Until this past Sunday, I had never really appreciated, except in a distant and intellectual way, Twain’s fascination with rivers.  Even though I’ve been kayaking numerous times, and I’ve always had fun, I’ve never before tackled it with such a strong sense of my own mortality, the inscrutable flow of the current, and the exhilarating and hilarious terror of crashing.  And now, frankly, I find myself even more puzzled by readings of the novel that focus on the idyll of the river and see the tension and the terror coming solely from the society’s intrusions on that peace.

A river, really, is a fucking scary place.

Those moments of calm, drifting slowly along with the current, fill you with the delusion that you understand the flow, that you’ve surrendered to it, that it will in some way take care of you.

What utter horseshit.

The river is a powerful and inexorable force, utterly oblivious to your puny self, and it is best that you never forget that — at least while you’re actually still in its reach.  It is just as happy to have you smash into a boulder as it is to have you flow gently and peacefully in its lullaby.

Sunday was a lovely, lovely day.  As I embarked on the annual Mother’s Day “Broads on the Broad River” trip, I remember thinking that it could not be more idyllic.  The weather was perfect, sunny but not too hot, a constant breeze flowing; the company, of the best sort.  I let myself go with the flow of the current, looking for the arrows in the water that mark the safe passages between the rocks in the rapids, floating with exhilaration when I hit them just right and shot through.  And I laughed, too, when I missed the sweet spot and bumped over the rocks instead.  The first small waterfall, pictured here, was easy this year, and I grew cocky as I made it through without dumping.  The even smaller waterfall downriver, though — one that I wasn’t expecting — was another story.

Heavy rainfall had changed the river that I thought I remembered.  Our group had gotten spread out, and I learned of the second waterfall only when I saw a distant friend ahead suddenly disappear.  Her head reappeared downriver, and I marked the spot I thought I had seen her navigate the hazard.

Boy, was I wrong.

Only when I was on the crest did I realize how poorly I’d chosen my spot.  Looming right in front of me with remarkable insouciance was a gigantic fucking boulder, lying crosswise, right in my path.  I turned the kayak as fast as I could, to try to shoot the narrow space between the bottom of the fall and the rock, congratulating myself when I succeeded.

Dumb.

As soon as I shot out of the ironic shelter of that rock, the full force of the river hit the kayak broadside, throwing me and all of what Huck would call my “traps” into the current.  I got my head above water, and ducked again just in time to keep from getting brained by my own overturned boat, maniacally spinning its own dance in the current.

“A Deep and Tranquil Ecstasy”

Believe it or not, it wasn’t my life that passed before my eyes at that moment, it was this picture from Mark Twain’s A Tramp Abroad.  (Twain scholars are truly weird people.)  Here, the two friends sit blithely on their raft, with umbrellas to protect them from the sun, bathing their feet in the cooling water, and there is Sam, smoking away, like nothing will ever go wrong.  But to me, now, it seems that there is a pensive gleam in his eyes, absent from his friend’s blank and vacuously smiling face.

As a child, Sam almost drowned in the Mississippi river numerous times.  His brother Henry died on it, as did countless others he knew, and the slave trade was active up and down its waters.  Mark Twain could have had no illusions about the ephemeral nature of the river’s idyll, whether the inevitable disruptions came from man or from the oblivious beast of the river itself.  He had to be fully aware of the inevitability of the crash, of one’s helplessness in the current, of the hubris and strength with which we go against the current for a time or mistakenly believe we actually have control.   Or peace.

In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the raft crash comes at a turning point in the novel.  It is abrupt and terrifying, and it comes almost right after Huck has realized at last the magnitude of the crime he is committing by traveling with Jim.  Further, he realizes at last that Jim has children of his own and an agenda of his own beyond helping this young white ragamuffin escape his father.  But even then, Huck protects Jim from some slave catchers by telling them a lie, because Jim has praised him for being the only friend he has now, and for being “de on’y white genlman dat ever kep’ his promise to ole Jim” (124).   But fog, the river, and a careless steamboat pilot result in a violent crash that separates them and changes the course of the novel.

In the complementary raft-crash scene of A Tramp Abroad, however, the moment is brief and fleeting — a minor but significant incident in the course of the novel.  Here, in chapter nineteen, Twain’s narrator revels in his hubris and takes exuberant credit for the crash:

“An Excellent Pilot–Once!”

“I believed I could shoot the bridge myself, so I went to the forward triplet of logs and relieved the pilot of his pole and his responsibility.

“Scatteration”

 We went tearing along in a most exhilarating way, and I performed the delicate duties of my office very well indeed for a first attempt; but perceiving presently, that I really was going to shoot the bridge itself instead of the archway under it, I judiciously stepped ashore.  The next moment I had my long coveted desire:  I saw a raft wrecked.  It hit the pier in the center and went all to smash and scatteration like a box of matches struck by lightning.”

The scene is brief and wickedly funny.  Twain’s narrator reveals a “long coveted desire” — to see a raft smashed.   He allegedly takes “responsibility,” but as soon as he realizes where the current and his own “delicate duties” with the pole are taking the raft, he deliberately disembarks, leaving his companions to their fate, which he describes with an “ecstasy” that is “deep,” but by no means “tranquil.”   The story has holes, of course, and scholar James Leonard assures us that it happened only in Twain’s vivid imagination.  If the raft were really “tearing along” in a “most exhilarating way,” there would be no way for the narrator to “step” ashore and stay dry; rather, he would have to dive from the raft.  But it is significant that Twain’s narrator portrays himself here as a practical joker, a man more interested in his “long coveted desire” than in the fate of his companions.   It is also significant that the crash is the result of four things:  his own inability to safely perform the “duties” for which he’s taken responsibility, his wicked sense of humor, the river’s power, and oblivious trust and preoccupation of his companions — they are posturing for the benefit of girls on shore.  After the imagined crash, nothing is hurt but the egos of his companions, who do “not want sympathy, they wanted a back alley and solitude” (A Tramp Abroad 182-183).

Twain had undertaken this excursion during one of the periods in which his own flow on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn had been interrupted and the manuscript shelved.  His own idyll interrupted, Twain cast about for new currents, and it is difficult for me not to read the complementary scene in A Tramp Abroad as a wicked satire on his own agency and covetous desires as an author, and his own uncertainty about where the crash in the shelved manuscript might lead him.

Hardly an idyll, surrendering to a river’s current means both joy and danger, both tragedy and absurdity.  The crashes are sometimes life-changing or life-ending, and sometimes minor bumps in the road, “scatterations,”  funny stories to tell.

