On Second Thought
2021; Penn State University Press; Volume: 7; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/studamerhumor.7.2.0257
ISSN2333-9934
Tópico(s)Contemporary Literature and Criticism
ResumoEditors:I found Sam Chesters's “metamodern” framework for satire in “Don't Go All Earnest on Us” useful and encouraging, especially in an era in which, despite George Saunders's own increasing popularity, satire is viewed with skepticism by much of the reading public and the publishing industry.1I was a student of Saunders's two decades ago, and even then he was warning me against my tendency toward what Steven Weisenburger refers to as “degenerative satire,” which Chesters points out had been done well in the past but whose strategies, she hints, have by now become rigid, stale, and ineffective. Metamodern satire, in Chesters's account, “functions effectively by grappling with postmodernism and modernism in sequence, first by destabilizing metanarratives through the characteristic irony and cynicism of postmodernism and then proposing the genuinely tendered correction present in modernist satire” (41), which seems to me a concise formulation of what Saunders and I were only grasping at in those conversations, as well as an accurate description of most of Saunders's work.What seems daring to me is Chesters's decision to focus this thesis on “Brad Carrigan, American.” Saunders has lampooned television, and particularly reality television, as least as far back as Pastoralia's “Sea Oak,” but “Brad Carrigan” is the first of his stories that I'm aware of to be set in a television show, a setting he uses to directly confront “the metanarrative of neoliberalism” (41). And I hadn't before considered how Carrigan differs from Saunders's earlier characters—“the dispossessed, the oppressed, or merely those whom history's winners have walked all over”—in being “very privileged but also oppressed” (59).Nonetheless, there is a darkness, a bitterness, to “Brad Carrigan,” and to much of the collection it appeared in, In Persuasion Nation, that I don't see elsewhere in Saunders's work. It may be worth pointing out that his first two books of short fiction were published before 9/11, during the “end of history.” With some exceptions (the novella Bounty being the most prominent one), the stories are a reassertion of compassion in the face of the comic nihilism of a culture that could produce, for example, Seinfeld and the pervasive self-referentiality of 1990s consumerism. The settings in these stories are carnivalesque, literally amusement parks and novel workplaces, and in them, a precarious and downtrodden laborer often comes to an epiphany about the inherent value of all people.But the reintrusion of history—the war on terror, the invasion of Iraq—has put a strain on Saunders's use of metamodern satire. In my reading, the cracks show. As Chesters points out, “Brad's final act is to concentrate on an improved version of himself that he hopes will guide his actions when he reemerges in his next life” (59). I agree this is the “correction” that Saunders intends, which distinguishes metamodern satire from its predecessor, and it's to Chesters's credit that she built this argument using one of Saunders's most fraught offerings. But while the story may deviate from the neoliberal metanarrative of its time, it seems to uphold today's, which not only expects neoliberal subjects to acquiesce to its boundaries but to blame themselves for an inability to transcend them, by retaining a focus on individualism. The characters in “Brad Carrigan” react with varying degrees of civility to the refugees who continually appear in the backyard, but no one, Brad included, gives much thought to where they come from or why or, perhaps most importantly, what could have been done to stop the war that killed them. And even if the victims can be comforted, in the world of the story, they're all already dead.Christian TeBordoRoosevelt UniversityEditors:What is crisis slapstick? In an era of rising authoritarianism, all-consuming media spectacle, and nonstop political carnival, slapstick itself is in crisis. I think about the crisis of slapstick all the time and was very intrigued to see an article on this topic in a recent issue of StAH. At first glance, the term seems to posit a vital zone of contestation between dystopian enjoyment and playful bodily protest.But Joshua Moss offers a different account of the genre. In “Cutting to the Punch: Graphic Stunt Comedy and the Emergence of Crisis Slapstick,” Moss defines what he claims as an original category by distancing it, first, from what it is not: classic slapstick. According to Moss, classic slapstick is exemplified by silent cinema's meticulously orchestrated pratfalls, which aestheticize danger but deftly manage actors’ own threats of bodily crisis.2 He places classic slapstick on the side of safety and catharsis, despite its projection of extravagant injury. For example, Buster Keaton's poetic survival of a collapsing house façade in Steamboat Bill Jr. (1928)—in a stunt that necessitated the star actor's foolproof blocking—fits snugly into the category of classic slapstick. As Moss puts it, the “absence of actual or lasting injury confirms that slapstick body violations are, in fact, superficial and inconsequential. Momentary dizziness, quickly shaken off, neutralizes whatever seeming violence has just taken place” (16). In other words, the disaster is only a