This itite relies on the kind and generous contributions of its editor and contributors. If you would like to become an official contributor, please contact the managing editor at the email address below.
Managing Editor:
Tracy Wuster
Tracy Wuster is the founding chair of the Humor Studies Caucus of the ASA, the President and webmaster of the American Humor Studies Association, and the operator of the list serve for those two groups–American Humor. He founded this blog in summer 2011, with the help of the Contributing Editors below.
Tracy is working on a book manuscript, with the University of Missouri Press, on Mark Twain’s reputation as humorist and author from 1865 to 1882, as well as a number of articles on Mark Twain and other topics. He has published on Mark Twain and Hawaii, Mark Twain and England, and Steve Martin (this guy!). Tracy is a lecturer in both the English and the Electrical and Computer Engineering Departments at the University of Texas. He is the Co-Director of the Humor in America Project at UT. If you have questions on this site, contact him at: wustert@gmail.com
Feel free to contact us with queries, questions, and suggestions.
Rainbows and Hippies: Humorous Responses to the Supreme Court’s Same-Sex Marriage Decision
Happy 90th Birthday Hal Holbrook!
All Joking Aside: An Interview with Rebecca Krefting on her new book (with an excerpt)
Adult Humor in Unexpected Places: Happy Birthday, LBJ and Pee Wee Herman!
Maya Angelou: “If you don’t laugh, you’ll die…”
In the Archives: Mark Twain’s Infectious Jingle– “A Literary Nightmare” (1876)
Editor’s Chair: The State of the Union
In the Archives: Agnes Repplier, “Wit and Humor” (1893)
Humor Studies at the American Studies Association Conference 2012
The Election! Zombies, dogs, and white people! Humor and politics in short video form…
An Educated Sense of Humor (with Amy Nathan Wright and rryura Hernandez-Ehrisman)
Sunday Satire: Mark Twain’s “A Presidential Candidate” (1879)
In the Archives: William Hazlitt, “On Wit and Humour” (1818)
Voter ID Laws and the Question of Political Satire
Sunday Satire: The Daily Show on the Conventions
Stand-Up Sunday: The Olympics!
In the Archives: James Russell Lowell “Humor, Wit, Fun, and Satire” (1893)
Studying Stephen Colbert: Nation, who is the most important humorist of the day?
Press or Pass: The Unfunny Closing of the University of Missouri Press
Stand-Up Sunday: Doug Mellard and Chuck Watkins
Stand-Up Monday: Happy Birthday Ricky Gervais!
Humor as Ridicule: The Case of UVa
The Subtle (and a little-less-than-subtle) Humor of Charles Chesnutt
In the Archives: The Philosophy of Laughter and Smiling by George Vasey (1875)
Obama and Gay Marriage: A Quick Look at the Cartoons
Visual Humor–Glenn Ligon: America
Stand-Up Sunday: Comedians on Gay Marriage
Mark Twain and The Jumping Frog
The third best gift of all: The Muppets and Laughter
Five Subjects Behind: Some thoughts on grunge, time machines, and “Clam Chow-Dah!”
Occupy Wall Street in Political Cartoons
Occupy Wall Street Cartoons, Post 2
Humor Studies: An Interview with Don Nilsen
Contributing Editors:
Larry Bush
Who Invented the Rube Goldberg Invention?
The Phenomenon of Fictional Place Names
The 1884 Cartoon Campaign of Walt McDougall
The Problem with Unfocused Political Cartoons
What’s With College Sports Nicknames?
The Morphology of a Humorous Phrase: “We have met the enemy and he is us”
How About Never–Is Never Good for You?
Using Political Cartoons in History Instruction
Tara Friedman
Cross-Cultural Humor in Central America
Calling All Social Critics and Comedians!
