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The Year’s Work in American Humor Studies, 2022

2024; Penn State University Press; Volume: 10; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/studamerhumor.10.1.0079

2333-9934

Jonathan P. Rossing, Heidi M. Hanrahan,

American Sports and Literature

The pieces included in the 2022 "Year's Work in American Humor" are wide ranging in perspective, covering everything from literature to stand-up, political rhetoric, memes, and podcasts, and raise questions of identity, gender, class, race, ethnicity, and power. Each piece reveals its own richness as it engages with the dynamic field of humor studies and refuses easy answers and sweeping "one-size-fits all" generalizations. Humor, like all rhetoric, arises from a complex interplay between speaker, audience, and message. Each of these pieces is interested in why and how humor works (or does not work) the way it does, and each makes a valued contribution to the ongoing critical conversation.It has been a particularly bountiful year in Mark Twain studies, which saw the publication of two highly anticipated volumes. We begin with the third and last volume of Gary Scharnhorst's massive biography, The Life of Mark Twain: The Final Years, 1891–1910. This period, Scharnhorst explains, was a dark and difficult one for Twain; he scrambled financially and fled to Europe, where he declared bankruptcy. Scharnhorst wastes no time establishing his financial woes as one of the volume's main themes, opening the book with "not even Samuel Clemens knew how deeply he was in debt" (3). Yet Clemens was relentless in his hustling in these frantic days and moved in circles where there was ample opportunity for it, in the course of which he encountered some of the century's most important and fascinating people. Scharnhorst describes, for instance, an 1894 party Clemens attended with impressionist painter Robert Reid, a number of actors, and Nikola Tesla (59). Scharnhorst, of course, also spends time on Twain's writings, which he richly contextualizes, exploring the composition, revision, and long path to publication for Pudd'nhead Wilson and recounting the author's bitter anger over Leopold II's seizure of Congo, resulting in King Leopold's Soliloquy.More devastating than the financial challenges were the personal losses—daughter Susy, wife Livy, and then daughter Jean—though in his mind they were linked: when Livy and Clara are sailing to tend to a sick Susy, Clemens writes to his wife apologizing for "the awful trouble that my mistakes have brought upon you. You forgive me, I know, but I shall never forgive myself" (159). Poignantly, thanks to a message sent via cable, "Sam [in Europe] knew his daughter had died almost 3,400 miles away three days before her mother and sister were told the news when their ship docked" in the US (161). Through his last days, Clemens's mind stayed sharp as he kept working and writing. His urgent, almost unstoppable voice leaps off the page right to the end. The book is a tremendous achievement and, like the two previous volumes, not only captures the author's life but also situates that life in rich social, political, and literary context.The second volume of Alan Gribben's Mark Twain's Literary Resources: A Reconstruction of His Library and Reading, which contains an author-title annotated catalog and a reader's guide, details nearly six thousand books, short stories, articles, poems, plays, operas, songs, newspapers, and magazines that the author "mentioned or to which he had direct access" (xviii). The book brings to light the wide range of texts in Twain's life, including works of philosophy, history, science, religion, and astronomy, in languages from English to French, German, and Italian. Gribben, who supplies commentary on Twain's at times edifying and interesting marginalia, claims that the collection will "astonish" many people, pointing to an "intellect more receptive to new influences and more critically mature" than usually ascribed to Twain (xxi). Gribben, whose 1980 Mark Twain's Library: A Reconstruction became a much sought-after reference work, has made an invaluable contribution to the field with these two volumes, the fruits of over fifty years of work. Toward the end of the introduction, he poignantly confesses "to feeling a personal sense of loss" now that the second volume is completed. The moment readers have access to it, he writes, "they will instantly absorb as much as I have ever known about these subjects. I will no longer be privileged to answer telephone and email inquiries such as those that arrived for decades," adding, however, that he reminds himself that "this act of letting go, of sharing everything one has learned, is, after all, what investigative scholarship must always have as its ultimate and unselfish goal" (xxi). As he sends this immediately indispensable book into the world, Gribben's beautiful sentiment reminds us of the real purpose of our work.One more book on Twain studies deserves special mention. R. Kent Rasmussen