our readership in mind, we have chosen to curate those publications we believe to be of greatest heuristic value in the following nine categories: literature, satire and political humor, performance, film and television, new media, empirical studies, visual humor, jokes, and theory. You’re welcome.Scholarly treatments of humor in literature and folklore in 2021 spanned a wide variety of authors, subjects, and genres. Books and articles covered not only the usual comic-canonical suspects such as Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, Philip Roth, and Ralph Ellison but also Yankee yarns, African American folktales, vernacular newspaper columnists, and modernist poetry.We begin with Twain, laughing in the face of some eternal American verities: death, the intergenerational wealth it creates, and the lawyers who monetize it. First, in “Reading and Editing ‘the Exquisitely Bad,’” Lisa McGunigal examines Twain’s joyous takedowns in private marginalia as Samuel Clemens and in publications as Mark Twain of bad poetry, especially elegiac obituary poetry, which was extremely popular in the nineteenth century as a form of public mourning. Throughout his adult life, Clemens devoured poor writing with “pleasurable disgust,” even going so far as to assemble what he called his “Library of Literary Hogwash,” a collection of bad writing from multiple genres and decades (147). McGunigal argues that this penchant for critiquing bad poems demonstrates “a substantial effort to undercut the falsity of emotion presented in these poems,” adding that he derided “poetry that he felt failed to capture sincere emotion” and in fact “used the power of his humor to enlighten readers to its pretense, as opposed to genuine grief” (140). These comic critiques, McGunigal suggests, speak to suspicion on Clemens’s part about the ability of popular poetry as a genre to accurately portray nuanced emotions.In “Mark Twain and Estate Planning,” Lawrence Howe studies Twain’s always suspicious and often satirical treatments of inheritance and its negative personal and social consequences. Howe shows, for instance, how several of the earlier short stories parody the illogicality of legal discourse around inheritance, whereas the ending of Pudd’nhead Wilson highlights the precarity and capriciousness of estate law. Howe concludes that Twain’s narrative depictions of inheritance amount to “cautionary tales whose discursive heterogeneity admonish us to be careful what we wish for” (136).J. Mark Baggett’s “Mark Twain’s Legal Burlesques” similarly explores Twain’s comic approach to legal contracts, situating his comic deployment of legal language in writings from his time in Nevada through the end of his life within a nineteenth-century legal reform movement seeking to “democratize and demythologize legal language” (96). Baggett, a retired professor of English and law, documents Twain’s intricate familiarity with law and legalese and analyzes several examples of his legal humor from shorter burlesques to courtroom scenes in his novels. According to Baggett, Twain consistently highlights the intermingling of “lawyer-talk and the vernacular” (107) in legal writing, not just mocking its extravagance but also aiming to “demystify the law” (105).Literary recovery is Gary Scharnhorst’s project in “Mark Twain’s Lost ‘Burlesque Hamlet,’” which upends the critical consensus that Twain abandoned this project at an early stage. Scharnhorst uses newspaper evidence to show that the burlesque play was completed under the title “Hamlet’s Brother.” With the help of a widely reprinted 1881 Detroit Free Press review of a page proof of the completed script, Scharnhorst pieces together elements of the burlesque play. In it, Twain gives Hamlet a mischievous and energetic younger brother, William or Billy, who unsettles Shakespeare’s storyline by meddling in Hamlet’s romance with Ophelia, impersonating Claudius’s ghost, offering commentary on events and other characters in nineteenth-century slang, and pulling, in the words of the Detroit Free Press reviewer, “indescribably ludicrous” “pranks” (276). Though the burlesque was scheduled for a run in New York during the winter of 1881–82, it was never produced or published.James E. Caron’s essay “Gendered Comic Traditions” treats an author who should be nearly as canonical as Mark Twain: the hugely popular mid-nineteenth-century writer Sara Willis Parton (a.k.a. Fanny Fern). In this suggestive essay in Studies in American Humor’s special issue on humor and empire, Caron builds on Judith Yaross Lee’s introductory insights (detailed elsewhere in this essay) by exploring how Fern’s humorous columns both draw on and depart from antecedents in British periodical writing. Caron traces a nineteenth-century transatlantic genealogy of comic belles lettres that derives from the “amiable and