trick; the spectator is aware at some level of this artful subterfuge; and that reassurance is what finally authorizes their carefree explosion into cathartic laughter.Crisis involves the eruption of danger on a deadline: stock market crash, political hostage snafu, pandemic viral contagion, or the spread of damaging disinformation—a volatile situation that needs to be managed with swift finesse before it unravels into a full-blown catastrophe. What, then, does the modifier of “crisis” add to the already crisis-fueled genre of violent, weird, uncanny, combustive, and punctually ill-timed slapstick? According to Moss, crisis slapstick throws both the comic stuntman and laughing spectator into the belly of the beast. Popularized by daredevils such as Johnny Knoxville and Steve-O of Jackass and Ralph Zavadil of the Cap'n Video series among others, crisis slapstick is the property of disaffected white male libidinal transgression. It is unclear, however, whether unfiltered misogyny is collateral damage or an essential characteristic of crisis slapstick's blurring of boundaries between safety and injury, comedy and horror, laughing spectator and self-eviscerating performer. Either way, Moss insists that the “erasure of women” is “critical” to the emergence of crisis slapstick as a performative mode, which he further associates with “the rise of a number of forms of illicit body spectacle media in home video, including porn, graphic horror, video nasties, and gross-out cinema” (22). Puzzlingly, he cites feminist porn scholars such as Linda Williams as evidence of porn's stone-cold patriarchal gaze without further exploring the gendered counterpleasures that feminist film theorists have elaborated on. There's plenty of fodder for antinormative crisis slapstick in the furious pornography and subversive aesthetics of Peggy Ahwesh, Doris Wishman, John Waters, Nelly Kaplan, and many others. But Moss's crisis slapstick, it seems, is all about the redemption of Oedipus.Transgression is really the wheelhouse of normative “crisis slapstick,” which has eerily alt-right vibes. Moss celebrates crisis slapstick as an outlet for the liberation of “primal masculine energies” that the “creature comforts of modern privilege afforded [to] the young white male” had kept imprisoned in “a gilded cage” (18-19). Though he emphasizes its erosion of boundaries between viewer, screen, and performer, his analysis produces a tangible confusion between fetishism and critique. Were a wider debate to ensue from this essay, it might echo many of the recent conversations about comedic edginess, political correctness, and “wars of the words.” But instead of edgy rape jokes, here we have settler colonialism gags, “quasi-‘snuff’” blooper reels, suicidal naked cliff dives, and self-flagellating Peruvian jellyfish stunts, as if self-inflicted bodily harm somehow neutralized the aggressive display of “primal masculine energies.” Yes, comedy is most incisive when it violates social norms and threatens kneejerk beliefs. But that does not make all comedic transgression inherently progressive (or even particularly interesting), as far-right shock jocks understand all too well. Crisis slapstick comics, in many of Moss's examples, punch down against the already dispossessed under the cover of doing so while they themselves are being punched.It would have been productive if Moss had related crisis slapstick to the subsequent rise of cringe comedy, xenophobic insult humor, nihilist antijokes, weaponized trolling, and far-right infotainment. That seems to be where many of the impulses he elaborates have gone. Instead, he cites the dark humor absurdism of The Eric Andre Show as a contemporary example, which I honestly found very confusing. Even more confusing is his assessment of classic slapstick, which, as a silent film scholar familiar with histories and theories of the genre, I found almost unrecognizable. Again, he focuses on the modernist formations of slapstick (instead of on postmodern or far-right contextualizations of crisis slapstick) in order to partition classic and crisis. Whatever the former is, the latter is not (and vice versa). In that vein, the gender politics of crisis slapstick as Moss describes it feels especially off the mark. For example, Moss implies that playful violence inflicted by or against women in slapstick comedies does not simulate crisis because it is merely representational, as opposed to the unfolding crisis of a forty-year-old man filming himself motorcycling in a Speedo off the roof of a middle school. In the latter case, physical injury and performative politics are two sides of the same coin: that's what pushes slapstick over the edge from catharsis to crisis. The inextricability of social aesthetics from material reality is, however, the premise of a vast body of film scholarship on early cinema, political modernism, slapstick comedy, archival historiography, and feminist theory. Moss cites many of these works (by Jennifer Bean, Tom Gunning, Don Crafton, Lisa Trahair, Kristen Anderson Wagner, Rob King, and me) but appears to miss their main point. In this field, slapstick offers an aesthetic mode for destabilizing the known world, especially during moments of intense social change and political upheaval. Slapstick's play between peril and safety is radically dialectical, but Moss misreads that dialectic of finitude as an ultimate delivery into stability and catharsis.All radical comedy