Humor. Although rooted in Old World cultures, identifiably American forms and traditions of humor began to emerge in the late
Colonial Era, particularly in Benjamin
Franklin's
Poor Richard's Almanack (1733–1758) and other writings. Here, as in his self‐presentation as a “child of the wilderness” while serving as American ambassador to France during the
Revolutionary War, Franklin popularized one of the longest‐lived comic types in American culture—the unschooled rustic whose natural simplicity masked an innate shrewdness and tenacity.
While Franklin's Poor Richard enjoyed universal appeal in the new nation, most antebellum humor had an explicitly sectional flavor. Washington Irving's
Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820) delineated the emerging regional type of the
New England Yankee. Stemming from earlier “Brother Jonathan” representations, the Yankee character solidified in the 1830s and 1840s through such deceptively simple yet morally didactic yokels in the big city as Seba Smith's Major Jack Downing and Thomas Chandler Haliburton's Sam Slick. By the
Civil War, the character had become the basis of a national icon, Uncle Sam. A second staple of antebellum humor was the backwoodsmen and poor whites of the old
Southwest states. Oral and published tall‐tales, such as Thomas Thorpe's
The Big Bear of Arkansas (1841), celebrated the boasting and fighting prowess of the frontiersman, epitomized by the “ring‐tailed roarer” persona of Davy
Crockett, featured in many narratives and almanacs. Comic writers also presented deceitful and socially subversive characters of the southern frontier such as Johnson J. Hooper's oily Simon Suggs (1845) and the prankster hero of George Washington Harris's
Sut Lovingood's Yarns (1867) who revels in vicious assaults on social hierarchies and social gatherings, from weddings to quilting parties to African American church services.
Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.
Not until after the Civil War would a writer succeed in forging a unifying national humor. Enormously popular by the end of his life, Samuel L.
Clemens (Mark Twain) was the first writer to present authentic American vernacular voices without an intermediating “respectable” narrator. Unlike the comical writings and lectures of Artemus Ward ( Charles Farrar Browne), Josh Billings ( Henry Wheeler Shaw), and other “Phunny Phellows” of the 1870s and 1880s who relied upon malapropisms, deliberate misspellings, and soon‐forgotten contemporary events and personages, Clemens revealed the deeper possibilities of American humor. He wrote humorously but movingly about timeless human foibles and deftly blended comic passages and characters with social criticism on the central issues of his day from
racism to imperialism to the destructiveness of modern warfare.
By 1900, the locus of American humor began to shift from the printed word to the new mass entertainments of the
vaudeville stage, newspaper comic strips, and silent
films. Heavily influenced by earlier popular entertainments such as minstrel shows and burlesque theater, these productions initially targeted a broad, at first, mostly working‐class audience of first‐ or second‐generation immigrants. Much of this humor was based on a combination of ethnic/racial comedic traditions and blatant stereotypes of Irish, German (dubbed “Dutch”), Jewish, and “Negro” (white and black men in blackface) characters. Simultaneously offensive and celebratory of cultural distinctiveness, ethnic humor faded by the late 1920s in the face of accelerating assimilation and protests by middle‐class pressure groups. Even more universally appealing was the slapstick comedy of many early comic strips (for instance Rudolph Dirk's
The Katzenjammer Kids and Frederick Opper's
Happy Hooligan) and such early motion picture stars as Charlie
Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd.
In the interwar years, American humor continued to mirror an evolving American society and psyche. The comic writers and cartoonists of
The New Yorker magazine (founded 1925), including James Thurber, Charles Addams, and Dorothy Parker, perfectly reflected the jaded cosmopolitan spirit of the post–
World War I boom years. Humor in the Depression‐wracked 1930s, by contrast, revealed a waning confidence in modernity. The anarchic zaniness of the Marx Brothers, immigrant Jewish ex‐vaudevillians turned movie stars, portrayed a world without rules or reason, while lariat‐twirling and plainspoken Will
Rogers, in his stage shows, films, and newspaper columns, drolly expressed his skepticism about industrial
technology and corporate
capitalism and celebrated the wisdom of the common folk.
Radio comedians of the 1930s such as Jack Benny, Jimmy Durante, and the husband‐and‐wife team of George Burns and Gracie Allen (many of them vaudeville veterans who would soon graduate to
television) hastened the rise of commercially sponsored humor geared to a mass audience. The popular comedy show
Amos ’n’ Andy, featuring white actors impersonating blacks, continued the tradition of humor based on racial stereotyping.
The Cold War Era and the Late Twentieth Century.
In the early
Cold War Era, amid anti‐Communist witch‐hunts and nuclear threats, most American humorists followed the safe path of presenting apolitical consensus‐oriented material. The increasing dominance of television reinforced this emphasis on social conformity. Even the comic geniuses of the era such as Lucille Ball (
I Love Lucy) and Sid Caesar (
Your Show of Shows) presented largely non‐controversial, non‐political routines. The tepid nature of mass‐media humor began to break down by the mid‐1950s, however, as daring “standup” comics like Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce, William Gaines and the other contributors to
MAD magazine, and irreverent comedy troupes such as Chicago's Second City (which would evolve into the 1970s television comedy revue
Saturday Night Live) challenged the limits of political and sexual commentary in professional humor. This trend accelerated in the 1960s and 1970s as the
civil rights,
antiwar, and
women's rights movements, as well as the counterculture and sexual revolution, shaped a new wave of American humor including G.B. (Garry) Trudeau's ground‐breaking comic strip
Doonesbury, the acerbic standup comedy of George Carlin and Lily Tomlin, and the suburban‐housewife angst of columnist Erma Bombeck. These years also marked the entry into the media mainstream of a generation of
African American ( Flip Wilson, Richard Pryor) and
Hispanic American ( Freddie Prinze) comics who emphasized not cultural integration but their distinct ethno‐racial communities.
As the twentieth century ended, American humor continued to evolve in ways that reflected changing social values and demographics. Bill Cosby, Roseanne (Barr), and Jerry Seinfeld reinvented the television situation comedy, featuring such once‐invisible protagonists as affluent African Americans and working‐class women and previously taboo sexual and social topics. Further, although the late‐night television talk shows still starred white male comedians like David Letterman and Jay Leno, the humor of nightclubs, network and cable television, and film was increasingly culturally diverse, featuring more women, people of color, and homosexual comedians. Despite changes in personalities and content, however, humor continued to play the critical role it had since the Colonial Era, helping Americans come to terms with both a rapidly changing world and the persistence of societal inequality.
See also
Literature;
Literature, Popular;
Minstrelsy;
Popular Culture;
Race and Ethnicity;
Racism;
Regionalism;
South, The;
Working‐Class Life and Culture.
Bibliography
Constance Rourke , American Humor: A Study of the National Character, 1931.
Walter Blair and and Hamlin Hill , America's Humor: From Poor Richard to Doonesbury, 1978.
William Bedford Clark and W. Craig Turner, eds., Critical Essays on American Humor, 1984.
Tony Hendra , Going Too Far, 1987.
Lawrence Mintz, ed., Humor in America: A Research Guide to Genres and Topics, 1988.
Joseph Boskin, ed., The Humor Prism in 20th‐Century America, 1997.
Anthony A. Harkins