domesticated” (279) satirist stance from the English tradition of the gentleman humorist that was adopted and adapted by American humorist and editor Lewis Gaylord Clark. Fern embraced this tradition, Caron argues, but because “the aesthetic of comic belles lettres, with its theoretical gendered accommodation for the figure of the amiable satirist, does not tolerate her disruption of social norms in the midcentury United States” (292), she had to modify it: the result was “a different genealogical line” through a “strong woman’s point of view” that anticipates twentieth-century feminist theorist Hélène Cixous’s figure of the “laughing Medusa” (279). In the essay’s final section, Caron identifies a litany of women satirists who inherited what he calls “the Medusa branch” of the comic belles lettres tradition (297), including twentieth- and twenty-first century writers and comics Alice Duer Miller, Dorothy Parker, Edna Ferber, Mary McCarthy, Phyllis Diller, Sarah Silverman, and Amy Schumer.Stefanie Schäfer undertakes a different type of transatlantic comic genealogy in her book-length study of the comic Yankee, Yankee Yarns: Storytelling and the Invention of the National Body in Nineteenth-Century American Culture. Schäfer consciously expands and updates Constance Rourke’s 1931 work on a cultural character who was, paradoxically, simultaneously a provincial figure and a national representative. Examining nineteenth-century depictions of the Yankee as disseminated through a wide range of media, including literature, theater, and visual culture, Schäfer frames the figure as a “transnational product of literary nationalist narratives” (15). Chapter 1 traces the birth and development of Brother Jonathan as an allegorical character whose persona is interwoven with that of the British figure John Bull through readings of popular fables and mock-epic poems as well as more canonical works by James Kirke Paulding and Washington Irving. This chapter also charts the emergence of the related Uncle Sam character in the cartoons of Thomas Nast and others that appeared in popular humor periodicals. Chapter 2 focuses on the antebellum stage Yankee in American and British plays from 1787 through 1846. In the American context, Schäfer argues, the stage Yankee links village and city and fuses “the Jeffersonian yeoman farmer with the Jacksonian self-made man,” yielding a “country rube” who helps to create a national imaginary onstage (90). Chapter 3 considers the figure of the Yankee peddler in literary depictions by James Fenimore Cooper, Thomas Haliburton (“Sam Slick”), and others as an “agent and hyperbole for U.S. capitalism” (16). Chapter 4 takes up the figure of the Yankee schoolmaster in regionalist novels and poems by Sarah Hale, John Greenleaf Whittier, and others and argues that this figure is a mobile embodiment of New England homespun identity. In all his various incarnations, Schäfer demonstrates, the Yankee establishes a particular and peculiar American identity through the practice of yarn spinning.Mary M. Cronin analyzes representations of another transatlantic comic figure, the Irishman, in the popular, late-nineteenth-century humor periodical Texas Siftings. Cronin argues in “Gilded Age Humor as a Moral Force,” a chapter in the edited collection Politics, Culture, and the Irish American Press, 1784–1963, that in a time when antagonistic and pejorative comic stereotypes of Irish immigrants were rampant, Texas Siftings produced “an often-sympathetic portrayal of the Irish” (136). Although the magazine still trafficked in prevailing stereotypes, it did so “to illuminate political and social hypocrisies of the time, as well as to highlight what the editors believed were the correct behaviors expected of immigrants and native-born Americans” (136). Texas Siftings also delivered humorous barbs regarding British policies towards the Irish. Cronin contextualizes Texas Siftings—which has been largely ignored by scholars despite its vast influence and popularity—by documenting its place within the proliferation of American humor magazines during the last two decades of the 1800s. Cronin’s chapter serves simultaneously as important comic recovery and as a musing on the often-ambiguous political possibilities of comic caricatures and stereotyped, essentializing humor.John Wharton Lowe also considers newspaper humorists in “Eugene Field, Finley Peter Dunne, and George Ade,” a chapter in the edited volume Chicago: A Literary History. Lowe connects these late nineteenth-century Chicago humor columnists via their shared “celebration and use of dialect and slang,” which were traditionally markers of inferiority” but become “in their hands . . . a sign of a new age, linguistic creativity, and the energy of a rising metropolis” (138). Lowe offers brief literary biographies of all three writers as well as representative