opens Critical Insights: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, with a surprising fact: this collection of original pieces devoted to the novel is the first in the one hundred and fifty plus years since the novel's publication, indicating the extent to which it has been neglected by critics. The collection, which is intended to address this gap in scholarship, is divided into three sections. The first section features work that situates the book in its cultural and historical contexts, including an essay by Gribben that explores why Tom Sawyer has been overshadowed by Huckleberry Finn and that argues for the value in looking at it on its own terms. In his contribution, Joe B. Fulton makes a case for Tom Sawyer as a book that is good for the environment, while Philip Bade reads the novel alongside the Harry Potter books. The second section, which contains eleven essays, offers critical readings of the novel, including a survey of the Tom Sawyer "franchise" in Twain's oeuvre by John Bird, an analysis of the rich significance of Becky and Aunt Polly by Linda Morris, an account of the book's engagement with Republican motherhood by Hannah J. D. Wells, and an interpretation of Injun Joe as a lens for thinking about Twain's attitudes about Native Americans by Kerry Driscoll. A final resources section provides bibliographies, an extensive and detailed chronology, and a filmography. Rasmussen asserts that "whether or not Tom Sawyer should be considered a 'great' book, it is unquestionably an important book," with "far greater depth than has been previously recognized" (vii). This collection certainly proves the point.Ben Click opens the 2022 Mark Twain Annual with a short "Editor's Re: Marks" piece introducing the volume's special theme: "Mark Twain and the West: Celebrating the 150th Anniversary of Roughing It." Click notes that while not every article takes on Roughing It, they all engage with Twain's complicated, sometimes contradictory, and multifaceted depiction of the West. In his piece that more fully introduces the volume, Bruce Michaelson describes Roughing It as "restless art," an experimental book that inspires criticism that matches its energy. He points to two developments that shaped the novel: a growing interest in writing that directly engaged with the outdoors and landscape and that treated the subject with candor, and technological advances, like the railroad and telegraph, that changed both the frontier and the "old world." For the travel writer, these developments posed a unique set of challenges, perhaps explaining why the book is seen as both an example of American realism and of the mythologization of the West. "This one old book," Michaelson claims, "about places formerly far away and a boisterous interlude that came and went in a flash, can still resonate in our thinking about who and what we are" (7). That it does indeed resonate for contemporary critics is made apparent in the Mark Twain Annual's offerings.James Wharton Leonard's "Mark Twain's Ambivalent Encounter with the Western Landscape" and Jeffery Melton's "Nature and Mobility in Mark Twain's Roughing It" take up the first development. Leonard claims Roughing It displays "distinctly revisionist western, or anti-western, impulses even if, at the time of its publication, it was responding to cues from proto-western travel and frontier literature as well as broader cultural expectations" (196). Leonard points out that the promise of "lordship" over the open land offered in romantic depictions of the West is never fulfilled for Twain's narrator, "even as the landscape itself largely offers up its promissory grandeur and tabula rasa potentiality" (191). In opposition to the frontier ethos that would later be articulated fully in Frederick Jackson Turner's "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," which valorized good character and hard work that would be rewarded in the West, Twain's narrator eschews work and rejects attempts at self-improvement. Leonard argues that the closest the narrator comes to having "Turner's mythical pioneering experience of lordship" (193) is when he camps at Lake Tahoe and claims a patch of land. Even that, though, rings false; he is not the first there, and so much else goes wrong (he accidentally sets a fire, for example). Leonard concludes, "The journey west forces Twain, along with his readers, to confront the reality that the allure of frontier life is largely the stuff of romance" (198).Melton explores how Twain reshaped romanticized depictions of the frontier by foregrounding mobility. Twain's landscapes in Roughing It and other writings on the West, Melton argues, are "never static, but in stark contrast, aggressively dynamic in our imaginations" (211). Twain creates the picturesque scenes contemporary readers expected but imbues them with a "dynamic sensibility of movement" that results in a "narrative forever bustling in a landscape of possibility" (211). In discussing the stagecoach episode, Melton points out that Twain actually wanted to