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The Year's Work in American Humor Studies, 2017

2019; Penn State University Press; Volume: 5; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/studamerhumor.5.1.0157

2333-9934

Bruce Michelson,

Media, Gender, and Advertising

On subjects directly relevant to comic dimensions in American literature, performance, and cultural life, the 2017 publications reviewed here include forty-five books and more than eighty articles and chapters. Though the year's business was brisk and diverse, quirks and patterns in it can be suggested.First, the year's efforts at cutting-edge literary and cultural theory continued to show unease with the comic as a presence in what are construed in these studies as high-serious texts. Rarely venturing beyond Bakhtin, Freud, and Bergson (if they cite anyone at all), “high theory” commentaries followed the familiar practice of avoiding or isolating moments or strains of laughter that could contribute to a text's overall vitality and thematic depth. Second, beyond the usual attention to Mark Twain, the year saw a dearth of discussions of American comic discourse in the Gilded Age, of twentieth- and twenty-first-century wit and humor in print (e.g., novels, short stories, magazines), and also of laughter on the modern American stage, except with respect to minstrelsy and vaudeville. Attention covering this span of cultural history instead centered on film, radio, and television. Third, despite a profusion of comedy on big and small screens, 2017 again saw concentration on South Park, The Simpsons, and Stephen Colbert, along with moral and political scrutinizing of television sit-coms that have been off the air for years. And fourth, in modes of scholarship self-classified as humor research (as opposed to humor studies, the enterprises represented by this journal), the year saw additional defensive efforts to reassert that “humor” means discrete jokes, extractable from contingencies and contexts which make them complex and interesting, that individually or in sequences, these jokes can be interrogated on the basis of semantic mechanisms, and that the historical and cultural explorations undertaken in Studies in American Humor, the Mark Twain Journal, the Mark Twain Annual, and other publications engaged with national and cultural history have no relevance to these inquiries. What passes for fieldwork in humor continues to be students watching video clips and filling out questionnaires or researchers importuning patrons of live performances (again with questionnaires) and then publishing data with insinuations that these findings have relevance to demographics beyond the local group in that given moment. The divide remains—and humor research for 2017 continues to be a liability to the larger enterprise.To navigate this sizable batch of material, this year's review is sorted under the following headings: general studies and large-scale theorizing; American culture before 1865; American culture, 1865-1900, including Mark Twain; American culture, 1900-1950; American print culture and the fine arts, 1950 to the present; racial, ethnic, and gender perspectives, 1950 to the present; contemporary film, television, performance, and online comedy; and adventures in humor research.Let us begin with the grand scale. For literary theorizing relevant to humor studies, Guido Mazzoni's Theory of the Novel is a tome designed with the austere portentousness that academic presses reserve for a world-boiling release. Profundity is the objective: “The significance of the novel and the reason a species of entertainment gained so much importance over a period of two and a half centuries is incomprehensible unless one understands that its rise is the sign of a ground-shifting transformation in the relations between literature and truth, between literature and philosophy, and between mimesis and truth that took place on the thresholds of the modern age.”1 Wellek, Lubbock, Iser, Lukács, Todorov, and the rest of you, move aside. Though responding to all of Mazzoni's pronouncements and convolutions is far beyond the reach of this reviewer, Mazzoni does claim to want to explore how varieties of comic discourse are engaged. And indeed he does—in ways that readers of Studies in American Humor may find sadly familiar. Amid so much generalizing about literature, truth, mimesis, philosophy, and all that, humor and wit come off once more as inconvenient qualities to be maneuvered past quickly: Another corpus of texts in the comic romance tradition, related to the picaresque novel but with its own specific identity, is the humorous novel of the eighteenth century: from Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1761-1767), to Diderot's Jacques the Fatalist … , to the works of Jean Paul. This literary lineage became an essential landmark for the first theorists of the truly modern novel, especially for Friedrich Schlegel. The freedom with which the humorous tradition mixed its contents and forms also contributed to the novel becoming