But it is all the same to the river.
.
© Sharon D. McCoy, 17 May 2013

]]> http://humorinamerica.wordpress.com/2013/05/17/finding-the-flow-mark-twain-the-river-and-me/feed/ 1 sdmccoy Waterfall RaftTA1r RaftTA2r RaftTA3r RaftTA4r http://humorinamerica.wordpress.com/2013/05/14/maron-debuts-on-ifc/ http://humorinamerica.wordpress.com/2013/05/14/maron-debuts-on-ifc/#comments Tue, 14 May 2013 11:03:57 +0000 Matthew Daube http://humorinamerica.wordpress.com/?p=5308 ]]> May may just be the month of Marc Maron. The stand-up comedian is not new to the scene, having begun his forays into show business alongside the likes of David Cross, Sarah Silverman, and Louis C.K. in the late ’80s and early ’90s, but it is only in the last few years that he has garnered considerable attention due to the success of his podcast interview show WTF. In early 2011, the New York Times featured Maron’s podcast as a “must-hear” for comedians, and of course he has come up on Humor in America, most recently as “a revelation.”

This May, Maron is popping up in the mainstream as never before, issuing a new book entitled Attempting Normal, getting interviewed by Terry Gross, Howard Stern, and Jay Leno — and debuting his own television show on IFC, simply titled Maron.

One of the main reasons that stand-up comedians continue to have television shows built around their personalities is that the stand-up trade requires the creation of a detailed-yet-instantly-recognizable persona. It’s easily transposed to television, but Maron frequently refers to himself as an acquired taste, not for everyone. Indeed,  the plot of the premiere episode makes much of that, as Maron cajoles a woeful Dave Foley into accompanying him on a hunt for someone who’s been pseudonymously insulting the podcaster via Twitter.

(By the way, I highly recommend Dave Foley’s real-life appearance on WTF for a discussion of the Kids in the Hall star’s ups and downs in Hollywood, including patented WTF-glimpses into Foley’s tangled personal life.)

For example, Dragonmaster tweets Marc Maron: “I would say don’t quit your day job, but you don’t have one, and it’s too late to get one.” Maron fans will recognize that as an external manifestation of Maron’s internal self-judgment. The dude is a volcano of self-judgment.

Episode One does a decent job setting up some of the Maron essentials. This includes his Twitter addiction, of course. His first ex-wife. His cats. The tension between his exhausting self-involvement and his deep self-awareness. The podcast set-up in his garage.

What Episode One doesn’t capture is Maron’s exquisite timing. Some of the bits culled from his stand-up act don’t work as well on the small screen, such as that voice within that urges him to f#$k things up, and the expression of negative emotions he has towards the second ex-wife. But I don’t think it’s a limitation of the sitcom medium so much as that common awkwardness of a sitcom trying to find its voice.

And if we can judge by Episode Two, Maron found his voice quickly. The second episode expertly weaves together multiple plots, including Dennis Leary, a clueless twenty-five year old desperate to enter show business, and a dead possum.

Maron’s real-life difficulties with boundaries make for good sitcom fodder. He’s a decent actor; playing oneself can be tricky, but as a stand-up Maron has had plenty of practice. He’s sharply funny, as always, but his strengths on the stage and on his podcast also include an extraordinary knack for storytelling. My hope is that Maron the television show will continue to develop that same mix of the funny with drama and timing. If you’re interested in checking out the show, IFC currently has a full episode available on Maron’s web site.

Matthew Daube holds an M.F.A. in Playwriting from Smith College and a Ph.D. in Theater and Performance Studies from Stanford University. 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. Matthew is also a founding member of the San Francisco producing company The Collected Works.

Today, May 12th, would have been George Carlin’s birthday.  Born in 1937, Carlin was one of the key figures of the stand-up renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s.  Carlin is listed as #2 on the Comedy Central list of the 100 most influential comedians of all time and was awarded the Mark Twain Prize in American Humor.

“Seven Dirty Words” originated on Carlin’s 1972 album, Class Clown, and was revisited on 1973′s, Occupation: Foole.  Carlin was arrested on July 21, 1972 for performing the routine in Milwaukie.  The case was dismissed when Carlin’s routine was judged indecent, not obscene. Carlin’s explication of the words led to a court case that eventually ended at the Supreme Court in Federal Communications Commission vs. Pacifica Foundation–a decision that is a modern touchstone in the debate over obscenity (here is part of the FCC transcript of Carlin’s monologue).

Every once in a while, I try to think what those seven words are–can you think of them?

Okay, still with me.  Here they are:

Shit

Piss

Fuck

Cunt

Cocksucker

Motherfucker

Tits

Okay, there we are.  My mom would think those are bad.  I love to swear, much to my mom’s chagrin.  But it is an art form, or should be, which I learned from watching Richard Pryor, especially his Live on the Sunset Strip movie when I was 12 or so (thanks, Trent).

Here is the version from Class Clown:

And a later video performance:

And an interview with Carlin on the words:

And see more of this interview.

Most scholarly work on Carlin’s words focuses on the legal questions of indecency and regulation of television and other broadcasts.  Marc Leverette’s book chapter, “Cocksucker, Motherfucker, Tits“–in addition to being quite the addition to one’s CV–looks promising, although the preview cuts out a few key pages.  Leverette argues that Carlin’s “use of language on HBO… both popularized comedy speicals, as well as having a normalizing effect regarding profanity.” (127)

As Melisa Mohr writes in her new book, “Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing,” such words were used in the nineteenth century in much the same way:

The words in question, fuck, shit, ass, and cocksucker, were chosen for their emotive charge, not to denote as directly as possible some part of the body or action. They were employed to shock and offend, or to express the speaker’s emotional state.

and sometimes the risks of using these words went beyond the FCC and court cases:

One final example will have to suffice: in 1894, a New York man murdered an acquaintance partly because the acquaintance wouldn’t stop calling him “cock-sucker.” It’s not clear who started the bad blood originally, but the deceased escalated things by ordering drinks for a group of men but excluding his murderer with the words “Treat them five and leave that cock-sucker out.” He then smacked the defendant on the nose and called him “cock-sucker” several more times. When at one point the defendant didn’t have enough money to pay for another drink, the deceased also butted in with “Let him stick it up his ass.” Eventually the defendant left the bar, came back with the gun, and shot the man who had repeatedly called him “cock-sucker.”

While Carlin’s discussions of dirty words points out the absurdity of having 7 bad words, compared to almost 400,000 acceptable ones, the reaction to Carlin–and the continuing power of these words–should lead us to see the importance of looking at the connection between humor and profanity.

Happy fucking Birthday, George.

(c) 2013, Tracy Wuster

Anne Bradstreet may have been America’s first poet. Born in England in 1612, she immigrated to colonial America in 1630, and quietly penned her verses while running a home and struggling to raise eight children. Her words have a poignant introspection, and touches of subtle, self-deprecating humor that provide fresh glimpses into Puritan life.

“The Author to Her Book” is about her chagrin at having learned her work was published without her knowledge or consent, and thus exposed to the critical public. In this poem, she scolds her poetry collection as if it were a beloved, ragamuffin child.

Happy Mother’s Day, Anne Bradstreet. If anyone deserved a bouquet of flowers and brunch with mimosas, it was you!

The Author to Her Book

 

Thou ill-form’d offspring of my feeble brain,

Who after birth didst by my side remain,

Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true,

Who thee abroad, expos’d to publick view,

Made thee in raggs, halting to th’ press to trudge,

Where errors were not lessened (all may judg).