Top 4 Reasons to Teach Sherman Alexie
Humor Can Do That! – The Serious Side of Laughter
Play and Purpose: Teaching Humor in Introductory Literature Courses
Nelly Lambert
Lovers and Fools in the Modern Romantic Comedy
Langston Hughes on Hard Laughter
Matt Powell–Music Editor
Matt is a writer, musician, lawyer and entrepreneur living in Venice Beach, California. He has a Bachelor of Music from Berklee College of Music in Boston and a Juris Doctor from Loyola Law School, Los Angeles. Matt plays guitar and writes songs for The Incredible Heavies, and his short story “Valley Dick” was published in the anthology Temporary Detective, a collection of modern noir. He often writes about music as a means to explore the interconnectivity of broader issues and themes.
The King of Cool and the King of the Road
The Unbearable Lightness of Don Rickles
Thanksgiving with Bob Hope, Lady Gaga and Tennessee Ernie Ford
Psycho! – Music and Manipulation in Hitchcock’s Great Comedy
Bill Murray: All the World’s His Stage
Cole Porter and the Gods of Gossamer
Van Heffer: Elvis, Ozzy and the Brazilian Bus Plunge
Ooo-xiety: Top Ten Mel Brooks Musical Moments
Ask Me No Questions, I Will Tell No Lies
Smile — and Perhaps, a Tear: the Music of Charlie Chaplin
Thanksgiving Dinner: A Musical Menu
Song and Dance Man: Revisiting Bob Dylan’s Legendary 1965 Press Conference
What A Glorious Feeling: The Gene Kelly Centenary
There’s A Riot Goin’ On: Leiber & Stoller Behind Bars
Andy Griffith: The Music of Mayberry and Beyond
Mojo Medicine: Humor, Healing and the Blues
Jan McIntire-Strasburg
Sherman Alexie’s Survival Humor Turns “Legal”
National Grammar Day Generates a Conversation on Insider Jokes
Risk vs. Reward: When are Jokes too Risky?
The Truth and Consequences of Trivializing Humor
Who Inherited the Mantle of the Humor of the Old Southwest?
Fortune Favors the Subversive:How Some Southwest Humorists Have Been Forgotten
How Tom Sawyer Grew Up to be Hank Morgan
Jeffrey Melton (PhD. University of South Carolina, 1993) is an Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama. He is the author of Mark Twain, Travel Books, and Tourism: The Tide of a Great Popular Movement (University of Alabama Press, 2002, rpt. 2009) and co-editor of Mark Twain on the Move: A Travel Reader(University of Alabama Press, 2009). He has published articles on travel literature, tourism, and humor in South Atlantic Review, Papers on Language and Literature, Studies in American Humor, Popular Culture Review, Studies in American Culture, and Thalia: Studies in Literary Humor. Jeffrey’s role on the site is a pedagogy editor of “Teaching American Humor.”
John Oliver, FIFA, American Humor, and Topic Sentences
Fake News Fallout: Brian Williams and American Humor
The Interview, Sony, North Korean Hackers, and American Film Comedy
American Film Humor in 25 Screenshots, Part 1
Cracking the Codes of Comedy: On the Anatomy of Jokes, Part 1
Cracking the Codes of Comedy: On the Anatomy of Jokes, Part 2
Teaching American Humor: the Great Colbert-Twitter Mediagasm of 2014
Teaching American Humor: The Essential Harold Ramis.
The Madness of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World: A Celebration
Dreaming of Walter Mitty Dreaming
Teaching American Humor: What Should Be Taught?
Teaching American Sitcoms: Shall We Gather Round the Table?
Teaching American Sitcoms: Ode to The Beverly Hillbillies
Teaching the Irony of Satire (Ironically)
Caroline Zarlengo Sposto–Poetry Editor
Caroline Sposto has a B.A. in English from The University of Colorado and an M.S. in Electronic Media from Kutztown University. In 1995, she co-founded Sposto Interactive digital agency. She is the Memphis correspondent for Broadwayworld.com and has been published in The Saturday Evening Post, Family Circle Magazine, Vocabula Review, The Atlanta Review, Mobius Journal and numerous anthologies. She won second place in the 2013 “Great American Think-off.”
On the 70th Anniversary of Germany’s Surrender
Happy Birthday, Robert E. Howard!
Dysfunctional Family Holiday Warmup
A Slice of Magical Realism with your Pumpkin Pie
Michael Collier’s Poem for the Season
Happy Birthday Wallace Stevens!