perceived at a certain point as the genre that can be used to tell about anything in any way whatsoever. (71, emphasis in the original) Though Mazzoni hurries to other business, his summary here is worth a pause. Actually not from Sterne onward but rather from Fielding and John Cleland, decades before Tristram Shandy, the comic novel in England and France was experimenting with giddy reflexivity, celebrating an inherent strangeness of narrative fiction, psychological and ontological mazes and mirror halls of writing, unavoidable absurdities connected with form. Robert Alter writes about this headiness in Partial Magic (1975), a classic study of the comic novel of the eighteenth century that gets no mention in Mazzoni. For Alter, comic play with literary form is dangerous and potentially chaotic—which is why other theories of the novel have often tiptoed around it. This happens again here. When Mazzoni closes in on James Joyce's Ulysses and the inconvenient fact that the book is a comic masterpiece, an exuberant celebration of and insurrection against the cultural hegemony of The Odyssey, those qualities are skipped over, in favor of attention to the book's “mechanism”: When Joyce explains the internal characteristics of the chapters in Ulysses using the “Linati schema,” he traces the form of his novel back to a preexisting idea that explains the text through an explicit pattern of correspondences. In a less pervasive but more general way, a similar effect is obtained using the principle of montage. … Using this mechanism to bring the parts together is tantamount to subverting every ordo naturalis: it subordinates the plot to an idea that manifests in an oblique, silent form, in the authorial decision to put a certain sequence near another. (318) Jane Austen's works are likewise summarized in language that evades engagement with her vitality and her comic sense, the commentary offering sonorous variants on a survey-course intro: Although Austen's works might appear to be limited, they contain another utopia of universal narratability, founded on the conviction that all human beings, even the most common, are faced with interesting conflicts during certain periods of their lives. This happens when objective turning points determine one's place in the world, fixing the relations between what one wants to be and what one becomes, laying the foundations for happiness or unhappiness, or, more modestly, tranquility or preoccupation. (271) Universal Jane Austen: life intrudes; shit happens. Again there is no recognition here that a comic sense affords these novels an intense and polished exuberance that keeps them readable. Along that same line: Moby-Dick earns a single half-sentence muzzle pat as “a modern allegorism devoid of any fixed hermeneutic key” (328), and, if you're looking for even a word about Mark Twain as the most famous classic American novelist—sorry, he's not here at all.Turning to book-length studies specifically about the comic, Todd McGowan has produced Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy for a series he coedits with the ubiquitous Slavoj Žižek, a book that grows out of courses he has taught and articles he has published in Quarterly Review of Video and Crisis and Critique. In his acknowledgments, McGowan thanks colleagues at the University of Vermont who “encouraged me to work on this book rather than waste time teaching or meeting with students. This enabled me to finish it quickly,” thus dimming, from the get-go, any hope that his experiences with comedy and wit have taught him the time of day.2 The book proper opens with one generalization after another about what comedy is and how it works: “The experience of comedy doesn't provoke reflection. This contrasts it directly with other extreme experiences. When we confront tragedy, we tend to think about the nature of tragedy. When lovers fall in love, they often spend time pondering the nature of love itself. When we see death firsthand, this can prompt us to consider our own finitude or the question of death's ultimate significance” (3). And on we go, with perhaps enough contradictions along the way to keep you awake. For example: “The immediacy of comedy locates it in a specific place and time. Unlike other aesthetic modes, comedy does not translate or age well” (3)— but physical comedy, he tells us, is exempt. So the Keystone Cops are an ageless laff riot, but The Importance of Being Earnest and Tom Jones are mirthless fossils? After dips into Hegel, Freud, and Bergson, we plunge into several pages on “the genius of The Hangover” (a misogynist lad film from 2009), Howard Hawks's Bringing Up Baby (1938), and Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove (1964), and then (no, don't ask why) The Silence of the Lambs (1991)—and not the novel here, but the movie. Always the movie. McGowan's plan is to “develop a theory of comedy structured around the intersection of lack and excess” (17) and looking for that pattern is the objective of the next eight chapters. We learn along the way that “the