At thy return my blushing was not small,

My rambling brat (in print) should mother call,

I cast thee by as one unfit for light,

Thy Visage was so irksome in my sight;

Yet being mine own, at length affection would

Thy blemishes amend, if so I could:

I wash’d thy face, but more defects I saw,

And rubbing off a spot, still made a flaw.

I stretched thy joynts to make thee even feet,

Yet still thou run’st more hobling then is meet;

In better dress to trim thee was my mind,

But nought save home-spun Cloth, i’ th’ house I find.

In this array ’mongst Vulgars mayst thou roam.

In Criticks hands, beware thou dost not come;

And take thy way where yet thou art not known,

If for thy Father askt, say, thou hadst none:

And for thy Mother, she alas is poor,

Which caus’d her thus to send thee out of door.

                          — Anne Bradstreet —

To say that the word took off is a lame understatement. A Google search of “truthiness” yields 969,000 hits. Wikipedia–where I get all of my facts with full enjoyment of the ironic potential of that statement–has an article on the word that offers 57 footnotes pointing to a wide range of popular culture and media sources. If you are so inclined, you could follow #truthiness on Twitter and receive a constant string of observations from some of the brightest minds of the time, but I can’t recommend that in good conscience.

In no uncertain terms, truthiness is in the American grain, politically and socially. Colbert claims that the word–and its satirical context–is the thesis for the Colbert Report itself. Whether all of his viewers really get that could be debated, at least if one considers viewers early in the run of the show. See the 2009 article examining the complicated range of audience responses to the Colbert Report by Heather LeMarre here: The Irony of Satire.  I have commented on that conundrum in an earlier post questioning the power of satire – Teaching the Irony of Satire (Ironically). That essay was followed by a first-rate essay by Sharon McCoy reaffirming at least some of my optimism — (Embracing the Ambiguity and Irony of Satire).  By 2013, however, Colbert has appeared out-of-character enough and has built such a clear following, it would be much more difficult to find an audience who would be as confused regarding his true political thinking as some viewers were in 2005. He is too big, and he has appeared more often out-of-character via interviews in a variety of outlets. He is liberal, OK?

I would argue that no humorist has ever called into service a word with more usefulness to cultural and media critics, and to lovers of irony. But the concept behind truthiness is not Colbert’s. It’s the cornerstone of American humor, and our greatest writers and characters have built a tradition of humor forever exploiting the grand American attraction to self-delusion, to the power of desire over the power of facts. It is what makes us so funny.

Washington Irving gave us our first enduring humorous character through the sleepy ne’er-do-well Rip Van Winkle, a man who abandons his family for twenty years and returns after his wife’s death to become a grand old man of the town, living the life he always wanted–talking and drinking with friends. Irving brings Rip to readers through his narrator, “Geoffrey Crayon” who takes the story from “Deidrich Knickerbocker,” who takes the story verbatim from Rip himself. That’s a lot of room for creative use of truthiness. Rip is no match for the idealized romantic heroic male of the revolutionary era, the Daniel Boone’s who built it, so to speak. He presents a different kind of American. He does not fight for love of country or for political freedom; he sits out the war. He does not build a homestead thus failing to accept his role in the making of the national Jeffersonian dream. Nope. Within the story are all the facts to show that Rip is a sorry excuse for a man and a lousy American, a troubling subversive. But we love him because he seems like such a nice guy, and his wife is such a pain–as Rip tells it. Of course, his narrative is self-serving–and successful. Although some townspeople clearly know he is a liar, most accept his story of sleeping for twenty years–because it feels right, or at least it allows them to go about their business. They are willing to believe in the mysteries of the hidden corners of the Catskills, but more importantly, they are eager to believe in a man they like. It just feels right. And easier.

Readers, moreover, do the same. They like him; they hate Dame Van Winkle. They forgive Rip his indiscretions and welcome him back into the fold. They believe him because he seems so earnest. Rip abides, bless his heart.  They believe, for the similar reasons, in the exploits of Daniel Boone. But I digress. All of Rip’s late-life success in becoming a center of attention is made possible by his willingness to lie and the inherent desire of most of the townspeople to believe his story simply because they want to. Facts and deductive reasoning be damned. That is funny.

Washington Irving, in giving us Rip, deserves recognition as the first worthy exploiter of truthiness in American humor. The great master of the 19^th century was, of course, Mark Twain–who I will come back to in another post. There are many others, from the eternal optimism of Charlie Chaplin, to the befuddled female misfits of Dorothy Parker, to the secret dreams of Walter Mitty envisioned by James Thurber, to the disturbed struggles of Lenny Bruce, to the white Russians of the Dude from the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski. It is a long list that has as its current master-artist Stephen Colbert. It is a timeline of writers, characters, comedians, and satirists covering just under two hundred years (using the 1819 publication of “Rip Van Winkle” as my starting point).

For some reason, there is still a need for satirical minds to tell subversive stories and to exploit the absurdities of American culture because there also remains a powerful urge for many Americans to shun facts and go with their gut to serve their own desires and belief systems. They find regular affirmation in popular culture and politics. One could be somewhat disappointed that after all this time there is still so much work to be done to defeat the powers of truthiness in our political systems and social structures. Not me. I believe things will get better. I can feel it in my gut.

Because Rip abides.

ABE’s post from earlier this week highlighted the institution of the “editor’s chair,” which I have taken a seat in several times before to inform you, my dear readers, of the goings on for Humor in America and  in humor studies more generally.  Often, these postings have been inspired by the truest of all journalistic motives–a missed deadline.

So it goes.

I have also often written posts about milestones with the site.  This morning, we passed 130,000 views.  Our overall readership has been a steady 150 views or so for several months, following a summer and fall of larger readership.  I have a theory that our current readership reflects a more accurate count of our reach, following the inflated numbers that followed Ricky Gervais tweeting our post and the traffic from an aggregator that referred hundreds a day during the fall and then fell out of love with us.  I thank you for reading us.

On to the news:

* Steve Brykman and Phil Scepanski commented on this news story on humor in times of tragedy, specifically in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing.

* There is a new issue of Studies in American Humor that members of the American Humor Studies Association recently received in the mail.  The issue is a special issue on Kurt Vonnegut edited by Peter Kunze and Robert Tally.  You can get the journal by joining the AHSA, as well as on some versions of EBSCO.

*Speaking of Studies in American Humor, I am the book review editor of the journal.  I am currently looking for reviewers for 4-5 books.  See here.  The reviews would be for the Spring issue and due in the fall. If you know of a book that we might want to review, please let me know (wustert@gmail.com).

Up for review

*Also arriving in the mail is the newest issue of To Wit, the newsletter of the AHSA.  The issue features a version of one of Jeffrey Melton’s pieces from Humor in America.  Also in the newsletter is the listing of AHSA, Mark Twain Circle, and Kurt Vonnegut Society panels at ALA in Boston (May 23-26).  Hope to see you there.

Up for review, too.