cut down or remove the section completely, humorously adding that "we should be willing to note an unpleasant fact of Mark Twain's career: sometimes, he had terrible ideas" (201). The playful vitality of movement that animates the text and the narrator's encounters with nature is, after all, exemplified in the stagecoach episode. Twain is "often keenly attentive to dynamic movements suggested by the complex interactions between the natural environment (place) and human perception (self)" (205). He floats on Lake Tahoe and hikes to the tops of volcanoes. Ultimately, Melton argues that Twain anticipates "the manic needs of the twentieth century" by paradoxically "setting in amber" certain crucial moments in Roughing It while simultaneously making movement key to his interaction with the landscape (211).Other articles in the Mark Twain Annual take up thorny questions of gender, race, and religion in Twain's encounters with the frontier, beginning with Driscoll's "Mark Twain's Masculinist Fantasy of the West." Driscoll argues that Roughing It provides a version of the West that marginalizes and silences women by "constructing a seductive masculinist fantasy of a society that never existed" (113), citing the narrator's insistence in chapter 57 that "it was a wild, free, disorderly, grotesque society! Only swarming hosts of stalwart men—nothing juvenile, nothing feminine, visible anywhere!" (103). Driscoll analyzes scenes and illustrations from the novel that highlight the fact that women are so rare in this fictional space that men will take any chance to gawk at them, no matter what they look like, including one scene in which a crowd of men insist that a man bring his wife out of their wagon and another in which a toothless old woman flips flapjacks. Yet this depiction is undercut by the historical record and Twain's own newspaper writing about his encounters with independent, strong women in Carson City and Virginia City. Driscoll points to a reason: beginning in the summer of 1870, with the death of his father-in-law, the death of another friend, and the birth of Langdon, Twain's Buffalo home was overrun with a "well-meaning but nonetheless intrusive barrage of women" (101). This experience shaped the masculinist escapist fantasy captured in Roughing It, which Twain was composing at this stressful time, a fantasy that contributed to the "broader cultural script" being written that positioned the West as the domain of men (107).Dwayne Eutsey shows how prominent frontier ministers influenced Twain's writing in the 1860s and his later composition of Roughing It, using evidence culled from the historical record. The frontier's "progressive theological landscape," according to Eutsey, was appealing to Twain. Preachers like Horatio Stebbins (who was as "thick as thieves" with Twain) and Henry Bellows (who enjoyed Twain's humor) both found ways to separate the message of the Bible from the restrictive and oppressive confines of institutional religion (43, 44). Another minister, Franklin Rising, probably the inspiration for the young minister in Roughing It, has a "comical 'Who's On First?' style exchange" with Scotty Briggs that is "arguably one of the funniest parts of" the book (46). Unlike other critics, Eutsey does not read this passage as evidence of Twain's "resentful Calvinistic countertheology" that defines everyone as sinful and fallen. Rather, Eutsey maintains, the minister, in his own way, is emulating Jesus, "who retorted to critics condemning him for associating with sinners" (46). Eutsey also points to the significance of Thomas Starr King, whose transcendental ideas likely influenced Twain's "nature-based, mystical Christianity," in the book's Hawaii sections.Three articles consider Twain, the West, government, and politics from multiple angles. In a nuanced reading that uses the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision as a reference point, Andrew Hebard argues that Twain developed a novel conception of corruption when he was in the West that provides "a vision of our polity that our courts and politicians might benefit from seeing" (186). Exploring corruption in the West as depicted in Roughing It, Hebard notes that by the end of the century, the West was "one of the most heavily administered regions" in the country, not a space of lawlessness, free of government restraint (178). During his time in the region, Twain witnessed what Hebard describes as nonvenal and noncriminal forms of corruption that greatly influenced him. Twain "introduces ambiguity" into his humorous descriptions of bureaucratic institutions, blurring the boundaries between public and private, legal and illegal. Hebard points, for instance, to Orion's work for the State Department in chapter 25, where he practices "administrative discretion," taking part in "self-interested acts that are still legal" but nevertheless seem corrupt (175) and to the government of Nevada's participation in irresponsible speculation and frenzy during the 1860s gold and silver boom. Moving beyond Roughing