unleashes extravagant risk. As Walter Benjamin once put it (in the context of 1930s knockabout films and grotesque cartoons), slapstick laughter represents a “preemptive and healing outbreak of mass psychosis,” in this case Nazism.3 At its best, slapstick converts the escalation of bodily crisis into the image of apocalyptic calamity in order to liberate the imagination and give vent to hell-raising political tensions. Self-proclaimed “laughing philosophers” have similarly toyed with the wager of taking intellectual pleasure in the very scene of their own mortal injury. From Friedrich Nietzsche's gay science and Georges Bataille's comic mysticism to Hélène Cixous’ Medusan decapitation and Ralph Ellison's homeopathic laughter, there is nothing new in the gesture to conjoin unorthodox joy with bodily abjection or ego-shattering annihilation. The most hopeful cultivations of humor (whether individual or collective) always place a vital equilibrium in danger. They demand a break from the cruel optimism of the present to clear the ground to move toward something different, something better: that is (and always has been) anarchic comedy's utopian impulse. When crisis engulfs the entire world, slapstick poses a reckless gamble and vital escape hatch from the nightmare of ordinary attachments. If nothing else, crisis slapstick is an evocative concept. Then again, circa 2021, what isn't crisis slapstick?Maggie HennefeldUniversity of Minnesota, Twin CitiesEditors:Todd Thompson's “Viral Jokes and Fugitive Humor in the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Reprinting” is an ambitiously thorough, cogent, and meticulously researched essay. It examines the recycling of one seemingly ubiquitous joke, “A Yankee Boast,” the earliest printing of which Thompson found in the December 24, 1855, issue of the Richmond (VA) Daily Dispatch. He strongly suspects, however, that “A Yankee Boast” may have appeared earlier in the Boston Transcript because the joke's frame narrator reports hearing the exchange between the two principal characters, Jonathan and John Bull, in Boston. John Bull, who represents Great Britain, smugly criticizes American expansionism and quips, “Fortunately the Americans couldn't go farther westward than the Pacific shore.”4 Jonathan, an ingenuous Yankee and representative American, matter-of-factly replies, “Why, good gracious, they're already leveling the Rocky Mountains and carting dirt out West” (66). Jonathan finishes his response with a well-executed display of one-upmanship, noting that a letter from his cousin reports that he “is living two hundred miles west of the Pacific shore—on made land” (66). An abbreviated tall tale (at least the punch line), “A Yankee Boast” employs the battle-of-wits paradigm frequently found in nineteenth-century American humor wherein a common man of little formal education employs verbal wit to humiliate his vain and would-be superior.What is fascinating about “A Yankee Boast” (sometimes appearing under different titles such as “Not to Be Outdone,” “A Great Country,” “Going West,” “Further West”) is how often it was reprinted, sometimes with slight variations, in newspapers in all sections of the United States and in several of the same newspapers multiple times. Thompson found the joke to have been reprinted at least 104 times between 1855 and 1867 (67).Thompson not only demonstrates his masterful capability as a savvy and patient archival researcher, pointing out specific newspapers and other periodicals where “A Yankee Boast” was reprinted, but also makes an interesting argument, broadly suggesting that “tracing the circulation of jokes in the culture of reprinting … helps … reconstruct larger circulation patterns and practices of scissors-and-paste journalism in nineteenth-century American print culture” (64-65).One of Thompson's most notable findings is that “A Yankee Boast” often served to draw attention to actual historical concerns because it shared space with news stories in the newspapers treating similar, if not the same, topics. In describing his process, he writes that contextual close readings such as he offers in the second half of his essay “create a space for sociopolitically informed interpretations that are simply not available to a reading of the joke alone, divorced from the context of the information and opinions surrounding it in newsprint” (76). Such an interpretative strategy enables Thompson to show just how flexible “A Yankee Boast” can be when placed beside or near similarly and seriously themed contents in a given issue of a newspaper. Among the many materials that he finds juxtaposed to the joke are editorials and articles, such as commentary on westward migration, the vast size of the United States, the advancement of slavery in the West, and the sheer magnitude of American natural phenomena.Thompson encourages further cultural work adopting the approach he has employed so proficiently in his essay, claiming it “could shed light on most any piece of fugitive humor, about any topic, in most any time period in which a corpus of digitalized periodicals is available” (84), and one area of American humor seems to me particularly ripe for this approach, namely, old southwestern humor that flourished between the 1830s and the 1860s, a genre Thompson himself mentions several times. Many of the sketches, tall tales, mock letters to the editor, almanac pieces, anecdotes, turf reports, and mock sermons published