* The summer also features the 7th International Conference on the State of Mark Twain Studies (what I call “Mark Twain Summer Camp“) in Elmira, New York.  Four of the editors of this site will be there.

Me, too!

*The 2013 ISHS Conference will be held from July 2 to July 6, 2013 on the campus of the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, USA.

Yes, up for review!

*We have a twitter account where we post articles on humor, links, etc. Al Franken, Baratunde Thurston, David Brent, and Walt Whitman are followers… maybe you should, too.

*Please let me know if you have any news, CFPs, etc. on humor studies.  Thanks.

“I rarely end up where I was intending to go, but often I end up somewhere that I needed to be.” You’d be amazed the liberty one feels at discovering the correct destination when relieved of plotting the course. Such was the case for this week’s submission to the Archives.

Quite often we hear the careless expression “In the wake of…” and understand the causality of A on the outcome of B. But the idiom in this case homophonically reminds us of our vigil in a funeral while punning on the context of current events. When the broad scope of law enforcement pulled Boston Marathon suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev out of a boat in a Watertown backyard, neither the boat, the backyard, nor the town were near water. But the wake cast by that young man in the boat capsized Boston for the better part of a week.

I was fortunate to be at a Dairy Queen with a small child twenty miles from the finish line when the bombs went off Patriots’ Day. I plan to stay near that child as close as I can when I see the pictures of children whose parents can’t hold them again. It sends the mind looking for answers. I thought I might find them in precedent.

That’s me on the left…

…meanwhile ninety-two and a half years earlier…

America has suffered from intentional combustion before 9/11. This September we are seven years shy of a century from the Wall Street Bombing in New York City, when anarchists sent a horse-drawn carriage with 100 pounds of dynamite and 500 pounds of cast iron to the front steps of J. P. Morgan bank. Thirty-nine people died, and hundreds more were wounded. I had hoped to find a published laugh to counterpoint the public cry of General William J. Nicholson: “Any person who would commit such a crime or connive in its commission should be put to death…He has no right to live in a civilized community. Such persons should be killed whenever they rear their heads, just as you would kill a snake!”

I turned to Harper’s Magazine, as their printer’s mark claims they’re “holding a light to be passed on to others” (ΛΑΜΠΑΔΙΑ ΕΧΟΝΤΕΣ ΔΙΑΔΩΣΟΥΣΙΝ ΑΛΛΗΛΟΙΣ, quoting Plato). Based on the time to prepare a periodical I turned to the October, 1920, publication (Vol. CXLI, No. DCCCXLV) and found an article by Brander Matthews on “Mark Twain and the Art of Writing” (pp. 635–643) reminiscent of my first piece on this website. Quoting Twain’s estimation for former Harper’s editor William Dean Howells as “concerns his humor…I do not think anyone else can play with humorous fancies so gracefully and delicately and deliciously as he does, nor has so many to play with, nor can come so near making them look as if they were doing the playing themselves and he was not aware they were at it. For they are unobtrusive and quiet in their ways and well conducted. His is a humor which flows softly all around about and over and through the mesh of the page, pervasive, refreshing, health-giving, and makes no more show and no more noise than does the circulation of the blood.”

Touching, and suitable for study in a later archive, but not therapeutic compared to present or past cataclysm. Was it possible that the high standards of past periodical journalists—professors, poets, and professionals of a certain social standing—did not consider writing about the immediate then and there? How far we’ve come, for better or worse.

Then at the back of the magazine I came upon a chair, recently occupied by Edward S. Martin. Born in upstate New York in 1856, Martin graduated from Harvard in 1877, like many men of import. Unlike his peers he began a little periodical called the Lampoon (or Cambridge Charivari) before he left, sort of a college Punch that later went National. His interest in starting funny literary magazines reached a professional level with Life magazine, which began publication in 1883 as a competitor to Puck and Judge before trading humor for photojournalism in 1936.

When aforementioned Harper’s Magazine editor William Dean Howells passed in May 1920, it was Martin who wrote the magazine’s eulogy for “The Dean of American Letters” in their July issue. When Martin resumed the “Editor’s Easy Chair,” previously occupied by Howells, in October of that year (pp. 677–680), he could’ve begun his tenure on any subject of his choosing. At sixty-four he had earned the right to write what he wanted. In discovering the following piece looking for a contextual laugh I realized that I did not end up where I was intending to go, but ended up somewhere that I needed to be.

There is no use in objecting because people don’t do what you think they should, especially in public concerns. The affairs of this world and this life are very incompletely transacted by people who do as you think they should. Most things that happen happen largely as a result of the activities of persons who do what you think they shouldn’t or of the failure to function of persons on whom you had built hopes.

Take the war! It was pretty much all a consequence of mistakes—the great preliminary mistake, well-distributed, of starting it: von Kluck’s mistakes that led up to the battle of the Marne, the mistakes of Gallipoli, and so on through four years of it until in spite or in consequence of all mistakes, the end came.

Take the peace! Here we are, at this writing, in the earlier weeks of a political campaign, which aims chiefly to get the opinion of the country as to who made the worst mistakes after the war.

The great factor in history that is constant is the fallibility of man. The one thing we can count on in life is that people will blunder. One might just as well expect that in the first place and try to be reconciled to it. It is the way the world is run. Life is a hurdle race and mistakes are the hurdles, and yet people groan about them and complain of them as though they didn’t belong in the game. But of course they belong in it, and the winner is the contestant who best and soonest gets over them.

One of the most useful exercises is to attempt something you have never done and think you can’t do. To do it you have to amend, enlarge, extend yourself, and if you do that it may be a bigger thing than to accomplish what you undertook. For to amend ourselves, enlarge and extend ourselves and become more than we began, is precisely what we are in this world for. We are started in life with the admonition to make the most of our talents. Education and all influences supposed to be beneficial are directed to induce us to let out a tuck and try to amount to something. But most of us hate to do it. We hate to think; we hate exertion; we hate discipline and self-denial; we hate innovation.

All these phenomena can be observed on a large scale in our present world. For practical purposes it is a new-born world, invited to amend itself and to undertake much more than it finds ability to do. It must recontrive its life, and it does not want to. It has come through a terrific struggle to be born again, and is still- tired. It hates to think, it hates exertion and a large part of it hates innovation. Nothing can make it bestir itself sufficiently and submit itself to necessary changes, but the discomfort of things as they are and the fear of what they may be if they are not taken in hand. It is the old-fashioned fear of hell, prodding up a reluctant world to go after salvation. The whimperings and complaints of people who think life ought to go on again in the old way, and can if proper plans are furnished and competent hands guide it, and their efforts to supply such hands and plans, are amusing when they do not threaten dangerous misdirection and delay.