readings of excerpts of their writing. Lowe’s chapter resuscitates some important comic and satiric work of largely forgotten humorists from the heartland whose jokes cloaked “jeremiad[s]” about social conditions and the plight of the working classes in the city of broad shoulders (149).Christopher Petrakos studies a different strand of largely ignored late nineteenth-century humor writing in “Comedy Gold,” which considers how settlers and visitors on the Alaska-Yukon border in the decade before the gold rush used humor to set social boundaries in the absence of official state authority. Petrakos considers the travel writing of frontiersman William Ogilvie and Chicago Record reporter turned miner William Douglas Johns, arguing that both writers leverage humor to create shared laughter among insiders—mostly those who were seen to have adapted successfully to frontier living—and to demarcate outsiders—mostly newcomers who were more connected to the regulated civilization they had left behind as well as tourists, Native Americans, Black Americans, and women. Petrakos draws on Bakhtinian notions of leveling humor, comic spectacle, and the banquet to describe Yukon frontier humor, especially practical jokes. This well-historicized essay on humor and imperialism demonstrates just how central humor was to life on the northern frontier, with “extraordinary power to create and define community and establish insider and outsider status” (103).In “African-American Humor and Trust,” philosopher Michael Barber also considers literary humor in terms of in-groups and out-groups. In attempting to summarize African American comedy and its dangerous relationship to white audiences from slavery through Richard Pryor, Barber risks overgeneralization, but his exploration of whether African Americans ever came to trust whites enough to share their humor throughout the historical period that included slavery and Jim Crow is compelling. Barber explores moments in “Ole Massa” tales largely consumed with expressing aggression and outrage against slavery and Jim Crow oppression that nevertheless imagine sharing humor with white interlocutors and that envision “the possibility of transforming their white audience through the humor shared with them,” of “reconciling, even equalizing blacks and whites, and restoring precisely what the long history of slavery and Jim Crow had denied” (162).David Bromwich’s “Ellison and the Visibility of Laughter” also takes up humor, laughter, and race in the segregated American South, exploring Ralph Ellison’s social uses of laughter and comedy in two essays, “The World and the Jug” (1964) and “An Extravagance of Laughter” (1985). The first was a response to socialist critic Irving Howe’s assertion that writers like Ellison and James Baldwin should be more overtly political. In this response, Ellison draws on W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness to develop a “tragicomic” perspective and attitude on African American life that, as Bromwich highlights, Ellison associates with blues music (207). In “An Extravagance of Laughter,” Ellison ponders his inappropriate and uncontrollable public laughter at a play he attended in the 1930s and offers a fable about a town with “laughing barrels” in the segregated South, where black people laughing “at improbable, improper moments” were required to “ retire when the fit of laughter struck” (211). Bromwich characterizes the laughing barrels as a comic inoculation to the brutality of lynching and points out how Kenneth Burke’s theories of humor influenced Ellison’s tragicomic approach not just in these essays but also in his famous novel Invisible Man.In “Market Segmentation and Shirley Jackson’s Domestic Humor,” Benjamin Mangrum offers a historicized analysis of the role that mid-twentieth-century women’s magazines played in market capitalism alongside an analysis of Shirley Jackson’s satiric domestic nonfiction. Mangrum seeks to rebut a critical consensus that devalues this nonfiction that she produced for women’s magazines, arguing that Jackson’s domestic humor satirizes rather than accepts normative gender roles. Jackson’s pieces puncture popular magazines’ hackneyed depictions of happy homes in part by satirizing husbands’ embodiment of “a remote kind of incompetence” (63). Mangrum contends that the reading publics imagined by Jackson’s domestic humor anticipate and require “market divergence in US print culture” (60). Such market segmentation, Mangrum argues, creates a space for satires like those by Jackson (and, later, Gloria Steinem) within mass-market magazines; popular print venues are thus retooled for the purpose of feminist critique.In “Parody as Pedagogy in Nabokov’s Pale Fire,” Paul Thifault proposes a method of teaching Nabokov’s Pale Fire—a book that presents a scholarly edition of a poem called “Pale