HUMOR

Between 1870 and 1920 Americans produced an immeasurable traffic in humor. Some of it went beneath or beyond language through eccentricities of dress, gestures, and facial signals; as many British travelers noticed, common talk in the United States included banter, deadpanning, irony, and sarcasm. Raconteurs were imitated by scavengers of jokes, and the jokes themselves emerged as a marketable commodity. Amateurs stole from printed sources or from professional performers in minstrel shows, vaudeville acts, stage comedies, and comic "lectures." All of these outlets proved pleasing to audiences in large cities and small towns alike. They were crucial in making humor a respectable form of entertainment.

Journalism was the steadiest supplier. In 1873 contemporary historian Frederick Hudson got specific:

Our four to five thousand daily and weekly publications have columns of "Nuts to Crack," "Sunbeams," "Sparks from the Telegraph," "Freshest Gleanings," "Odds and Ends," "News Sprinklings," "Flashes of Fun," "Random Readings," "Mere Mentions," "Humor of the Day," "Quaint Sayings," "Current Notes," "Things in General," "Brevities," "Witticisms," "Notes of the Day," "Jottings," "All Sorts," "Editor's Drawer," "Sparks," "Fun and Folly," "Fact and Fiction," "Twinklings." ( Journalism in the United States, p. 695)

The typical newspaper had—or pretended to have—a local editor whose duties included supplying amusement, often clipped from the "exchanges," that is, the papers exchanged between different news publications so that they could share material when necessary.

Stories about eccentrics or mismatched circumstances got passed around; anecdotes and aphorisms got wider exposure; and many plays on bumbling syntax got repeated more often than they deserved. Purely comic newspapers and magazines had difficulty breaking even until Puck (established in 1877) attracted enough subscribers to turn a profit. Its success encouraged the startup of Judge (1881) and Life (1883). A submarket, "college humor," quickly recognized as a genre, established its viability. Gradually, the sober magazines, emboldened by the ongoing "Editor's Drawer" in Harper's New Monthly, added a humor department; they particularly encouraged the vogue of comic or "light verse" keyed to current customs. Newspapers, meanwhile, strained to set the pace and, as soon as the print shop could manage, expanded to cartoons and later to the comic strip.

The book trade responded to a rising demand for humorous material. At the fringes, joke books and pamphlets of ephemera circulated through hawkers and peddlers. Bottom fishers pirated hardcover collections until the laws on copyright got tighter. Humorists who built a following—such as Mark Twain and Marietta Holley—racked up totals impressive for the size of the public that could read English. Josh Billings—a pseudonym for Henry Wheeler Shaw (1818–1885)—sold over nine million copies of his Allminax in its best decade. Edward Noyes Westcott (1846–1898) produced David Harum (1898), an amateurish novel about a folksy rural banker that sold half a million copies. Novelists with serious themes understood that light touches would help lure a following. Though genial irony came naturally for William Dean Howells, once known for his one-act farces, Henry James both consciously and perhaps disingenuously created some characters who invited smiles rather than abstract dilemmas.

The process turned into push-pull. Cumulative popularity attracted more practitioners—from the rising trade of joke-smith to almost anybody trying to make a living by writing. Humor grew self-conscious, examining itself admiringly; Henry Ward Beecher's Beecher as a Humorist (1887), which caused no surprise, had many loosely analytic excerpts. Ultimately, listing the authors who shunned humor is far quicker than listing those who employed it, and Theodore Dreiser stands almost alone at his level. While the name of Kate Sanborn or Charlotte Perkins Gilman can pop up in anthologies moldering away, the contents are lopsided with male freelancers. Only lately have feminists managed to exhume a gallery of humorists they judge noteworthy. Except for Jewish writers, immigrants still need a closer census. Most overlooked, the humor of the working classes—on farms and in factories—has sunk beyond reach, though joking, playful or bitter, bubbled on the job, too. Recently, the pointed jokes of the most exploited subclass, the emancipated African Americans, has come into scholarly print. Doubtless, other groups—Native Americans, Hispanics—also had comic routines and sayings.

THEORIES AND PATTERNS

Many commentators have codified this swarming of humor. Their models, however, clash when they choose their typical authors or patterns—when they choose Thomas Bailey Aldrich over Ambrose Bierce, Marietta Holley over Mark Twain because she perhaps sold more books; when they emphasize the literary comedians over the columnists who wrote drolly about horsecars instead of horses, about transcontinental travelers instead of Arkansas travelers; when they emphasize vaudeville skits over the major magazines; when they focus on personal traits over attitudes claimed as distinctively American. But the more dynamic the advocate, the more that are convinced. An eloquent, hearty critic such as Bernard DeVoto, for instance, sweeps along more believers than quieter voices.

Theorists and classifiers have tended to emphasize that exaggeration held great appeal for humorists and their audiences. British commentators, especially, pointed to overstatement of emotions, bodily shapes, quantities, and outcomes. In some cases, this can narrow to the tall tale or to a stone-faced lying that outrages common sense. Cultural analysts find the most distinctive or else the most popular attitude an untamable irreverence, painfully obvious to less approving British critics. Even Artemus Ward, always intent to entertain, twitted pieties and left biblical morality less imposing. Encouraged explicitly by the humorists themselves, analysts past and present find a hostility to humbug, hypocrisy, or pretense. That hostility also functioned to favor the idiomatic and the colloquial over school-marmish rules or a bookish vocabulary.