With a world in such a case and so uncertain about its prospects, Easy Chairs seem incongruous. Are there any left? Should any be preserved? When Mr. Curtis began, about 1854, to sit in the Easy Chair of this magazine, a big national job, the Civil War, was coming down the road. He had an active part in that great disturbance and earned a share in whatever distribution of repose came after it. Truth was he never got any very somnolent degree of repose but was active in political disturbance all his days. The house he lived in on Staten Island is still there and very much as he left it, a house saturated with his personality, with Civil War flavors, and pictures, books, and writings reminiscent of the ’sixties, the ’seventies and the ’eighties of the last century. A visitor who is old enough to remember, will feel himself back in the times of Lincoln, of Grant, of Blaine, of Cleveland. He may see reminders of still earlier times—notes from Thackeray written when he came here to lecture in the ’fifties; letters from Dickens; other letters, both earlier and later, and of a most particular literary interest. And maybe in the room where Mr. Curtis wrote and where his desk stands undisturbed, a chair will be pointed out to him and he will be told, “That was the Easy Chair.”

It was his Easy Chair, and so the one most identified with the department in the magazine, though not the “old red-backed Easy Chair” described in the October number, 1851, and from which the department, then begun, got its name. Mr. Curtis’ chair is not at all such a chair as one thinks of when he thinks, nowadays, of easy chairs. No springs, no stuffing, no arms! It is a simple, shaker rocking-chair; a chair that stood not so much for repose as for a change of thought; for contemplation, consideration, reflection,—things we have as much need of in these times as in any days that ever were. For thirty-eight years, until his death in the autumn of 1892, Mr. Curtis filled the Easy Chair. Then for eight years it was laid off, until in 1900 came Mr. Howells and sat in it.

Mr. Howells came to an Easy Chair still affectionately remembered and to times meet for it. The Spanish War had come and gone, and left the country bulging with peace. To be sure it had left the United States in a different relation to the world from that it found it in, but it had no violent after effects. Its results were premonitory but not convulsive, and the same can be said of the seven years of Roosevelt’s administration, which Mr. Howells sat through. They were immensely interesting and had in them the beginnings of change, but not in the whole course of them did easy chairs go out of fashion or to sit in them seem unbecoming. His essays in the back of this magazine were to Mr. Curtis a change of thought from politics. For Mr. Howells they were a change from creative literature. Mr. Curtis turned from writing leaders for Harper’s Weekly to write essays about society, letters, travel, the drama, and music. The change was not so marked for Mr. Howells, for he turned from writing books to writing about books—from making pictures of human life to writing comments on human life. Mr. Howells was a very diligent worker, who never sat down to rest until he had done his task, but the contemplative attitude was very agreeable to him and characteristic of him, and until the Great War came his Easy Chair state of mind was not much disturbed. Through the first fourteen years of this century the world was a pleasant place—rich, well ordered, full of beauties, very comfortable to go about in, highly agreeable and improving to inspect. Mr. Howells went about a great deal—duly inspected Europe, approved it for the most part, and wrote about it. He saw the era that he had lived in end, and grieved undoubtedly at the sight. He hated war and wrote no more about it than he could help, but in the Great War there never was any doubt where his heart was. Though he sat in the Easy Chair all through it, he never went to sleep. He saw the United States, after two years of looking on and discussion, finally bestir itself, slowly gather its strength, and go like a giant into the world conflict and do a giant’s work. For Mr. Howells, though he saw the end of the era he lived in and the beginning of the new one, the visible world at home was not dislocated. It became immensely picturesque—filled with new sights, with new emotions—but it did not dissolve. It never came to a place where an easy chair was impossible.

“Put up your dukes!”

Nor has it yet come quite to that. We have had action, no end. The world has passed the crisis of a terrific sickness and these are days of convalescence, but of a convalescence hardly less anxious than the illness it succeeds. It is a convalescence full of pains and distempers, threatened constantly with relapses, needing careful watching and nursing all the time if the patient is to be saved from loss of vital powers and from age-long invalidism. Certainly in such times people who can sit down and think, have need to do it. Chairs to sleep in, the world hardly needs, for there are beds for that, but for chairs that rest the body while the mind stays active, for places a little apart from the din, where the soul can be invited, there may well be demand.

For there are more world problems nowadays than can be settled even at the polls. Indeed, the most that will be done at the polls, or in conferences or councils, will be to record something thought out elsewhere by people sitting apart, watching events and taking such council as comes of solitude and meditation. We have had a great row and delay and disagreement about the details of a mechanism designed to give a broken world a chance to get well of its fractures and bruises. The delay has held back the organization of the remnants left by the war and is generally credited with having done immense harm. But, after all, the delay is only more of the same disease that made the war. The war did not cure the disease; it ran over into the making of the peace. What made the war? Vanity and fear; love of riches and love of power. What has delayed the peacemakers? The same—vanity and fear; love of riches and love of power. Those are the things that must be cured if the world is to get well and those are matters that can always be meditated in an easy chair. The cure of them is not political nor economic, though politics and economics have their places in it. It is spiritual. It will come, if it comes, when the leadership of the world—the controlling leadership—can find the political road humanity should travel, and when humanity is ready to travel it.

But it may be debated whether political leadership will ever find that road. Humanity may find it by mass instinct. The question as to whether leaders lead the herd, or the herd crowds them where they ought to go, is not altogether easy. People of great sobriety and judgment say that no leadership can control the world at this time; that the great forces that are working in it will work out whether they are opposed or not, breaking bonds and bans, their courses shaped by driving instincts behind them.

The mass feels, and produces thinkers, and presently a man of action. To feel and then to think is a better sequence than to think first and feel afterward, but neither order is infallible. Genius can divine the thoughts that are born of feeling, and stupidity may feel indefinitely without having a saving thought.

When the mass has produced a great leader, the thing is to get something valuable out of him while he is still good. That calls for promptness, because leaders spoil so fast. They swim in terrible twisting currents of adulation, solicitation, abuse, and condemnation. They are all black to one side, all white to the other. When they would stop and think, they are driven on; when they see the course and would pursue it they are thwarted. Fool friends practice to twist them away from their best conclusions by arguments of expediency. Fool enemies assail them with slanders. It is an awesome calling to be a world leader, and men do not seem to last long at it. World leaders especially have need of easy chairs wherein to sit apart, from time to time, and rest and look on at the world in continuous performance.

Clint Eastwood knows the importance of an easy chair…

What sort of eggs is she hatching out, our Mother Earth, so unfamiliar and disquieting in her present gestations? What will come of all these vast upheavals, this general upset? How long will the Bolshevists last, and when they go how will they go? They will not make the world communist, but they may do something to it that will be more interesting to future historians than comfortable for present earth-dwellers. Is Lenin Tolstoi’s “strange figure from the North—a new Napoleon—in whose grip most of Europe will remain until 1925”? What Bolshevism aspires to do has very slight relation to what it may actually accomplish. It is a moving, destructive force and will get somewhere, though probably not where its artificers think to send it. It is an exceedingly ominous force, and powerful just now by its partial acquirement of organization. If there must be a collective effort to fight it back from Western Europe, the issue of that effort will leave Europe different from what it found her.