pun is the primordial form of comedy,” that “puns are not always funny” (29), that “every successful joke confronts us with this link between lack and excess that occurs during comedy” (39), that “the best Jewish jokes rely on the failures and betrayals of the omnipotent deity” (43), and that “the bare existence of comedy does not in itself prove the truth of Hegel's philosophy of contradiction” (100). (Swish that one around for a moment and let it bloom like top notes in a bargain-bin merlot.) And here's my favorite: “Though he never puts it this way, Henry Fielding identifies affectation as the foundation of the comic because it encapsulates the coincidence of lack and excess. The affected person displays a lack through excessive attempts to obscure this lack” (45). So much for Fielding, who (though he could actually write comedy) hadn't read Hegel or Žižek and didn't make movies. Later, there are two paragraphs about Mrs. Slipslop's malapropisms—but that's as far as this study ventures with comic narrative fiction. There's passing mention of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and hit-and-run allusions to Shakespeare; but “comedy” in this theory of comedy means American movies, with just a few British ones for spice, and overall the selection seems oddly configured: Lethal Weapon (1987), Die Hard (1988), How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (1965), and zero mention of Nora Ephron, Mel Brooks, Judd Apatow, Rob Reiner, George Cukor, any of the postwar Alec Guinness films, anything that might complicate a thesis that remains to the end only vaguely articulated.The worst thing about The Rhetoric of Humor, edited by Kirk Boyle in the Bedford Spotlight Reader series, is the cover, a photoshopped image of a braying zebra. If I were looking for a reader in a college course on the comic I'd toss this one out for its in-your-face visual message that humor and its rhetoric are mindless. To make things worse, this cover pic shows up repeatedly inside the book, compounding the chore of reassuring students that despite this gratuitous cue, wit and comedy and humor are actually not a waste of scholastic time. It's too bad, because the contents of the book do try to provide a useful range of commentary on contemporary-style laughter and comic discourses. For broad theorizing, Boyle includes excerpts from John Morreall's philosophical-scientific attempts to cover the whole business, the bit from Freud on aggression and relief theory (with a mildly cautionary introduction suggesting that Freud might be a bit sexist and out of date), and Chris Bachelder's effort to blueprint and categorize what he calls “the mechanisms of jokes.”3 Most of the other essays here engage contemporary issues—the rough times that stand-up comedians are facing on politically touchy college campuses, patterns and transgressions of various sorts on cable and late-night TV, comedy about American minority life, the joys and dangers of the internet and social media. There's scant attention to literary texts or to cultural history running back more than a couple of decades, and even feature-length film comedies are mentioned only now and then. So the Rhetoric of Humor comes off as largely a rhetoric of pixelated jokes and between-the-commercials routines before live audiences. If you seek guidance on how it might work in Much Ado About Nothing, Huckleberry Finn, Ulysses, Invisible Man, stories by Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker, and on and on, seek elsewhere.Hearteningly different in both content and design, The Bloomsbury Reader in Comedy, edited by Magda Romanska and Alan Ackerman, features a cover that takes the year's prize for gravitas. In a detail from a Polish romantic-era painting depicting a battle from three hundred years earlier, a sour-looking fellow in a blood-red jester suit, solus in a shadowy corner, contemplates defeat, lost glories, mortality, the whole package. Though, as a come-on for students, this might not be better than the Bedford zebra, the collection itself is worth a place on the shelf of any scholar who wants ready access to the long conversation about the role of laughter in literary life. Selections run from Plato and Aristotle through Simon Critchley, Linda Hutcheon, and essays from the most recent decade, with smart choices from Frye, Burke, Langer, Woolf, Derrida, and others who ought to figure more in current debates. Though the focus is on stage comedy, Fielding is here, and Mark Twain on the art of telling a story, and René Girard, and Bakhtin, and Bergson—a range that a seminar might need for informed, provocative thinking about laughter and the literary imagination.Comedy Begins with Our Simplest Gestures: Levinas, Ethics, and Humor is a set of nine essays from various contributors, meditating on the legacy of Emmanuel Levinas, the Lithuanian-French philosopher whose theory of the Other drew extended commentary from Derrida, thus assuring Levinas a place in the history of twentieth-century ethics. Wondering “what it might mean