Strange Felicity: Welty’s Women Laughing, Disguising, Revising, Seizing Speech Lois M. Welch Were I to give each of you a true/false quiz requiring you to mark which of Welty’s stories and novels were comic and which were not, you would either bravely flunk or request a fairer quiz.1 Neither “Why I Live at the P. O.” nor The Ponder Heart are conventionally comic, though we usually talk about them in those terms. A remarkable number of my students have been mystified by “Why I Live at the P. O.” While we share Reynolds Price’s judgment that, in American literature, only Mark Twain “displays as skillfully poised a comic gift [as Welty], poised on the razor that divides compassion and savagery,” the razor needs examining (177). Since we are addressing Welty in the context of Women’s Humor, I must remind you that the category itself constitutes a new zone in literary studies. It was not so long ago (1959) that a critic, ironically named Blyth, blithely announced in a book entitled Humor in English Literature that “women not only have no humor in themselves but are the cause of the extinction of it in others” (qtd. in Barreca 4). I am not making this up. I have tested this statement in courses on Women’s Comedy for the past fifteen years and trust that by now Blyth has had to answer to a higher authority for this among his sins. If not, Regina Barreca, the brilliant critic of women’s comedy, has roasted his toes. I prefer to use the term “comedy” to “humor,” mainly because “humorists” tend to disappear in the mists of literary history. Humor can be very topical and is more context-bound than comedy. Also, of course, comedy has a definite history, as the insouciant double to tragedy. Comic theory is as old as Aristotle’s Poetics. I’ve always loved the fact that Aristotle’s tract about comedy, the Tractatus Coislinianus, has been lost for centuries. Personally, I believe that it was used, like some of Haydn’s symphonies, by his cook to start the fire. At any rate, comedy is normally treated as the bimbo stepsister to tragedy. Only Eugene Ionesco has gone the whole distance in disagreement, asserting somewhere in Notes and Counter Notes that “only the comic is serious.” Clearly, seriousness retains its cultural cachet. One detects the aroma of literary hierarchy. [End Page 149] My starting premise is that women laugh at different things than do men, though of course there is overlap. I have yet to meet either the woman who finds the Three Stooges funny, or a guy who could explain why he did and we didn’t. Even before the days of political correctness, we didn’t laugh at mother-in-law jokes. Here, I omit 200 pages of feminist theory. Recently, I read a survey about what men and women most fear. Women mainly fear violence; men mainly fear being laughed at. No wonder, then, that so few women writers appear in the history of comic literature. We must proceed gingerly, looking both ways before we laugh. This applies to writers and characters alike. Does Lily Daw guffaw? Naw. She does turn to one of her benefactors and, observing carefully, announces, “You got bumps” (“Why” 9). I love it! What a great deflection from the lofty goals the ladies think they are pursuing for her. The incongruities of “Why I Live at the P. O.” are hilarious—but not one of the characters is laughing. We have a problem here. Even if we generously acknowledge that comedy comes in a multitude of shapes and forms, Eudora Welty is still not Phyllis Diller or Wendy Wasserstein. No doubt you, like so many of my students, feel uneasy letting go and guffawing at Welty’s stories. Even I, with my admitted predilection for comedy, was startled to discover how funny “The Wide Net” was when I heard Welty read it at Cornell University in the nineteen eighties. We need some theoretical assistance. I regret not having space to provide a full-blown post-modern, post-Freudian, even post-colonial ludic algebra, or even a...