Notes from the SHREW Rehearsal
Happy Birthday (more or less) Frank O’Hara!
The Lightning that was Leroi Jones
Remembering Elinor Morton Wylie
Thanksgiving, Puritans and Rap?
Happy Birthday, dear Google . . .
Funny weather we’ve been having.
I’m the dog. You can be the wheelbarrow.
Frank Lloyd Wright, Ice Cube, Poetry and Humor
The Dead Joke and the Funny Man
Oh no. Swimsuit season again . . . .
Barbie is 53 and I’m not feeling so young myself.
Happy Birthday, Jimmy Durante!
. . . ’tis the season to be jolly . . .
“Memo to the Candidate: The Town Hall Meeting”
Humor, Irony and Modern Native American Poetry
Oscar Winberg has a M.A. in history from Åbo Akademi University where he is currently a doctoral student, also in history. His main field of research is the rise of conservatism in the United States. His current research is on the discourse on welfare and taxes in American television sitcoms from 1970 onward. This means that he gets to work with material that has been with him since the 1990s, when old reruns of shows like All in the Family and The Cosby Show was a staple of the after-school offerings on Finnish television. His master’s thesis was about ideological conflict within the Republican Party using editorial cartoons as source material. He has presented on ethnic identity and integration on the sitcom Modern Family. He also contributes blog posts for the John Morton Center for North American Studies. If you feel inclined, check out his tweeting, @WinbergOscar.
Packaging the Presidency, with Laughter
Nerd Prom and Presidential Humor
Thanks to Obama You’re Paying for It: The Politics of Sitcoms
The Laughter of Millions: Finding your Material in the “Vast Wasteland”
There’s a Political Cartoonists behind Every Successful Political Cartoon
Daniel Yezbick
50 Ways to Play!: Selected Sex Positive Responses to the Agony and Ignomy of “Torture Porn” Romance
Charlie and Louie: An Affair of Two Magazines, Two Cities, and Too Many Questions
Opossum Carols, or Walt Kelly’s Xmas Postludicrosity
Contributors
ABE (former Contributing Editor) lives in Massachusetts with one wife, two kids, three dogs, and four regrets. Three kids, two wives, one dog, and a life in California would’ve been his preference. He fills the rest of his life tracing the evolution of comedy, looking for descent with the same passion as Mary Leakey in Olduvai Gorge. He also shares Mrs. Leakey’s love of freedom and dislike for rules, which he learned about on Wikipedia. ABE suffers to work for a living while finishing his doctoral degree in editorial studies, a less interesting term for the impenetrable Editionswissenschaft. You might call it “textual scholarship,” or “Henshu-Bunkengaku,” depending on your continent. Feel free to follow any one of his aliases on Twitter if you can find it. Follow @abe_humor
One Tan, Many Memories: Elmira Mark Twain Conference 2013
In the Archives: An Easy Chair in an Uneasy World (1920)
The Jewish Comic and the Irish Muse
In the Archives: Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Diversion (1862)
A Revelation: WTF with Marc Maron
In the Archives: Thomas Nast and Santa Claus (1862-1890)
In the Archives: Artemus Ward’s Panorama (1869)
The Mount Rushmore of Mount Rushmores
What Could’ve Been What’s Meant to Be
Bonnie Applebeet (former contributing editor) is a doctoral student in the University of Michigan’s Program in American Culture. She thinks about, watches, and obsesses over class and queer humor in standup comedy and television sitcoms. She has presented on David Sedaris, Mark Twain, and their perspectives on American citizenship as well as the formation and legacy of Anita Bryant’s anti-gay rhetoric (a project that was not funny in the least). She feels uncomfortable discussing herself in the third person but is so thrilled to be a part of this effort and to learn from others in her field that she has conquered this discomfort with great aplomb. Bonnie was one of our original contributing editors and has transitioned to Contributor status.