to put Levinas's thoughts on responsibility, trauma, suffering, and the holy in conversation with contemporary theories of humor, comedy, and laughter,” editor Brian Bergen-Aurand asserts that “there is an important space for the ludic in Levinas's philosophy and even more so among those engaged with his thought. Levinas makes a place for comedy in his essay ‘Reality and Its Shadow,’ and he discusses laughter and comedy briefly in Totality and Infinity, Otherwise than Being, and elsewhere. However, his treatment of comedy in these texts is preliminary and calls for further interpretation in the context of his more dominant themes”—which is why this explication is called for:4 “What becomes clear” in accounts of “how comedy functions in Levinas or how Levinas's thought works with regard to comedy,” Bergen-Aurand notes, is the importance of readers’ critically considering “their own tacit seriousness and straightforwardness with regard to comedy and humor” and also that “Levinas provides the resources to produce a distinctive theory of comedy, humor, and laughter that challenges many of the dominant theories presently under discussion.”5 The essays in the collection, most of them, move categorical words and phrases around the board—transcendence, “excendence,” the ego, the ethical, fraternity, eros and fecundity, subjectivity—with bits of Nietzsche, Freud, Bergson, and others seen as qualified to be shelved as philosophical. But when we get to the foreshadowed “distinctive theory of comedy, humor, and laughter”—bromides break out. “Laughter,” we are told, “does not always take us away from what really matters to us. Indeed, we tend to laugh harder when we are laughing at what matters most deeply: religion, war, death, and sexual inadequacy. Laughter is an escape, but it does not have to be escapist. The important point is that one should not take oneself too seriously” (29). The exercise of bumping Levinas and Bataille into each other so as to shed light on “the comic significance of the ontological impasse” (33) leads to problems based in an unquestioned assumption that irony, the absurd, humor, and wit are all pretty much the same thing. In fact, neither in the introduction nor in the constituent essays are there pages that settle down to describe even provisionally what these words signify over the arc of the collection. We do, however, get bursts of eccentric generalization: “The humor of a person or a people is a pre-philosophical mode of their being, on the other side of that person considered as an essence. In this way humor is in some sense not itself properly philosophical but is philosophically significant for understanding how and why persons and people are ethical.”6 This might make a nice epigraph if you're doing an essay that tries to avoid landing in the psychological and situational mess of “persons and people.” The editor's own essay, offering connections between Levinas and the humor theorizing of Simon Critchley, does try to come down to earth, though “humor” and “comedy” are equated here, once again, with discrete jokes. The fifth essay in the set, called “Toward a Critical Theory of Laughter,” culminates this way: “A critical theory of laughter begins in the wake of disaster in order to discern tragic wisdom without succumbing wholly to the tragic pathos of such simulations,” a stunning generalization (based on other people's generalizations) about when and how and why we are amused.7 Elsewhere there are discussions of play with no reference to Huizinga, of the construct of “I” and the subject that do not draw on psychology or the mind sciences later than Freud. Refreshing in the array, however, is the contribution by Julia Lane, listed here as a clown scholar and as a practitioner of the art. Admitting to some trouble in connecting what she knows about comic performance to anything in Levinas, Lane offers insights into varieties of clowning: “Rather than perform to an audience, clowns exist for an audience. For the clown, the audience is present and is inherently part of the event. … [T]he clown also disrupts the form of participation that Levinas suggests may lead spectators of art to forget about their ‘real world’ responsibility for the Other.”8Diana Hope Polley's Echoes of Emerson: Rethinking Realism in Twain, James, Wharton, and Cather has a way of approaching its subjects in descending spirals. The introduction, for instance, opens with the September 11 attacks, George Will, Henry James on the loss of American innocence in the Civil War, a touch of Karl Marx and Raymond Williams, and a nod to Bakhtin, all before we get to this: “Echoes of Emerson employs the theories of Williams and Bakhtin in order to explain the dialogic relationship between residual, dominant, and emergent cultures within the realist novel. … More specifically, the double-voiced discourse gets expressed within realist literature through a fraught dialogue between postbellum history and the antebellum transcendental philosophies of Ralph Waldo Emerson.”9 It's worth noting that throughout