Fire” surrounded by comically “unhinged critical commentary”—by highlighting its parody of oft-taught T. S. Eliot poems (15). Pale Fire is usually seen as difficult to teach because “the fun Nabokov has at the expense of academe requires a reader familiar with that world” (16). So Thifault encourages instructors to focus on Pale Fire’s parodic allusions to Eliot as a way to help students arrive at their own understandings of Nabokov’s satire of academia and literary criticism. Among other pedagogical strategies, he suggests teaching Eliot’s Four Quartets, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and other works as a “comic introduction to critical discourse” (18) that will allow them to hunt for allusions to Eliot when they read Pale Fire. Such an approach also helps students see how allusions do not just refer to other texts but also express anxiety about one text’s relationship to another.In Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Rachel Trousdale pushes back against the prevailing notion that high modernism necessarily requires high seriousness. She argues that attending to humor and laughter in modernist American poetry can foster community among readers and writers and offer lessons in empathy and understanding. According to Trousdale, modernist American poetry features humor that is often interpersonal and that mediates between the self and society by both creating and affirming mutual understanding and shared values. Trousdale is particularly interested in how humor and laughter can create, strengthen, define, or reorganize social groups in ways that “can both promote and suppress fellow-feeling” (2). Her introduction ably synthesizes extant humor theories—the superiority, incongruity, and relief theories of humor, feminist understandings of humor, accounts of the relationship between outsider humor and race and ethnicity, and approaches that emphasize how laughter can shape national identity—demonstrating the complex relationship between laughter and empathy and these theories’ implications for group identity. As Trousdale puts it, “The competing theories of humor are also competing theories of what it means to be human” (3). The chapters that follow examine humor, laughter, and community in the works of famous and influential modernist poets including W. H. Auden, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Sterling Brown, and Elizabeth Bishop. The seventh and final chapter, “Laughter and Knowledge in Contemporary Poetry,” considers the inheritors of modernist comic poetic traditions in the twenty-first century such as Raymond McDaniel, Stephanie Burt, Cathy Park Hong, Albert Goldbarth, Kim Rosenfield, and Lucille Clifton.Trousdale also treats humor in modernist poetry in her contribution to the collection Elizabeth Bishop in Context. Trousdale’s chapter shows how Bishop’s use of humor is at odds with the distanced and distancing accounts of humor proffered by superiority and incongruity theories: “Her humorous asides, wry ironies, and satirical critiques help her hold competing ideas in double exposure: her levity presents varying viewpoints without necessarily taking sides. Her humor fuses empathy with judgment, as her subjects’ and speakers’ frailties are to be both rejected and felt as our own” (303). Trousdale delineates the poet’s common comic techniques, particularly her use of humor to achieve intimacy, through an analysis of three poems—“12 O’Clock News,” “One Art,” and “Filling Station.”Unlike modernist poets, novelist Philip Roth is no stranger to humor studies. In 2021, two chapters in the collection Philip Roth in Context consider Roth’s literary uses of humor and satire. Paule Levy’s “Roth’s Comic Seriousness” delineates Roth’s comic influences—which run the gamut from Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Sherwood Anderson to Borscht Belt stand-ups and nineteenth-century frontier humor—and traces the evolution of Roth’s humor throughout his career. According to Levy, though Roth’s humor “grew darker over the years” and was “tinged with nostalgia and a sharp sense of the absurd” (39), he consistently used tragicomedy to produce social and political satire that denounced hypocrisy and subverted norms while still celebrating the vulnerability of humans and the complexities of human existence. David Gooblar’s chapter in turn homes in on Roth’s political satire, arguing that his 1971 novel Our Gang—an absurdist takedown of Richard Nixon, who claimed a commitment to “the sanctity of life” while looking the other way at atrocities committed against the Vietnamese—is Roth’s only truly satirical novel but also a failure because it did not change what anyone thought of Nixon. Gooblar sees Roth’s subsequent work as more effective at shifting readers’ perspectives even if it is not specifically political satire because “rather than satirizing political actors directly” it takes “aim at the way people think about politics” and how “our habitual ways of thinking shape our politics” (308), a tactic better suited to Roth’s skill at subtle, in-depth characterization. Gooblar specifically praises The Human Stain (2001), which posits that “the hypocrisy that we are left to face is not a president’s, but our own” (309).Sam Chesters considers satire in the work of another postmodern humorist, George Saunders, in “‘Don’t go all earnest on us.’” In her close reading of Saunders’s remarkable 2006 short story “Brad Carrigan, American,” Chesters updates Steven Weisenberger’s theory of postmodern satire in Fables of Subversion for the post-postmodern, or “metamodern,” moment. Metamodern satire, Chesters explains, combines the modernist impulse toward satiric correction with the postmodernist interest in subverting narratives. Chesters regards “Brad Carrigan” as an example of the “hybrid mode” of metamodern satire because “it critiques the entrenchment of neoliberalism through the symbolic metanarrative of television” (39), specifically formulaic sitcoms and reality TV. Unlike postmodern satire, “Brad Carrigan” utilizes irony both as a method of subversion and a way to suggest a corrective for the problem identified. Saunders’s satire recognizes the ravages of neoliberal capitalism and the inherent flaws of humans while expressing “compassion” and an optimistic belief in the power of satiric correction (44).In “It’s Kind of a Funny Story,” Melody May examines the work of a very different kind of twenty-first century writer, memoirist and blogger Jenny Lawson. May offers Lawson’s work as an example of how writers can use comedy to give voice to women suffering from chronic illnesses. Lawson’s comic metaphors, hyperbole, and satire, May explains, “get to the truth of what it is like to live with a chronic illness, allowing her readers . . . who identify with this to feel seen, and allowing readers with no experience to understand her experience” (54). May suggests that Lawson’s use of absurd exaggeration is a way to articulate the frustration of describing to others what invisible chronic illness feels like.Finally, Annjeanette Wiese’s book Narrative Truthiness: The Logic of Complex Truth in Hybrid (Non)Fiction takes Stephen Colbert’s concept of “truthiness” and applies it to genre-bending postmodern narrative works. Wiese’s “narrative truthiness” describes both an approach to twenty-first century writing and a heuristic for interpreting it because the concept of truthiness “requires that we be aware of and examine our constructions of truth and their possible distance from the facts” (26). Most of the book’s chapters examine narrative truthiness in literature from across the world that blends fiction and nonfiction, including controversial memoirs that include fictions and graphic narratives. Likely of most interest to readers of Studies in American Humor is chapter 7, “Satire and Truth: Fake News, the Onion, and the Complex Nature of Narrative Truthiness.” Wiese treats the Onion as a microcosm of all modern satirical fake news, which, she argues, brings to the surface tensions “between what we know . . . and what we want to be true, which in turn elucidates the complex nature of truth” (167–68). To support this thesis, Wiese categorizes and examines Onion headlines as narratives in miniature that blur lines between fact and fiction in the context of the parodical newspaper genre.James E. Caron’s Satire as the Comic Public Sphere: Postmodern “Truthiness” and Civic Engagement also engages with Colbert’s notion of “truthiness,” in this case to describe the function of satire in the postmodern public sphere. Caron’s ambitious and theoretically nuanced book historicizes satire and its relation to the public sphere from the Enlightenment through the contemporary period. In part 1, Caron describes the “comic public sphere” as a parodic supplement to Jürgen Habermas’s conception of the public sphere as an arena of Enlightenment discourse (2). For Caron, comic political speech is a mode of discourse separate from normal political speech; satire operates through metanoia, “a change of mind in its audience,” which subsequently encourages its audiences to engage and promote their own reforms in the public sphere (9). Within the comic public sphere, Caron helpfully distinguishes between the ridiculous (laughing at, the realm of satire) and the ludicrous (laughing with, the realm of humor). He then identifies a particular mode of postmodern satire called “truthiness satire” that ostensibly (but only ironically) accepts the prospect of opinion mattering more than facts while actually highlighting the vitality of facts to informed citizenry. In part 2, Caron applies his theory of satire to several contemporary examples. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 connect J. L. Austin’s speech act theory to contemporary news satirists such as Colbert, Jordan Klepper, Jimmy Kimmel, and Samantha Bee. Caron also highlights Bee’s and Colbert’s “satiractivism,” that is, satire that moves “beyond the implicit exhortation to experience metanoia within the poetics of the comic public sphere and make an explicit call to direct action in the public sphere” (27). Chapter 7 raises questions as to when satire crosses the line into snark or screed, chapter 8 looks at public sphere interpretations of Trump’s speech acts as a way to think through the extent to which satire is defined by audiences’ reactions to it, and chapter 9 acts as a conclusion that stresses the important role that truthiness satire’s parrhesia—speaking truth to power without fear of consequence—plays in our society.Caron’s book is one of many 2021 scholarly considerations of satire and political humor. These accounts from various academic disciplines share an interest in the efficacy (or inefficacy) of political satire and activist political humor; most also explore the relationship between humor and politics in the twenty-first century. Several special issues of and forums in journals feature productive, if ultimately inconclusive, conversations and multiple perspectives on these issues.Julie Webber introduces and moderates an exchange among five other humor scholars on the topic of the political force of the comedic in an issue of Contemporary Political Theory. Webber situates comedy as the “preferred genre” of people “confronting precarity, increasing police power, and state abandonment of its governing role” and highlights humor’s potential role in “preparing the ground work—the affective cultural shift—necessary to effect widespread change” at a later date (420). Individual contributions to the forum detail comedic engagements with authoritative leaders and analyze the relationship between comedy and social media. Mehnaaz Momen describes a mode of satire that simply reveals absurdities and irrationalities, delivering and interpreting information in a manner more akin to journalists than to previous satirists and worries that, in an age when citizens do not just disagree on policy but also have entirely different belief systems, rational satire loses its shock value and bite and therefore becomes largely impotent. “When we are drowned in irrationality,” Momen writes, “satire becomes simultaneously omnipresent and redundant” (425). In her contribution, Jessyka Finley applies Lauren Berlant’s theory of humorlessness and M. Lane Bruner’s work on the humorous nation to Black women’s satirical humor that assumes the form of activist politics. Finley analyzes the work of two Black women satirists, American parodist Sarah Cooper and Ugandan activist Stell Nyanzi, who use political humor to attack heads of state and to persuade their audiences to see those heads of state as incompetent, disingenuous, and dangerous. Rebecca Krefting considers how comedy’s inherent ambivalence structures its “capacity to both undermine and support contemporary social movements” (433) and highlights comedians’ power to shape audiences’ opinions and actions—whether they are racist and/or sexist or antiracist and/or antisexist—and calls for more reception studies on the persuasive power of comedy that seeks to remedy social injustices. Cynthia Willett and Julie Willett celebrate the comic tactics of the BTS Army, a huge international group of K-pop fans that uses humor and social media for playful social justice interventions. Willett and Willett frame K-pop activism as engaging in a “solidaric empathy” (439) that leads to unexpected political alliances and, in the case of the tricks that the BTS Army played on Trump, enables the pranking (and, more importantly, seriously unnerving) of a pranker who made his way to the Oval Office largely via teenage-style name-calling (439).Global Society: Journal of Interdisciplinary International Relations also published a special issue on humor and politics in 2021. In an introduction focusing on “intersections between humor and global politics,” issue editors James Brassett, Christopher S. Browning, and Alister Wedderburn highlight the importance of humor to political and diplomatic communication and state their ambitious goal of establishing “humour and comedy as important fields of study” in politics and international relations (2). They connect a growing political usage of humor to a burgeoning “new diplomacy” focused more on cultural values and an increased, feminist-influenced “focus on the everyday” in political studies (3). Humor, they note, connects leaders to their publics, shapes their political landscapes, and helps them in drafting critiques and establishing their authenticity. The essays that follow consider how the sch