Remembering Phyllis Diller without Apology
Cerebral Standup Sunday: Emily Levine
That’s Not Funny: Margaret Cho’s Ableist Faux Pas
Ron White: Smooth Standup for Singular Viewing
Stand Up Sunday: Easter Eddie, The Easter Bunny, and Atheism
The Pitfalls of Activist Humor
Standup Sunday with Lea DeLaria
Rick Rolls to a Stop: Queer Humor and Internet Responses to Perry’s Ad
Roseanne, Roseanne, and Where We Stand
Humor in America is on Twitter!
Steven Brykman (former contributing editor): In 1993, Steve Brykman left medical school to write fart jokes for National Lampoon. He has been thrown out of both the 2000 Democratic National Convention and the Smithsonian Museum and has on more than one occasion performed standup comedy naked. Most recently, he infiltrated the Republican party and worked on the Romney campaign at their Boston headquarters. Watch for his account of the most insane campaign in history in the weeks to come.
Brykman has written for and/or appeared on Prairie Home Companion, Comedy Central, G4TV, and the Food Network. His work has appeared in Playboy, Cracked, Nerve, The Huffington Post, and The New Yorker where he was featured in Talk of the Town. As a writing fellow at the University of Massachusetts, his fiction was awarded the Harvey Swados prize.
XMas Envy or The Plight of the Jews
The Time I Had Them Mutilate My Son’s Genitals
The Time I Got Thrown Out of the 2000 Democratic National Convention
The Time I Performed Standup Comedy Naked
The Time I Kissed Grace Paley on the Mouth
Matthew Daube (former Contributing Editor–Ph.D., Theater and Performance Studies, Stanford University, 2010) has taught in half a dozen different departments at Stanford University, including a year as a teaching fellow at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. His dissertation, “Laughter in Revolt: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity in the Construction of Stand-up Comedy” argues for the recognition of stand-up comedy as a distinct performance mode that emerged in the United States following World War II, linked to issues of race and focused on the performance of self. He is particularly interested in the intersections between humor and the performance of identity, and has published articles on the use of ethnic stereotype by the Marx Brothers and the role of the audience in stand-up comedy.
Stand-up Sunday: Tony Clifton Won’t Die
Stand-up Sunday: Michael Richards, Six Years On
Stand-Up Sunday: Hollywood Comedy Clubs
Ben Anderson is a journalist with a Bachelor of Arts from Curtin University. Like most Fijian-born Australians of Scottish descent, he loves American sit-coms. Ben has been published by Cracked and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and blogs at www.madasaspoon.wordpress.com. As well as writing, Ben enjoys acting, watching other people play sport and writing short biographies about himself. Follow him on twitter @Benjaminfa.
Is America’s most realistic sit-com a cartoon?
Carrie Andersen is a graduate student in American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her primary research interests include the intersections between art and politics, subversive and awkward comedy, digital humanities, media studies, popular culture, and 20th century American history. She is also a contributing writer for Laughspin, a website devoted to comedy of any and all varieties.
Absurdism and Authenticity at South by Southwest
Jake Austen
No Pryor Knowledge: How I Got Moved by Mudbone then Ambushed by Art
Joe Faina (former contributing editor) is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. His studies and writing focus on the relationships between rhetoric, humor, and new media, with several conference publications and journal articles on humor and mass media. He is also an Austin based stand up comedian/writer who performs regularly around town and writes for UT Austin based humor publication Texas Travesty. You can follow him on Twitter or his website.
Stand-Up Sunday: Robin Williams
Stand-Up Sunday: Dave Chappelle
On Daniel Tosh, Rape Humor, and Artistic Integrity
Sunday Stand-Up: Louis C.K. on Fatherhood.
Owning Your Jokes: Louis C.K. and Digital Distribution
Laura Hernandez-Erhisman
M. Thomas Inge is the Blackwell Professor English and Humanities at Randolph-Macon College, where he teaches a course in American humor.
The Essential Nature of American Laughter
Politics and the American Sense of Humor
Michael Kiskis: The post linked to below was published in February 2011 by Michael Kiskis on his blog, Kiskis Log. Dr. Kiskis passed away suddenly in May, a shock of great sadness to the community of Mark Twain and Humor Studies scholars who knew well both the insight of his scholarship and his passion for his work. This essay, “The Critics Dream Mark Twain: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” is published in honor of Dr. Kiskis’s life and work. I am reposting it with the kind permission of Michael’s wife, Ann. I encourage you to read further in Michael’s blog and to see his website for more information on his career. See also Michael’s other blog,Canonical Babbling.