the book there's little actual engagement with writings of Emerson. With regard to Huckleberry Finn (centered in a “Twain” segment of this study), scholars have been having a lively conversation for a long time about paradoxical clashes and blends of tropes and themes associated with romantic and realist sensibilities. Polley approaches the issue with a preamble on the Whittier birthday speech from 1877: the where and the when, and who said what about that evening at that time and in later years. When we arrive at Huck, there's a loss in clarity and currency. Though “many other critics” are bumped aside for their naïve assertions—that the novel is a work of nostalgia, that its ending does or doesn't work, and so on—the only ones engaged from the past fifty years are Jonathan Arac and Richard Poirier, and both of these only briefly. Otherwise, there are jousts with DeVoto, Leo Marx, Hemingway, and others from a couple of generations back, and we roll through a conventional analysis of the novel's characters and episodes: “Tom Sawyer, like the Duke and the King, characterizes the more corrupt facets of 1880s America. Tom represents the antithesis of Huck Finn” (37). The conclusion: “Unsure of where we have been left and where we are going, we sense both possibility and defeat, manifested as a backward glance at Emerson's romantic philosophy and a forward nod to historical reality” (39). How all this connects to “the philosophies of Ralph Waldo Emerson” remains hard to fathom.Critical Inquiry, a journal that was rocking Anglo-American lit-crit thirty years ago, produced a special number in 2017, edited by Lauren Berlant and titled (with various entendres) “Comedy: An Issue,” as comic discourses and resonations continue to cause trouble for high theory. One of the longest and most provocative essays in the set is Berlant's own on “humorlessness,” a word signifying what she regards as a peculiar and timely variety of the comic: texts with no obvious extractable jokes, offering instead a pervasively ludicrous environment, often constructed around personalities who can't grasp the absurdity of how they are behaving and what they want. Drawing on the 2013 film American Hustle, Berlant offers “the combover”—in other words, the camouflage job on the pate of our current president—as a descriptor for what she's talking about, and though her term might not find its way into taxonomies of wit and humor, it does nudge us away from equating humor with discrete gags and varieties of “relief.” With unacknowledged links to the “refuser of festivity” as a trope in Restoration stage comedy, Berlant's proposition seems apt for our own moment; and with prose that seems uncommonly breezy for Critical Inquiry, she describes a contemporary American scene vexed by its agendas, a country where everything devolves into face-off, with joyless multitudes (including folk in our trades) who resist looking at anything, including themselves, from fresh perspectives and who have no grasp of their own limited effectuality. “What constitutes humorlessness,” says Berlant, is someone's insistence that their version of a situation should rule the relational dynamic; but no particular way of being and sounding confirms its social presence. In this essay my larger claim is that, whatever else structures it, the comic is motivated by the pressure of humorlessness, with its radical cramping of mobility at the heart of the encounter, whether the encounter is with oneself or with another person, object, or world.10Bergson is the only old authority referenced in more than a passing way, and he is here as a springboard: “Humorless comedy is also a comedy of confusion about what and where sovereignty is, such that its location and the relation between its inflation and reduction are in crisis and unknowable” (308-9). Berlant's real interest lies in what she calls “flooding,” which is “the way a scene of disturbance lets into the room multiple logics of frame switching, temporal manipulation, status scale shifting, identification, and norm-agitating gestural events”: “If only the world were x and its other. If only causes led to effects. … The combover exemplifies the comedy of unbinding that happens in the face of rigidity but locates the comic in its proliferation of complications, threats, potentials, constraints, and consequences that are never definitively ordered” (313). If the essay is hampered by its choice of texts to work with—not only American Hustle but also the old, so-so Martin Scorsese film The King of Comedy (1982) and the second-tier HBO sitcom The Comeback (2005 and 2014)—Berlant nonetheless provides support for innovative thinking.Coediting with Berlant, Sianne Ngai offers an essay titled “Theory of the Gimmick” proposing that “the gimmick form, like the comedy of procedure that puts it so ostentatiously on display, emerges explicitly as a phenomenon of industrial capitalism, not just of a rationalized modernity.”11 Contrasting the capitalist gimmick with premodernist tricks like Melchior Broederlam's “mechanical