in newspapers were recycled frequently, appearing again and again during times of sociopolitical upheaval along with articles on historical events and on significant issues that occupied the news of the times. It seems to me that tracing the reprinted Old Southwest humor texts and examining them alongside the serious content of the newspapers and reinterpreting them in relation to the time frames in which they appeared would prove a fruitful undertaking.Among the many newspapers, the eager researcher may begin looking for originally printed and reprinted materials of southern frontier humor in the New York Spirit of the Times, the New Orleans Picayune, the New Orleans True Delta, the St. Louis Reveille, the Milledgeville, Georgia, Southern Recorder, the Augusta, Georgia, States Rights Sentinel, the Cincinnati News, the Columbia South Carolinian, the Montgomery, Alabama, Mail, the Knoxville Press and Messenger, the Knoxville Daily Press and Herald, the Nashville Union and American, the Nashville Daily Gazette, the Alabama Journal, the Columbus, Georgia, Enquirer, the Southern Watchtower, the Buffalo Daily Courier, the New York Picayune, the Pendleton, South Carolina, Messenger, the Savannah Daily Morning News, the Chattanooga Daily American Union, the Greenville, South Carolina, Mountaineer, the Southern Miscellany, the Lynchburg Daily Virginian, the Arkansas Times and Advocate, the American Turf Register, the Concordia, Louisiana, Intelligencer and the Lafayette East Alabamian. One significant challenge is finding digitized newspaper databases, especially for smaller and lesser-known periodicals.5 In addition, one will find Old Southwest humor texts in literary periodicals, such as the Southern Literary Messenger, the Magnolia, and Russell's Magazine. If the researcher's squinting eyes can tolerate the careful scrutiny that such a project will require, the discoveries gained from the close reading of reprinted old southwestern humor materials in the contexts of the serious contents in periodicals will be, as Thompson's work illustrates, well worth the effort.Ed PiacentinoHigh Point UniversityEditors:In his essay “Comedy Gold: Humor on the Alaska-Yukon Border, 1886-1896,” Christopher Petrakos draws on Mikhail Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World as a theoretical frame to explore the ways in which humor and laughter function to construct social boundaries on the northern frontier among white miners while simultaneously undermining official authority.6 This approach also helps Petrakos demonstrate how humor others women, Indigenous people, African Americans, and tourists, turning them into outsiders, in the decade before the Klondike gold rush. Drawing on Bakhtin's theories of carnivalesque, ritual spectacles, uncrowning, and billingsgate (abusive language), Petrakos analyzes the humor in the travel writings of Yukon commissioner and surveyor William Ogilvie and Chicago journalist William Douglas Johns, which established an “us” versus “them,” insider/outsider status among frontiersmen. While humor plays an important role in creating in-groups, Petrakos shows how it may also be used by outsiders to collapse social boundaries, at least temporarily. His analysis of the role of humor in creating ideological boundaries within the settlements that Ogilvie and Johns describe produces keen insight into boundary making. Examining the role of narrative point of view in travel frontier writing, in this region as well as in other frontier locales, could be a way to expand on these insights. Such an examination would account for the authors’ status as outside observers of the social dynamics they depict in their accounts and consider how their position as observers shapes their assessment of insider/outsider group identity.The Bakhtinian theories of humor Petrakos draws on to analyze social formations in frontier settings would also be useful in the study of other travel accounts. Two that come to mind are Frederick Law Olmsted's The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller's Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States, 1853-1861, and Caroline M. Kirkland's A New Home—Who'll Follow (1839). Writing for the New-York Daily Times (now the New York Times), Olmsted traveled throughout the southern states and commented on a wide range of social groups and their cultural practices and standards. He often used rather biting humor to describe everything from southern food, to clothing, housing, social events, poor roads, church activities, and tavern life, in order to critique the South's practice of slavery, which Olmsted observed was responsible for the stunted economic growth in the region. While Olmsted's humorous anecdotes and often judgmental satire undermine planter hegemony, his own class assumptions and the racist and sexist rhetoric of his humor simultaneously contribute unflattering depictions of poor whites, African Americans, women, and other plain folk.Caroline Kirkland and her husband traveled from New York to a remote frontier settlement in Michigan in 1835. Her account, A New Home—Who'll Follow, details their arduous journey and early life in the Michigan wilderness and describes the manners, fashion (or lack thereof), food, weather, poor travel conditions, and other aspects of living on the border between frontier settlement and established community. What makes Kirkland's account so unique, aside from her woman's perspective, is her