It, Hebard argues that in The Gilded Age Twain elaborates on his conception of nonvenal corruption through the "figure of the 'decent soul' who nevertheless acts corruptly" (175).Matt Seybold makes a similar connection to a twenty-first-century governmental collision with corporations and consumerism, framing his article around the US government's probable forthcoming antitrust litigation and legislation against entities like Amazon and Facebook. While Roughing It emerged in another era, it was one like our own in which "increasingly powerful media technology companies and government agencies were negotiating their mutual interests across a similarly emergent public-private divide riddled with ambiguities and potential conflicts of interest" (90). Seybold notes the explosion of media during the first decades of Twain's life, when the country went from having "barely one hundred daily newspapers and fewer than 1,500 active periodicals" to having "five hundred dailies and nearly six thousand active periodicals, which together printed more than 1.5 billion issues annually" (91). As a writer whose celebrity depended on these newspapers and periodicals—which could be cheaply shipped anywhere in the country—Twain benefited to an extent from the rapid expansion of the mail service, particularly across the frontier, but he ultimately wasn't able to make much money. The mass media also played a role in mythologizing the West. Critics can debate whether Twain takes part in that mythologizing in Roughing It or burlesques it, but either way, as Seybold observes, "he is certainly reproducing it" (91). Thus, the image of Twain's narrator trying to sleep on a pile of mail on the back of a stagecoach is especially resonant and casts a long symbolic shadow; the penny press and the post were reliant on each other, but this dependency made Twain worry about the effects of a mass market and mass media controlled by entities that can "disappear, gossamer-like, from scrutiny and appreciation" (97).Todd Nathan Thompson also takes on the intersection between writer, politics, and the press. Examining over seventy reprints of the two letters about Hawaii that Twain published in the New York Tribune in 1873, he shows how the selections excerpted by editors "decontextualize or mischaracterize" Twain's ideas (53). Though the pieces' wide circulation through reprints created "a kind of echo chamber establishing and amplifying Twain's authority" as an expert on Hawaii (56), the most commonly reprinted selections, especially when they are decontextualized, reveal much about the editors' and readers' investments in US imperial ambitions and preexisting attitudes toward Hawaii. Often, they reify stereotypes and ignore or remove evidence of any ambivalence Twain might have felt. For instance, according to Thompson, the final section of the second letter, entitled "Why We Should Annex," sarcastically reverses "readers' conceptions of civilized and savage" and shows how Americans are likely to engage in "grift and poor governance" in Hawaii (62, 63). However, most papers only reproduced the final paragraph, which sapped the section of its "angry power" and had the effect of framing Twain as proannexation (63). Studying these reprints reveals how, as his work circulated in newspapers and periodicals across the nation, Sam Clemens had limited control over Mark Twain's image and its association with empire.Another group of essays considers Twain's connection to other writers. James E. Caron writes about two of Twain's contemporary travel writers in Nevada, William Wright, who worked for the Virginia City Editorial Enterprise, and J. Ross Browne, who reported on the Comstock silver strike for Harper's Monthly, providing a richer literary backdrop for Roughing It. Caron notes that both writers "evince the vividness, intimacy, and accurate detail Mark Twain said defined a good correspondent" (22), but he also points out differences, such as that Wright favored accurate and vivid reporting over "storytelling and intimacy" (23). Though he was capable of witty and comedic writing, in his Washoe Rambles column for the Golden Era, a San Francisco newspaper, he uses straightforward, plainspoken, and detailed prose to depict everything from Paiute clothing and customs to the "fatal draw" of the "big strike" (25). In contrast, Browne has a more distinctive if more ambivalent voice, as witnessed in pieces like "A Peep at Washoe." Browne was also more prone to satire and burlesque, like Twain. In the end, Caron asserts, Twain's style is the most effective and memorable of the three. Twain was the only one who, in Roughing It, "decided to allow a comic narrator and character to dominate the narrative" (36).Next, Myrial Adel Holbrook puts Sherman Alexie's short story collection, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), in conversation with Roughing It. Though these authors are quite different from one another—for example, Alexie is Native American while Twain was Caucasian—Holbrook argues that both build a Western