There is not a country in Europe, not a country in Asia, in which the present order rests on any firm basis. We think we know, if we know anything, that England will still be England twenty years from now; that France will still be France. And Germany will be Germany, though Austria, it would seem, may be a spot on the map where there once was a nation. British will still be British; French, French; Italians, Italian; Germans, German; but what sort of British will govern England and on what plan, and with what visible results we do not know, nor who will be on top in Italy or Germany or France. And as for all the new-born nations, no one can foresee how many of them will grow up, or who will run a nursery for them.

My! but there’s a lot to do in this world just now; a lot of plans to be made and worked out, and a lot of coal to be dug and passed around; and oil and gasoline to be collected and distributed, and so on, a thousand items, including food, and no visible superabundance of willing hands to do all these things. Even here, out to one side of the worst disturbed area, willing hands to do the chores of civilized life are somewhat to seek. Even here the strange restlessness that the war has left in the minds of men is a factor in all plans. Even here we are not insured against novelties of experience nor against catching contagions from Europe.

“…we do not know…who will be on top in Italy or Germany or France…”

The day’s work is exacting and one must think of it until it is done, but in the easy chair that follows it, these other novelties may be considered. The evening paper will have news and rumors about them, and the morning paper more of the same, which may or may not be information, and little by little, day by day, the scroll will unroll on which the destinies of mankind are recorded.

Optimism nowadays is based chiefly on religion. It looks with confidence for better times, and a truer spirit in men. It sees a lot of good in the world, both spiritual and material; it sees knowledge ever increasing, and, though it recognizes the danger-signals and sees how slowly response comes to them and what grave impediments delay it, it does not think a world so laboriously improved as this of ours is really going to pot. But even optimism, though it has faith in the future, hesitates about the present. It does not know how far it is to the turn in the road that leads in the direction of harmony and happiness, nor how the going will be until we reach it.

The source of all humor is not laughter, but sorrow. ~ Mark Twain

It has not been a week of laughter. The terrorist bombings in Boston last week were a troubling reminder that we live in a changed and tragic world; a world changed long enough ago we were almost getting comfortable. There have been other attacks and even more horrific tragedies in recent years, but this was a man-made explosion in the heart of an American icon and that carries with it a certain kind of pain and frustration.

The Patriot’s Day holiday in Massachusetts represents everything positive about a civilized society. Patriot’s Day is the biggest day of the year in Boston. Its origins are in tribute to the great American Revolutionary fighters and thinkers whose blood spilled upon those very same streets centuries ago, but it is mainly an excuse to drink during a weekday and watch other, more sober, people run. This itself is noble. What better way to celebrate humanity and freedom than to take a pause from work, bend a few social norms, and host a sporting event that is a testament to the human spirit, individualistic accomplishment, and the coming together of all cultures, from all corners of the globe, to compete in a non-adversarial quest using nothing extracurricular to the human body other than shorts and a pair of shoes? The genius of a marathon is that anyone can do it – you don’t have to run quickly, or run at all. You don’t even have to finish. Performances are timed, yes, but runners truly compete against only themselves. It is whatever the runner wishes to make of it. It is a mission of personal fulfillment that also happens to be witnessed by and shared with the world. For anyone to want to disrupt such a triumph with death and devastation is a painful reminder of the lowest in humanity – oppression, fanaticism, ignorance, and tyranny.

It is true that Boston has had its share of Puritan repression and racial dysfunction. But one thing quintessentially Bostonian is that Boston rejects tyranny. That is essentially its existence. Boston pride is a special breed.

When I lived in Boston I discovered harmony in the past and present coexisting; in the profound poetry of the reflection of Trinity Church in the glass exterior of the John Hancock Tower in Copley Square, mere feet from last week’s explosions. I learned that there are indeed bars where everybody knows your name and that, as my boss at the pizzeria made clear, it would be rude to not bring a pizza from the neighborhood joint where I worked for the bartender at the neighborhood joint where I drank. My boss was happy, the bartender was happy, and I was certainly happy; drinks on the house. There’s a certain cyclical poetic profoundness in that as well.

This is a humor blog and my monthly entries are about humor in music. It has been difficult to enjoy either since last Monday but in Boston you don’t sit around feeling sorry for yourself. You show your reverence for the fallen of the past – be it centuries ago or just a few days – by showing your pride for the present.

So here are five funny songs about one tough and beautiful town:

Banned in Boston – Sam the Sham & The Pharaohs

I’m proud to say that my best friends are Boston’s biggest freaks

Boston is known for its bizarre and antiquated “blue laws” (it only became legal to sell liquor on Sundays as recently as 2004 and it is still illegal to harass pigeons). This phrase dates back to the city’s puritanical roots when literary works deemed “objectionable” were forbidden. Sam the Sham was a turban-wearing, Hearse-driving, Mexican-American rock ‘n’ roll singer from Texas named Domingo Zamudio who added his name alongside the likes of Walt Whitman, Ernest Hemingway, William Burroughs and The Everly Brothers as being a little too “weird and bearded, baby, wild and wooly” for Beantown. Now let me get up on this doctored up thunder ticket.

Boston Beans – Peggy Lee

They have Cambridge and Harvard and MIT, they didn’t have any beans for me

The “Beantown” nickname dates back to the slave trade era when the city was infused with an inordinate amount of molasses from the West Indies, which was used to sweeten a then-popular baked bean dish. Imagine Peggy Lee’s surprise to find out no one really eats Boston baked beans in Boston. They have “plenty of fish, Chinese food if that’s your dish,” but, alas, no molasses baked beans.

Dirty Water – The Standells

Frustrated women have to be in by 12:00 (ah, that’s a shame)

The Standells were from Los Angeles, not Boston. But the city’s reputation in the 1960’s for college co-ed curfews and water pollution was enough to inspire one of the coolest and most influential garage rock anthems ever waxed. It remains a staple at local sporting events.

Government Center  – The Modern Lovers

Make those secretaries feel better, when they put the stamps on the ledgers

An ode to the monotony of bureaucratic government workers’ daily doldrums. But it’s nothing a little rock ‘n’ roll can’t fix. Recorded in 1972, this proto-punk track was left off The Modern Lovers’ original eponymous 1976 release.

M.T.A. – The Kingston Trio

He may ride forever ‘neath the streets of Boston

This colorful tale is like a musical T map – name checking Kendall Square, Jamaica Plain, Chelsea, and Roxbury – detailing the adventures of Charlie, a rider stuck on the Boston subway system unable to pay the “exit fare” increase implemented after he started his ride. Never mind that his wife could hand him the requisite extra cash instead of a sandwich at the Scollay Square (now Government Center) station each day. The song was composed in 1949 as part of a political campaign and shares a melody with the train tragedy folk classic, “Wreck of the Old 97.”  The Kingston Trio recorded the definitive version in 1959. More than half a century later, Charlie’s fate is still unlearned.

(c) 2013, Matt Powell

When computers learn how to make jokes, artists will be in serious trouble.