use of humor, which more often than not exposes her own pretenses and romantic notions as ill suited to the frontier. Through her gentle self-mocking anecdotes, she sheds the social proprieties of New York polite society and establishes an insider group status with her frontier neighbors. Throughout her descriptions of backwoods life—the daily drudgery of cooking, cleaning, and other domestic duties in a rural frontier home and the habit of borrowing among neighbors—she leverages her liminal insider/outsider status on the border in her humor.Bakhtin's concepts of carnivalesque, ritual spectacle, uncrowning, and billingsgate, which Petrakos deploys in his study of Yukon texts, would similarly offer fresh opportunities to tease out the threads of social critique and to demonstrate “humor's power to respond to, create, and subvert social and cultural norms” (103).Gretchen MartinUniversity of Virginia WiseEditors:Recently I attended a university leadership training in which participants were asked to complete a psychometric assessment known as the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI). The HBDI prompts the user to select the adjective that best describes herself from word pairs such as “imaginative/sequential,” “conservative/empathetic,” and “quantitative/musical.” As I progressed through the exercise, dutifully consulting the glossary provided, I became less and less sure of my responses. The more I puzzled over what the terms meant, the less confident I was applying them to myself. I fared a bit better with the section that asked me to agree or disagree with statements like, “I would rather be known as a reliable than an imaginative person,” but by that point I was skeptical that the assessment was going to reveal my thinking preferences, as the HBDI promises. Then came a welcome change in the line of questioning: the final prompt requested that I respond to a photograph of a dilapidated and abandoned mansion with a “for sale” sign in the foreground. I laughed aloud at the incongruity of this image, at its content as well as at its unexpected appearance at the end of a long sequence of frustratingly opaque language. I felt relief at encountering a text that actually spoke to me; I readily perceived the arc of history that the image portrayed, along with the implied aspirations and disappointments of countless other humans.The power of images to tell stories rather than simply illustrate them is central to Vanessa Meikle Schulman's article “The Pleasure of the Parlor: Mocking the ‘Home Guard’ in Civil War Visual Culture” in the latest issue of Studies in American Humor.7 Schulman argues convincingly that images of the home guard—men who stayed home from the Civil War to protect their communities—portrayed these men as weak, cowardly, and feminized by their close association with the domestic space of the “homes” they ostensibly guarded. Schulman's evidence is drawn from a multitude of contemporaneous visual material, from genre paintings to illustrated books and periodicals such as Harper's Weekly and Vanity Fair, eight examples of which she includes in her piece. The strength of Schulman's argument is its interdisciplinary approach. She draws on literary theory, humor, art and gender studies to unveil the anxieties of a society in which the gender roles of both men and women were in flux. Most powerfully, Schulman engages with images as text, paying attention not only to what is pictured but how it is pictured.I especially appreciate her reading of Thomas Hicks's genre painting The Home Guard (1863). A cursory glance at this painting reveals that the subject matter is a member of the northern home guard in his uniform, seated in a parlor opposite a woman he is courting and her chaperone. Having set aside his weapon, the gentleman is redeployed as a domestic implement—his hands are literally tied as the young woman winds her knitting yarn around them to disentangle the skein. Schulman locates the humor in this image in the incongruity of the man, who is clearly not “pressing his charge” as suitors are expected to do, as well as in the suggestion that he is being toyed with, just as the smaller ball of yarn in the foreground is being batted about by a black cat. This is a subtler form of satire than is evident in other images considered by her, such as the Harper's Weekly illustration titled “Costume Suggested for the Brave Stay-At-Home ‘Light Guard’” (1861), in which the costume of the soldier is a corset and hoop skirt and the weapons at hand are a broom, dustpan, and feather duster. By contrast, the humor of Hicks's painting is revealed only by close looking, aided by Schulman's deft visual analysis. The triad of figures are bound together by gestures and glances, as well as by a triangular composition, a pictorial device that has connoted stability since the Renaissance. The tension in the image is achieved by the diagonal juxtaposition of the lady and her subordinated suitor and by the contrast of light and dark areas in the scene. The open landscape that is glimpsed through the window behind the soldier's head is eclipsed by the dark void of the hearth that is twice that dimension and spans nearly the entire right half of the image. Whatever the reason this young soldier has chosen to sit out the war at home, he is now inexorably caught in the web of the domestic sphere.Kate MorrisSanta Clara University
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