terra comica, where "physical terrains" are subordinated to "verbal terrains." These verbal terrains, dominated by wit and humor, illustrate a shared transcendent humanism "that is grounded . . . in recognizing human flaws" (139). Both authors use unreliable and compelling narrators, multilayered humor, and "polyvocal, cacophonous stories" in a terrain that, "though often rocky and fraught," provides a space where white and Indigenous people can talk and find understanding (133). Holbrook zooms in for a close reading of Twain's female initially reticent stagecoach companion who subsequently unleashes a torrent of gossip. Holbrook notes that "her way of speaking is biblical in duration and spans multiple natural media—water, rocks, and air" and that "her captive audience, confined to the stagecoach, can little appreciate the rush of scenery outside when affronted by such a geological force of conversation" (135). She also analyzes Alexie's story "Every Little Hurricane," arguing that in using comic and tragic language to build the characters' worlds, it "spirals away from stultified meanings," "defining and redefining what merits literary attention, as well as what qualifies as destructive and constructive in literature" (137). Rich and multifaceted, Holbrook's article resists easy summary, but its impulse to bring Native American humor into conversation with Twain's is compelling.Two more articles from the Mark Twain Annual that foreground humor look at the ways young Twain practices his craft in the West—rhetorically and literally. Sarah Elizabeth Fredericks analyzes Twain's "rhetoric of insults" in his pre-1866 newspaper writings, focusing on rivalry, hoaxes, and honor contests. She argues that as a new reporter, Twain felt the need to assert and affirm himself, especially when it came to wit. He "experimented widely and relentlessly with insults" in these pieces, she observes, "using humiliation and vituperation to demonstrate or reinforce his various group identities or contest his place within in-group hierarchies" (143). For instance, his friendly digs at Clement T. Rice, whom he teased with an eye toward the absurd, contrasts with the abuse that he directed at Albert S. Evans, an antagonistic rival at the Alta California. In another example, Fredericks considers a hoax Twain wrote for the Territorial Enterprise titled "Another Bloody Massacre!" the point of which was to set a trap for the editor of a San Francisco paper who frequently reprinted Enterprise pieces. Though Twain sometimes overplayed his hand, drawing blowback for his insults, this rhetorical experimentation later laid the groundwork for some of his "most recognizable narrative voices, tropes, and techniques" (155).Finally, Blake Bronson-Bartlett announces exciting news from the Mark Twain Project: soon Twain's early California and Hawaii notebooks (notebooks 4–6, covering January 1865 to April 1866) will be available online as high-resolution, color digital scans. These notebooks powerfully demonstrate the writer at work, his frantic attempts at recording the sights and sounds around him, and comically highlighting, Bronson notes, the fact that he can never fully capture what he wants to. The pages, Bronson-Bartlett observes, reveal Twain's "ongoing experiments in training his eyes and ears with portable media and in stockpiling a reserve of unruly traces for future reference" (77). Episodes in the notebooks reappear—reimagined—in, for example, both Roughing It and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, showing their influence was "formative and lasting" (72). Complete with an icon in the shape of Twain riding a frog to indicate an annotation, the digitization project will allow readers to see up close Twain's "messiness" as he honed his craft and developed a rich storehouse of ideas and images.In the first issue of the 2022 Mark Twain Journal, Shosuka Kinugawa explores wordplay and encoded writing in Twain's oeuvre, arguing that both played crucial roles in his professional and private writing. In playing charades, his family frequently relied on wordplay, such as acting out "conflagration" as "con flag rat shun" (96). Clemens includes rebuses in his letters and lecture notes and used them as learning tools for his children. As readers, we can find wordplay and riddles in his detective stories in The Stolen White Elephant, hoax pieces like "Petrified Man," and his play Cap'n Simon Wheeler, the Amateur Detective: A Light Tragedy. Kinugawa notes that sometimes these riddles were "camouflaged too well" and their satirical effect was lost on readers. Ultimately, Kinugawa points to "the need to revisit Twain's fiction as a whole with an eye for clandestine wordplay and encipherment" (88).Turning to another kind of riddle, Harrison Otis takes on Twain's seemingly contradictory attitudes about writing and obscenity in an analysis of 1601: Conversation, as it Was by the Social Fireside, in the Time of the Tudors, an imagined dialogue between Queen Elizabeth I, Francis Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, and