Comic Sketches Research Articles

"The Big Bear of-Maine???": Toward the Development of American Humor

THE New York Spirit of the Times' is considered an important source of American humorous literature, publishing so e of the most popular comic sketches written before the Civil War. Although the subjects varied widely,2 the most common involved such action-filled sports as hunting and horse racing. Probably the best-known story, T. B. Thorpe's of Arkansas,3 concerned the ultimate feat-the hunting of an unhuntable bear. Thorpe's tale is, as Walter Blair has noted,4 a masterpiece surpassing most antebellum humorous stories, but the Big Bear is not atypical in technique and subject. Like most tall-tale writers, Thorpe used wildly exaggerated characters and events which appear possible in a narrative full of realistic details. The subject-a

V. The Two Societies: a Study of Town Life in Nineteenth-Century Ceylon

The English-speaking society of nineteenth-century Colombo, as in other areas in Ceylon gradually acquiring an urban character, was composed of two main units—the European, and the native. Within both were intricate subdivisions, which 'Sampson Brown’ described in a comic sketch of 1842:Glibb and I have had some rather long chats about the natives and their moral character. They certainly are a most repelling race: there's no making anything of them as yet, and I doubt if we ever shall…A native of one particular caste will not marry into or associate with another and so the whole race of them is split into small factions. This is bad enough say you, but…the white man's casterages [sic] as widely and deeply as that of the Buddhist…In Ceylon you find the Burgher caste, the Civil caste, the Military caste, and the Mercantile caste, all little worlds distinct from each other, travelling in different orbits. They would not dine with each other, I suppose, if their existence depended on it.

Comic tales and Sketches'

Comic tales and Sketches'

‘Comic tales and sketches.’

‘Comic tales and sketches.’