apparatuses,” she cites recent national nightmares caused by Ponzi-style financial instruments as demonstrating this kinship, arguing that “it is a form we marvel at and distrust, admire and disdain,” she says, “whose affective intensity for us increases precisely because of this ambivalence. Indeed, the gimmick is the very slippage between these positive and negative judgments—wonder and trick—in a way that gives it a special relation to comedy, opening a window onto the genre in a way that the unequivocally appreciated precapitalist device does not” (470). Swooping through Marx, Rube Goldberg, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, E. L. Doctorow, the Discovery Channel, and slick maneuvers in PowerPoint, the essay eventually lands on A Connecticut Yankee, which Ngai reads as replete with Mark Twain's capitalist anxieties over the Paige typesetter and the threat of bankruptcy, making the novel a mess of contradictions. The novel is said to lean too heavily on “a fairly mechanical proliferation of burlesque ‘contrasts,’” on “stock devices” and “clichés of travelogue nostalgia” that become “mere parts of the machinery of this mechanical novel,” and on a protagonist “more mechanical than any of the gadgets in which he specializes, [who] grinds laboriously through his ‘acts,’ his only means of attracting attention being to run faster and faster, to do bigger and bigger things, until the mechanism of his character flies apart” (492). Most of these phrases are lifted from commentary in a Norton Critical Edition published thirty-odd years ago.12 Having classified the Yankee as sociological data on Gilded Age capitalism, the essay moves to Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods (2012), a big theme of which “is that regardless of the stage of technological development, and in a way that might explain why the novel's exact historical moment is so hard to pin down, capitalism's main productivity enhancing device remains what it has always been: contingent-because-feminized, feminized-because-contingent labor” (504). If you move fast and stay high in the air, everything can look like it fits.Though the action here in 2017 was relatively sparse, the quality is high. To begin with the books, in the Concise Lincoln Library series published by Southern Illinois University Press, Richard Carwardine reconsiders Abraham Lincoln as a wit, joke teller, and humorist, seeking origins for all that in his upbringing and observing how comic utterance added sophistication to his political life and impacted his public image—sometimes for the good, sometimes not. In the presidential reelection campaign of 1864, for example, major newspapers in the North attacked him as a frivolous bumpkin who too often made people laugh instead of making them think. Tracing Lincoln's risky irreverence back to his childhood, Carwardine documents an abiding impatience with stupidity and how it fueled outbreaks of rough and aggressive satire in his years as an Illinois lawyer and candidate for various public offices. Handily organized, Lincoln's Sense of Humor covers not only the biography and famous outbreaks of comic speech along the way but also varieties of these tactics or indulgences: wit, dry wit, ribald humor, nasty satire, and the like. This is a lean, crisply written history and commentary.Edited by Lorie Watkins, A Literary History of Mississippi includes a chapter on the state's contribution to Southwest humor; its author, Ed Piacentino, is the acknowledged master of the subject. Condensing insights from several of his previous publications, Piacentino offers a summary history before centering on five writers: Alexander Gallatin McNutt, Phillip B. January, Joseph Glover Baldwin, Joseph Beckham Cobb, and William C. Hall—all of whom he has recovered and written about before. As a brisk and reliable tour, Piacentino's chapter is a top-level resource. Elsewhere in this volume, though the state of Mississippi cannot lay claim to Sam Clemens except perhaps as a river pilot on its convoluted edge, and though his classification as a southern writer is often debated, in “‘Reading the Bozart in the Sahara’: Mississippi Literature and Culture, 1890-1920,” Thomas J. Richardson engages him as a benchmark against whom other prose writers from the region were measured, especially from the final decades of the nineteenth century until about 1920. The chapter is less about Mark Twain than about obstacles that critical and public response to him created for younger authors struggling to come into their own as comic voices. The one chapter expressly on modern humor, Terrence T. Tucker's “Humor, Fantasy, and Myth: Dramatic and Marginalized Voices and Mississippi's America,” is mostly about the plays of Beth Henley, whose comedy, says Tucker (going for long yardage here) “provides an unflinching, unromanticized portrait of violence and despair and loneliness in the South. Henley's humorous approach contrasts with dramatic representations of southern women as tragic heroines whose only qualifications rema