–Donald Barthelme, “Not Knowing”

We have all had the experience of having something we are fascinated by dampened by learning more about it.  The tragedy of poor schooling is not unmet standards or bad test scores–the tragedy of school is having the natural curiosity of childhood deadened.  Of course, much of the transition from magical world of wonder to rational world of knowledge is necessary… we wouldn’t want an entire nation of clowns who do not understand that magnets are not miracles.  But thought and study don’t have to lead to the death of wonder–what I, and I would hope other scholars of humor (and of almost any subject, really), would like to convince you is that study can lead to both a knowledge and a deeper appreciation of the subject, a deeper fascination with the complicated and, yes, fun workings of humor.

But when it comes to humor, people often have a different reaction.  Humor, of course, is not a science–and there is not formula that a computer can learn to tell a joke properly in front of an audience, even if computers can make jokes.  Jokes and laughter are a different kind of subject, and one dominant thread holds that turning humor into an object of study might diminish the vitality of the work.

The objection that the study of humor takes something alive and turns it into something like a computer program is a real fear, and surely one with some basis.  But often, and maybe unfortunately, this real issue for discussion gets wighted down into one simple, and somewhat misleading, metaphor: “killing the frog.” Both Sharon McCoy and I have taken on E.B. White’s semi-famous warning that studying humor is like dissecting a frog.  I have seen several versions of this saying:

Analysts have had their go at humor, and I have read some of this interpretative literature, but without being greatly instructed. Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.

Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog.  Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.[1]

Sharon nicely explains that the metaphor is off–frogs are already dead when they are dissected–and that the act of dissecting the frog leads to scientific understanding of not only frogs, but of ourselves and of our environment.  In my post, I explained that White states this position, and then he goes on to offer some definitions of humor–partaking in a long tradition of people claiming you can’t define or discuss characteristics of humor and then going ahead and doing so.  I call it a “definitional denial.”

What I think the prevalence of this quote points to is a larger fear that the study of literature–or of film, or of television, or of any piece of artistic expression–somehow seeks to lessen the experience of that object.  That to seek to understand a cultural object is to lessen the authentic interaction one might have with that object.  That to call something a “cultural object,” and to point out that it might have a historical or sociological or psychological or linguistic or any other academicalistic meaning, takes that thing out of the realm of enjoyment, of relaxation, of appreciation and then puts it into the realm of school.  And with humor–which most people  experience as enjoyment, as laughter–the feeling is either heightened or easier to vocalize.  For those who didn’t get pleasure out of school, putting humor into the scholarly realm might be a heightened betrayal [2].

When encountering a frog, most people just want to watch it, not cut it open to see how it works.

But some of people like to think about how humor works.  We are scholars.  Just as there are scholars of frogs, and of schools, and of Texas music, and of male flight attendants, and of religion, and of stadiums, and of just about everything else, there are scholars of humor.  And unless you don’t like scholars in general, there should be no need to defend any particular branch of study: from frogs to funny.

That being said, I seem to be venturing close to my a corollary form of the “definitional denial”: the defensive denial–claiming I don’t need to defend the study of humor and then doing so.  Instead, let’s turn not to a dissecting a frog, which is not a terribly good metaphor for humanistic study of humor, to looking at a goat.  Not just any goat.  This goat:

Robert Rauschenberg, “Monogram” (1959)

Seeing this piece, we might have any number of reactions–”What does it mean?”  ”Who is it by?” “is it supposed to be funny?” ”I like it” “I hate it” “eh” “wow” “is it art?”  These reactions are not much different from the reactions people might have to a piece of humor more generally.  Your answers to these questions, your reactions, matter to you.  And the range of reactions a cultural object might have are important as evidence of audience reception.

But to the art historian, or the aficionado of art more broadly, the historical context of Rauschenberg’s combine matters, along with its formal characteristics and its place in his development as an artist.

For Donald Barthelme, in his great essay on writing, “Not Knowing,” [3] Rauschenberg’s goat stands in as a synecdoche for all prose and poetry, really all art.  It is an object deliberately made, presumably meaningful in some way, and one that inspires explanation.  In other words, it is an object of study (for those interested in that study, of course).

As an object of study, the goat with the tire inspires similar responses to humorous objects and might itself be a humorous object. Is it worth studying?  What can we get from studying it?  What does it say about the artist, about its time, about art more generally?  Will studying the goat kill our enjoyment of the goat?

The goat–like the frog–was already dead.  The metaphor of art as “living” or “dead” only goes so far.  As Barthelme writes, the goal of mimesis–of representing the reality of the world–has become an impossible, or at least impractical, goal for the writer, and we might instead see the text as “an object in the world rather than a representation of the world.”  For Barthelme, and I think I would follow him on this path, art is “always a meditation upon external reality rather than a representation of external reality or a jackleg attempt to ‘be’ external reality.”

The confusion comes when individuals are confronted with an object and it becomes part of their own external reality–often and object of art becomes vital to an individual.  With humor, something makes us laugh, and that object becomes a living thing, or more precisely, part of our lived experience.

And this transaction is somewhat magical.  The problem with study is the fear that this magic will be explained, that the living experience will become the dead object, that the fun will be sucked out and we will be tested on a corpse.  And, surely, sometimes this happens.  But, I would argue, that the problem is not the act of study, but the method:  with my students, I find that I must frame the study of literature (or art, or other  cultural object) not as a problem to be solved but as an experienced to be deepened.  The end goal of interpretation is not to answer something like an equation but to more fully understand a piece of literature and, often, the time period in which it was produced.  Admittedly, the study of humor will still change our experience of the object, but most humor scholars aim for the experience to make individual objects of humor more alive and, as an extension, to enliven the experience of all humor.

That is surely a lofty goal, and one easier stated than accomplished.  Not everyone who dissects a frog will learn much about the creature, and not everyone who sees Rauschenberg’s goat will think about it in any depth–even if asked to.

Barthelme takes on a kind of “critical imperialism” in which a “tyranny of great expectations obtains, a rage for final explanations, a refusal to allow a work that mystery which is essential to it.”  The range of approaches to literary works (as well as other artistic works) that, in one way or another, reduces the work to a system, to straightforward evidence of a cultural zeitgeist, to a footnote in some larger project of representing reality–these are the approaches that risk extinguishing the vitality of the work of art.

Not that these approaches might not create something vital in their own right… but that the mystery of the literary work might disappear as critics seek other mysteries.  Then the critical work is no longer about the goat but about the world in which the goat is an object.  Far be it from me to state the proper subject for study, as I said earlier, study what you will–from frogs to funny.  But with humor, the vitality of the interaction between the object and its audience seems so central that the movement away from that magical moment of surprise seems more an act of killing than it might in other cases.

But, remember, the goat was already dead and stuffed when Rauschenberg put that tire around it.  Those interested in understanding the work might follow Barthelme’s line of analysis:

What precisely is it in the coming together of goat and tire that is magical?  It’s not the surprise of seeing the goat attired, although that’s part of it.  One might say, for example, that the tire contests the goat, contradicts the goat, as a mode of being, even that the tire reproaches the goat, in some sense.  On the simplest punning level, the goat is tired.  Or that the unfortunate tire has been caught by the goat, which has been fishing in the Hudson–goats eat anything, as everyone knows–or that the goat is being consumed by the tire; it’s outside, after all, the mechanization takes command.