Theories that build from historical patterns focus on the social leveling that intensified after the Civil War. Humor about "native" types, that is, rough-hewn white males, grew more respectable to write or to enjoy and resonated more with empathy than condescension. Such types now could guide the humor rather than let it happen to themselves. A blander approach finds a conflicted mixture of nostalgia and modernizing—an affection for a rural simplicity yet amusement at outmoded standards, a resistance to the steam engine of progress yet amusement at stuck-in-the-mud bumpkins. Timeline historians, following the theorists who explain humor as the deploying of incongruity, emphasize the sensitivity to the contrasts between regions. This is not surprising given that improvements in travel infrastructure made it possible to move quickly between vastly different areas—from Chicago, for instance, to a remote mining frontier. More clearly than today, economic levels were recognized—except in campaign speeches. As the middle and upper classes coalesced in the cities, their jokes and their favored sketches and cartoons stereotyped uppity clerks and dull-witted maids. As a woman's magazine fretted over the "servant problem," its humor page chuckled over Irish cooks and handymen. Still, socioeconomic perspectives can get too ponderous. With more leisure for some, with more time and better health for boredom, empty fun sold well, too. In printed bulk, it outweighed tendentious or aggressive humor.

Whenever essayists saw salability in discussing the national distinctiveness of humor, Americans were quickest to claim it. Some British critics agreed, instancing exaggeration, informality, and brashness—further localized vaguely as Western. Still, thorough reading encounters a range that includes reworking the oldest forms such as the proverb; tall tales, likewise, turn up earlier in almost every ethnic tradition.

Much of the dominant American culture had British roots; Charles Dickens had many New World devotees. Closer to home, Canadian humorists were sometimes well received in the United States. Stephen Leacock—like "Sam Slick" (a creation of Canadian Thomas Chandler Haliburton) a century earlier—fit in so easily here that many of his readers did not know or care that he was not a U.S. citizen. American humor could itself travel far because it meshed with basic human nature. But its offhand egalitarianism and its quickness to ridicule snobbery and pomposity was stronger than that of any other country with a print culture.

Much of the humor from 1870 to 1920 does not appeal to readers in the early twenty-first century. Political barbs like those of Thomas Nast or Petroleum V. Nasby—a pseudonym for David Ross Locke (1833–1888)—rust away, but so does the topicality of needling the southern "colonel," the bloomer girl, the boardinghouse landlady, and the "masher." Racist and ethnic slurs have sunk beneath respectability, and the politically correct will merely scowl at opaque dialect. Audiences in the 2000s squeeze less glee out of misused words and none at all out of tortured spellings. Likewise, there is little demand for the light or "occasional" verse that made Oliver Wendell Holmes a celebrity until his death in 1894. Also, when later readers refer back to historic material, they are absorbing it in a way that is quite different from the way that audiences of the late 1800s and early 1900s perceived it. Contemporaries of Josh Billings, for instance, took his writing in weekly doses or skipped around in his almanacs, which made them less likely to notice the recycling of devices and even phrasing. In addition, Billings's first fans did not read his work silently, as later readers tend to do, but shared his columns in groups, much like the television sitcom is vetted around the vending machine. Above all, the modern reader no longer feels that unapologetic amusement is daring, like skipping Sunday school. The late-nineteenth-century public could enjoy themselves enjoying humor while choosing from an expanding menu rather than expecting it to be available everywhere.

ENDURING WORKS

Literary historians differ in highlighting names of important works from the hundreds of plausible candidates. They differ on weighing success at the time against appeal today or against retrospective topicality. Ellis Parker Butler's huge success with "Pigs Is Pigs" (1906) evaporated long ago, for instance. But any historian should include Washington Irving, who held his prominence in anthologies used in the schools. James Russell Lowell, more august personally each year, heard from new readers of the first series of The Biglow Papers (1848), which amused even after its topical point failed. For loyal if diminishing fans, B. P. Shillaber carried on the tales of Mrs. Partington. As the wall between high- and lowbrow weakened, the lusty sketches from the old Southwest edged into the parlor, nearly fit to keep company with Harriet Beecher Stowe's Down East yarns through Sam Lawson. Though the Civil War satirists thinned away, Petroleum V. Nasby growled on for the unforgiving northerners while Bill Arp (a pseudonym for Charles H. Smith) genially reminded them that the white South still felt righteous. Though Artemus Ward died in 1867, Josh Billings, who started out imitating Ward's style, prospered for deriding humbug and stock sentimentalism. After the first Samantha Allen collection in 1873, Marietta Holley (1836–1926) published new books until 1914, mixing Billings's old-fashioned wisdom and virtue with calls for women's rights. While the Victorian commonplace that women have no sense of humor persisted, Holley and her ongoing admirers must have laughed at that, too.

Poets working in subliterate dialect tried to turn it into humor. A mini-genre of immigrant-inflected dialect, not indicted yet as ethnocentric, was especially popular. The writer from this style who persisted the longest in anthologies was Hans Breitmann—a pseudonym for Charles Godfrey Leland (1824–1903)—but like other dialect poets of the period, he receives little attention from modern readers. The same is true of the local colorists, who once invaded every nook of the continent and every magazine supplying fiction, and who usually wove some humor into their writing. The local colorists tended to profess curatorial purposes, and the writings of Joel Chandler Harris (1848–1908), in particular, have been upheld for helping preserve the folklore of African Americans. Still, the humorous content of such works is an important part of their appeal. