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American Fun: Four Centuries of Joyous Revolt

2015; Penn State University Press; Volume: 1; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/studamerhumor.1.2.0303

2333-9934

Erin Guydish,

Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies

Wars and social conflicts often serve as defining moments of history. More particularly, American history is largely established in a national narrative centered on revolutions and civil rights movements. However, equally important as those big events—in their own ways—are the ways that Americans understood and negotiated such conflicts throughout their national history. And one underexamined way that Americans have engaged with their culture is through humor. Humor is key to the in-depth reflections on the demonstration of American character in Winifred Morgan's The Trickster Figure in American Literature and John Beckman's American Fun: Four Centuries of Joyous Revolt. Many oft-ignored factors of American identity are explored through these authors’ engagements with texts and demographics focusing on humor. The two studies alternate grand narratives of American culture featuring tricksters, borderland inhabitants, and paradoxes of rebellious belonging.John Beckman has created a nuanced definition of American fun as he examines joyous happenings involving risk, participation, rebellion (sometimes implicitly, other times explicitly), and democracy. Furthermore, fun is distinct from entertainment because the former unites Americans through enactments of liberty, freedom, and participation in politically meaningful acts, whereas the latter separates the public based upon gender, class, and ethnicity. Beckman is concerned with how Americans have fun and what fun has meant and still means. He examines fun from American independence to contemporary social circles. While he reflects on a variety of ways Americans have had fun (attending pubs, singing and playing music, attending festivals, attractions, and sideshows), his most salient threads trace dance and hoaxes or pranks as acts of rebellion. Beckman's work, balancing narrative and analysis, is a pleasure to read. He occasionally provides commentary and quips; he is most definitely not an unbiased historian or cultural analyst of American history. Rather, his amusement in presenting America's fun history is apparent.Chapter 1 launches with the quintessential moment of American fun: Thomas Morton's Merry Mount opposing William Bradford's Puritan rules and community. Beckman refers repeatedly to Merry Mount in justifying the continued presence of the “essence” of fun in and through rebellion. He explains fun happening in and through political events in chapters 1 through 4: Merry Mount; Jack Tars, John and Samuel Adams, and events during the American Revolution; Pinkster celebrations, African American trickster tales, and dances originating in religious African American settings evolving into Congo Square dance events; and the development of American character in the West through hoaxes, dances, and the democratic policy allowing all to have fun so long as none have their own right to fun impinged. He then shifts to P. T. Barnum, sports and dancing, and the commercialization of fun. Beckman establishes how fun was often a politically meaningful act even when it was commercialized. After reflecting on capitalist endeavors, Beckman recognizes jazz (as music and dance) as the culmination of the past types of fun and describes it as the “American spirit or a warning of civilization's decline” (164). He discusses major figures and analyzes the risks and rewards involved with jazz, which aided in the rise of the New Negro and the New Woman. This section focuses on how specific celebrities and demographics became more politically focused in their fun as the Jazz Era faded and the Harlem Renaissance arose.Beckman next examines the passivity of cinema as he begins engaging with contemporary cultural conditions. Cinema and film, he claims, are representations of a popular culture that was invented, not by the media, but by the people as they were having fun—by going to dances, playing with gender and American social norms, and pushing against temperance and strict Christian morality. The Merry Pranksters, the Beat generation, Rock 'n' Roll, the San Francisco Mime Troop, and the Diggers are all positioned as pranksters, hoax inducers, or tricksters of some sort. They engaged with and required participation from audiences. They also pushed against capitalist and, in some ways, bigoted patriotism. The Yippies, which developed in part from the Hippies and other groups just mentioned, are framed as forces of fun and rebellion. This section is valuable in its analysis of the Yippies’ court proceedings and the fun they had with the American legal system. Examining history's somewhat recursive nature, the earlier section on the Gilded Age connects with how culture created by the people was claimed and used in marketing in the 1970s as well. Commercialization, which simultaneously gives the masses what they want while giving them space to rebel, then serves as the framework for the Punk and the Do-It-Yourself mindset of America's contemporary culture. Beckman closes by considering how the active history of resistance clashes with the passive lifestyle Americans often have today. He gestures toward the need to ensure that risk, participation, and fun do not die at the expense of passivity, spectatorship, and entertainment.Whereas Beckman provides readers with a historical narrative of American humor and fun as democratic, participatory, and risky, Morgan analyzes how literary tricksters represent the need for multicultural American demographics to veil their desire for Beckman's type of fun, even as they seek to develop and engage with it as Americans. Her tone is much more formal and intended to represent her objectivity. In general, she tends to twist humor and tricksters in ways that can wring the