After some further discussion of possibilities, Barthelme writes that “what is magical about the object is that it at once invites and resists interpretation.  Its artistic worth is measurable by the degree to which it remains, after interpretation, vital–no interpretation or cardiopulmonary push-pull can exhaust or empty it.”  The best interpretations of humor, I would argue, help us understand the vitality of humor, either by providing an understanding of the ecosystem of a living joke or by revitalizing humor that has become a taxidermied specimen in need of some contextualization.

I have gotten far back into the metaphor of the study of humor as something of a natural science.  That link between humor and a living creature seems important.  As Simon Critchley points out in On Humour, the link between animal and human is a key aspect of humor:

If humour is human, then it also, curiously, marks the limit of the human.  Or, better, humour explores what it means to be human by moving back and forth across the frontier that separates humanity of animality, thereby making it unstable…

This link might explain the sudden explosion of videos on my Facebook page featuring goats screaming like humans (a video of which has been viewed over 16 million times).  Animals-real and imagined–acting like humans has long been a staple of humor that would be worth considering in more depth.  But this study should never kill the vitality of watching a kitten scamper, a blue jay think, or a rabbit sing [4].

Let’s take a look at the portion of White’s quote that is often left off:  ”Analysts have had their go at humor, and I have read some of this interpretative literature, but without being greatly instructed.”  Note how the quote rests on the assumption that he has read “some” of the literature, but that he was not “greatly instructed.”  When a critic, or author, or student reads some of the available literature on a subject and then claims that he or she didn’t learn much from it, then we are no longer in the realm of studying the frog or the goat–we are dealing with a whole other part of the animal…

(c) 2013, Tracy Wuster

Notes:

[1] Note: he does not say that explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog, although the quote sometimes gets bastardized into this formulation.  Very few humor scholars are out there explaining jokes the way people like to imagine when they use this quote.

[2] White’s formulation speaks to those who want to make something funny–to produce humor–as a living thing.  To write something that could someday be anthologized with Mark Twain’s great jumping frog.  Elsewhere, White wrote to William Zinsser: “But if you’re hoping to disabuse people of the notion that there is something vaguely second-rate about humorous expression in literature, I wish you luck.  I don’t think you have a prayer.”

[3] See a class project on Barthelme’s essay that inspired this post:

http://dbknowing.blogspot.com/

http://dbnot-knowing.blogspot.com/2012/05/alpha.html

[4] My original goal was to relate Barthelme’s discussion of the goat with this video:

Nature industrialized.  Violence mechanized. Sheep absconded and rescued. The wolf outfoxed. Framed by the cohabitation of natural enemies who clock in to the “factory” of a field of sheep, Ralph E. Wolf is foiled by an increasingly implausible resolutions to his plans. Maybe for another day…

When people are in the midst of tragedy, or dealing with its aftermath, their expectations are different.  They seek comfort.  Connection.  Strength.  Relief.  Information.  Laughter can seem inappropriate — especially lighthearted laughter or any sort of mockery.  But laughter can also provide comfort, connection, strength, and relief.  And sometimes humor — as opposed to comedy or a joke — can also provide information, or a new perspective that enables coping.  In other words, humor can allow us to stand a little askew — a stance that can help in surviving a tragedy, or in coping afterward.  This use of humor is very human, but I also think, in many ways, it is particularly American.

In September 1857, the ship Central America, carrying 626 crew and passengers and almost $2,000,000 in treasure,  went down in a hurricane off the southeastern coast of the United States.  Sighting a ship in the distance, all of the women and children were put aboard the only three lifeboats they had.  The men aboard went grimly about the business of bailing until the ship finally went down.  Of the approximately 576 men cast into the waters when the ship went down, fewer than 10% survived to be rescued.  But amid the terror of the wreck, a group of survivors remembered most what gave them hope and strength:  humor.

One of the passengers on board the ship was the blackface minstrel Billy Birch.  Along with other men, he had put his wife Virgina (with her pet canary firmly and safely tucked into the bosom of her dress) into a lifeboat.  Cast into the sea with the others when the ship went down, Birch swam about until he found a bit of flotsam.  Hailing other survivors in the nearby waters, he invited them expansively to have a perch on his “yacht” to rest, and apparently kept up a running patter of jokes and humorous comments as they waited hours in the cold and stormy seas for rescue.  Years later, long after the stories of the night’s terror had dimmed in the popular imagination, occasional re-tellings surfaced about the incongruity of the famous actor and his impromptu floating stage, of his indefatigable good humor and laughter.

The story resonated because it appealed to something deep within Americans’ sense of themselves.  Unlike the legendary British “stiff upper lip,” Americans seem to pride themselves on meeting disaster and danger with resolve and quips and humor.  Events of the last week show that this is still true.

When on April 15, the Boston Marathon was violently disrupted by bombs exploding near the finish line, the initial response across the nation was of course shock, empathy, sadness, and anger — simultaneous with pride in those who helped and in the resilience of survivors who woke up “happy to be alive” and runners who had not been able to finish the race but who, only a day or two later, were discussing online how to finish the race in honor of the fallen, which included an 8-year-old boy, and out of determination not to be stopped.  Humor quickly came into the national conversation as well, as one of the slain, Krystle Campbell, was described over and over as having “a great sense of humor” as one of her most important and defining characteristics.

Stephen Colbert weighed in the next evening, with a tribute to the people of Boston in his opening monologue that is being shared on websites and in news reports around the world.  The monologue has already been characterized as “masterful,” “meaningful,” “eloquent,” “touching,” “patriotic,” “moving” — and “humorous.”  I would argue that it is also quintessentially American.  After opening with a serious statement of sympathy and one of determination that those responsible will be caught, Colbert used humor to remind Americans of what he sees as our core strengths, exemplified in the city that was the “cradle of the American Revolution”:

Source:  http://www.dailydot.com/news/4chan-boston-marathon-bomber-photo-evidence/

Mark Twain once said:  “Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.”  The inappropriate or offensive efforts at humor in the wake of this tragedy will probably be remembered only as lessons in how we need to improve.  Others, like Billy Birch’s arguably heroic use of humor to keep survivors’ hopes up in stormy seas, or Stephen Colbert’s efforts to remind Americans of their strengths in the face of adversity, will last somewhat longer.  But the fact that humor is a part of the American ethos, the American response to tragedy or loss, it seems, will not change.  And when we ourselves are crushed with the weight of the tragedy, we count on others to find some humor, to provoke a moment’s laughter and a moment’s ease.

Because, to paraphrase Leonard Bernstein’s defiant statement after the assassination of President Kennedy, the only “reply to violence” is to do whatever it is you do passionately “more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.”  Tragedy, facing death or destruction, doesn’t really change us, it distills us.  It makes more who we are.  And humor is, inescapably, a part of the American way of looking at the world.

©  Sharon D. McCoy, 18 April 2013