The Critics Dream Mark Twain: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Jason Mellard is the assistant director of the Center for Texas Music History at Texas State University. He was a research fellow at the Clements Center for Southwest Studies of Southern Methodist University where he completed a book on representations and experiences of Anglo-Texan masculinity in the 1970s.
Sagebrush Comedian: The Passing of Cactus Pryor
Beza Merid
Beza Merid is a doctoral student in the NYU Department of Media, Culture, and Communication. His primary research interests include stand-up comedy and the intersection between confessional performance and the discourse on illness, disease and death. Beza is interested in how humor is used to talk about pain, as well as the technologies and media forms through which these performances are transmitted. When scheduling permits, Beza enjoys exploring the Manhattan and Brooklyn comedy scenes, visiting as many venues as possible.
Stand-up at the Knitting Factory (Brooklyn, NY)
Sharon McCoy (former Contributing Editor)
Sharon McCoy (Ph.D., American Literature, Emory University, 2003) is president of the American Humor Studies Association, executive coordinator of the Mark Twain Circle, and an academic free agent. She has been teaching writing and American literature at the University of Georgia since 2004, while researching and writing a book on Mark Twain and post-bellum blackface minstrelsy, Nothing But Trouble. She has published humor-related essays on Mark Twain and the San Francisco Minstrels, and on blackface imagery in Tom Sawyer Abroad and in No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger.
Her interests focus on the complex and often disturbing interplay of race, class, and humor in literature and popular culture. McCoy revels in American literature’s unreliable narrators and trickster figures and in exploring the intricate ironies of American history and literature, relishing the many rich voices that are America. She will cheerfully and relentlessly bend anyone’s ear for hours on these subjects. Forewarned is forearmed.
The Trouble Begins at Nine?: Mark Twain, “A Speech on Women,” and Blackface Minstrelsy
Embracing the Ambiguity and Irony of Satire: A Response to Jeff Melton
Sunday Sermon: Activist Humor and Frederick Douglass’s “Servants, Obey Your Masters”
If I Hear it Again, I Swear I’ll Scream: Hemingway, Huck Finn, and “Cheating”
Mark Twain’s Tale Within a Tail Within a Tale
American Deadline Politics, Supercommittees, and Channeling Teddy
Politics, Mark Twain, and Blackface
“Drink Some Lemonade, and Forget About It”
Poetry Corner–Paul Laurence Dunbar: Changing the Joke to Slip the Yoke
Linda Morris:
The Mark Twain Circle of America
Amy Nathan Wright
Phil Nel is Professor of English and Director of the Program in Children’s Literature at Kansas State University. His most recent book is Keywords for Children’s Literature (NYU Press, 2011), co-edited with Lissa Paul. See his excellent blog, Nine Kinds of Pie, which features great posts on children’s literature, comics, music, academia, and other subjects. Check it out.
Syd Hoff’s Teeth: The Leftist Satire of A. Redfield
Don and Alleen Nilsen: Don and Alleen Nilsen became emeritus professors at Arizona State University on May 15th, 2011. Their opus magnum is the Encyclopedia of 20th-Century American Humor which in 2000 was selected as an “Outstanding Academic Book” by Choice, and which in 2001 won an “Outstanding Reference Source” award from the American Library Association’s. Don has also written three books about humor in British literature, one about humor in American literature, and one about humor in Irish literature. In 2004, Don and Alleen published two books about teaching metaphor in public schools, and in 2007, they published their Names and Naming in Young Adult Literature. Don and Alleen’s most recent book is their revisedPronunciation Contrasts in English, about half of which is about English spelling as a rule-governed system. Don and Alleen are presently working on the 9th edition ofLiterature for Today’s Young Adults, which will appear in 2012.
How Restaurants Whet Your Appetite with Whimsy and Wit
Humor Studies: An Interview with Don Nilsen
David B. Olsen–Former Contributing Editor
David B. Olsen is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of English at Saint Louis University, with an emphasis in American literature, experimental fiction, and visual narrative. He is currently finishing his dissertation, “Sign and Design: The Visual Language of Contemporary Fiction,” which explores novels in which images, photographs, graphic design, and typography are at once essential to and irreducible from the narrative itself. He is also an adjunct faculty member at SLU, where he has taught courses in writing, literature, science fiction, and graphic novels.
He has presented his research at many unsuspecting conferences across the country, including the Modern Language Association, International Comic Arts Forum, College English Association, Media Ecology Association, and San Diego Comic-Con International, where he was once asked a question about deconstruction by a grown man dressed as Harry Potter.
Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan: A Roundup of Recent Cartoons
The First Obama-Romney Debate: A Roundup of Recent Cartoons
Making Light of The Dark Knight Tragedy: Dane Cook,Tastelessness, and Why We Bother Being Funny
“The Voyeurs” by Gabrielle Bell
Just So: Wes Anderson’s “Moonrise Kingdom” vs. The Stuff That’s in Gedi Sibony’s Alley
The Influence of Anxiety: Kristen Wiig, SNL, and Self-Consciousness
Annie Hall on the Wall: Remaking a Classic as Contemporary Art
(Power) Girl, You’ll be a (Wonder) Woman Soon
Power Girl and Girl Power (Or, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bombshell)
The Sound and the Furry: An Interview with Alfra Martini, Creator of The Kitten Covers
Being Nerdy Loudly: “Little League” by Cap’n Jazz
Tintin, In America (A Review Eventually)
Santa is coming to town, so watch yourself.
Laura Who? A Study of Lost Cats and Missing Persons
Teresa Prados-Torreira
Michael Giles Purgason
The Muppets: An Exercise in Humorous Metacinematic Irony
Ben Railton is Associate Professor of English and Coordinator of American Studies at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts. When he’s not chasing his two young sons, he runs the American Studier blog (http://www.americanstudier.org) and is working on his next couple book projects. He’s also pretty funny, although the pressure of being funny in this brief bio has proven too much for him, and he apologizes.
Sam Sackett is a reformed English professor old enough to remember radio. He left teaching for journalism, then advertising, then public relations; then, having become an expert on career change, he spent 15 years in career management. He’s back in the US after having spent six years retired in Thailand, which he spent writing novels and short stories.
THE SMALL HOUSE HALFWAY UP IN THE NEXT BLOCK
The Tragedy of American Comedy
THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING HUMOROUS STORY
WIT AND HUMOR ON RADIO AND TELEVISION
Susan Seizer, Indiana University
Craft and Magic on the U.S. Comedy Club Stage
Self Deprecate is the website of Jason Parker. It is an excellent source on current political humor. Go there.
Political Cartoons About Missouri Senate Candidate Todd Akin’s Unpopular Opinions
Editorial Cartoons of Penn State and Jerry Sandusky Scandal
Richard Talbot is a freelance nonfiction journalist living in Minnesota. It is his particular bent to see the most uncommon aspects of the most common things. His work has appeared in newspaper, magazines, professional journals, and reprints have appeared in the U.K. and the Asian market in Korean translation.
Mark Twain and Medicine: A Review of Sorts
Robert Tally (former contributing Editor)
Kurt Vonnegut is Taken Seriously, and You Won’t Believe What Happens Next!
Joker Poe, Part 1: Just Diddling
Joker Poe, Part 2: The Poet as Prankster
Joker Poe, Part 3: Horrific Humor
Joker Poe, Part 4: The Critic’s Laughter
Joker Poe, Part 5: The Jingle Man
:
Brykman (steve)
Carrie Andersen
Daniel F. Yezbick
David B. Olsen
Jeffrey Melton
jmcstras
larrybush2013
Matt Powell
Matthew Daube
Caroline Zarlengo Sposto
nellylewislambert
Oscar Winberg
Robert T. Tally Jr.
Philip Scepanski
Sharon McCoy
selfdeprecate
tefriedman
ABE
Humor in America 