humor out of them and present them as iconic figureheads who are not necessarily funny or witty.Morgan is concerned with the evolution and differentiation of tricksters across various multicultural American communities. She works to define different tricksters and explain how they are connected as well as different. Furthermore, she explains how trickster figures appear in nontraditional ways in multicultural texts and what type of work those trickster characters perform, both as representatives of different demographics and as critics of American social circumstances. Morgan assumes a highly analytical, formal tone in addressing her works, contexts, and audience. Her approach positions her as an authority on both tricksters and their function in multicultural literature and communities. The texts examined in Winifred Morgan's work engage tricksters who are more complex characters than their pranking ancestor stereotypes.Morgan is concerned with who American tricksters are, where they appear, and what social and literary functions they serve. To provide a fuller examination of the many versions of tricksters in American literature, Morgan analyzes tricksters in African American, Native American, European American, Chinese American, and Latino American traditions. The connecting factor of all these tricksters is that they require being “cloaked” in humor in order to make their social critiques (12). Furthermore, these characters explore race, gender, class, and ethnicity without reinforcing those boundaries. All of her chapters are formatted to discuss why she has chosen a particular cultural heritage, what its traditional tricksters look like and function as, and each chapter closes with what contemporary manifestations of kindred tricksters do. The tricksters Morgan examines are literary figures that attempt to find unity within a diverse American culture. They function as representative figures of minority American groups by combining various ethnicities with Anglo-American characteristics. Humor, pranks, or wit are not necessarily traits embodied by the tricksters she examines. Instead, the characters use humor to manipulate social circumstances—sometimes for the trickster and his or her community, other times for majority American culture. Ultimately, tricksters are agents in American culture(s) who change themselves and others through humor.Morgan studies how American tricksters live in cultural borders and reveal social contradictions while finding ways to unite Americans with their critiques. In her chapter “African Americans and an Enduring Tradition,” Morgan examines tricksters manifesting in less recognizable ways in pieces such as Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada (1976), Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982), and Toni Morrison's Tar Baby (1981). While many of the figures engage humor, sometimes in unique ways, Morgan emphasizes how they reveal social contradictions or seek threads connecting disparate American communities. Her tricksters are more than funny; often they are working to slyly draw attention to social conditions. Morgan's analysis of Native American tricksters in texts by Leslie Marman Silko and Louise Erdrich (among others) discusses how tricksters may not be concerned with being particularly witty or funny. They may be so, but sometimes only by happenstance; Morgan's selected tricksters are subversive and focused on a new version of nationality. The characters and stories she draws on do not call out communities or alienate America's multicultural communities while emphasizing social problems and contradictions (one of the most important qualities of a trickster Morgan would argue). Instead, they seek to create an equal and diverse American community. Tricksters must serve as motivators of change for themselves and others, a characteristic that takes precedence when she discusses Euro American tricksters, particularly the Merry Pranksters and John Irving's A Son of the Circus (1994).After explaining that she will limit her focus in Asian American studies to Chinese American traditions because an entire book could be written discussing the vast number of Asian American trickster traditions, Morgan analyzes these tricksters as particularly ambivalent characters—asserting traditional identities as well as exploring American elements of identities. She looks toward well-known works such as Eat a Bowl of Tea (1969) and M. Butterfly (1988) as well as Crossings (1968) and Tripmaster Monkey (1989) and highlights their characters as tricksters because they manipulate themselves and their environments. Her final section reflects on Latino American tricksters, their commentary on machismo (which at times supports, at others refutes it), and the repeated use of imagination (reminiscent of magical realism) in such works to change environments (occasionally other characters). She closes by connecting the work that all of these tricksters do to emphasize how minority communities are made Others in American literature. Her trickster analyses critique an American history that neglects narratives showing diversity, national unity, and humor. In addition, they reflect on American democracy and display social contradictions in order to promote a vision of social evolution.Both works contribute significantly to the fields of American and humor studies by addressing how humor has traditionally shaped representations and enactments of culture in the United States. Beckman's work illuminates areas that deserve attention and study as cultural motivators while Morgan's analyses explore nuances and push past traditional definitions of tricksters and trickster texts in America. Beckman focuses on how humor has been a motivator and often-ignored factor of historical and culturally defining moments, whereas Morgan reflects on how humor reveals beneficial and detrimental cultural elements. Overall, both sources would be a valued addition to either an American studies or humor scholar's bookshelf.