others that Twain wrote in 1876, published anonymously in 1880, shared with close friends, and finally took credit for in 1906. Otis argues that the piece is "so self-consciously obscene that it becomes self-reflexive: it is not just obscene, but it is about obscenity, and the potential value (or lack thereof) of such discourse" (127-28). Otis shows how, for Twain, obscenity's morality depends on its intention, not its effect. For instance, an extended series of fart jokes reflects poorly not on those telling the jokes but rather on the piece's narrator, who is uptight and takes himself too seriously. "Innocent obscenity" is charming and linked with humor, suggesting a kind of "shameless physicality" that is no longer possible in a corrupt world (144). More intentional obscenity, while less moral, can also serve a useful function, as when Elizabeth cries out "oh, shit!" to silence Lady Alice, who is self-importantly droning on. Otis connects Twain's ideas about obscenity to realism, noting that obscenity can sometimes serve to remind readers "of the shameful realities" they "would rather ignore" even as innocent obscenity gestures toward a lost ideal (143, 144).In the last article of the March issue of the Mark Twain Journal, Jerry Tarver shows how late nineteenth-century elocutionists loved Twain, even if he did not love them back. Though Twain admired great oratory, elocution, particularly the kind he grew up with in school, was special target of his satire. According to Tarver, the Patrick Henry Speech Tom delivers in Tom Sawyer, an "authentic example of elocution in an 1840s school program," is unsuccessful because it represents a "shallow engagement" with the material and is thus inauthentic (156), while the boy's melancholy delivery of a Mary Ann Harris Gay poem in his Black Avenger performance draws on a later sentimental tradition that Twain also finds vexing owing to its insincerity. Tarver's research, though, shows that elocutionists' collections increasingly favored passages from Twain's work, such as Tom Sawyer's white-washing scene. One popular volume that contained sixty-eight selections included three by Twain, a total matched only by Longfellow and Macaulay. The elocutionists thus "met his burlesque of their efforts by recognizing his talent and bolstering his fame" (161).The second issue of the Mark Twain Journal opens with Kevin Mac Donnell's account of his acquisition from a private owner of Twain's "State Banquet Remarks," a joke-filled speech that the author delivered at a dinner party that he hosted San Francisco's Lick House hotel in 1868 (7), which editor Joe B. Fulton calls an "astonishing find," "destined to take its rightful place next to 'Advice for Good Little Girls' and 'Advice for Good Little Boys' as a burlesque gem." Mac Donnell explains that Clemens was riding high at the time, having just finished a lecture tour and having obtained the rights to the letters he would later use in The Innocents Abroad. In preparation for the dinner, he wrote a funny menu, developed a seating chart, and composed remarks. As far as we know, only two copies of the menu exist today and just one copy of the remarks. The speech, a list of nine rules the guests must follow, begins with a request "that no light conversation, no laughter, no levity will be indulged in upon the occasion," which sets the tone for the entire list (17). Another rule forbids commenting on how elegant the room is (and the room was indeed among the most elegant in town), while a third commands "no wine before soup," an especially funny dictum given that soup was the first course. Mac Donnell's article is itself hilariously written, featuring wordplay that would delight Twain, and includes instructions for folding one of its pages into an object—"a box used to send candy or pickles to other tables in the dining hall" (30-31)—with special resonance for Twain's speech.Kent Rasmussen and Don Pellegrino turn to the dramatic in their articles, specifically films and plays. Rasmussen looks at the marketing and reviews of three silent-era Paramount Twain adaptations, Tom Sawyer (1917), Huck and Tom: The Further Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1918), and Huckleberry Finn (1920). Each was marketed as authentic and praised by critics for sticking close to the original. Paramount directly incorporated his words into title cards, featured actors who looked like the author to introduce the films, and widely advertised that they had been filmed on location in Hannibal, although, as Rasmussen wryly notes regarding this last assertion, "it was all a lie" (51): the films were made in California. In a press book to accompany one of the films, Jack Pickford, who starred as Tom, claims that "we've just got back from Hannibal, Missouri," which is just one example of the studio's brazenness (49). Even more remarkable is that the lie "went unchallenged in so many publications" (52). Rasmussen argues that perhaps audiences readily accepted this lie because Twain had been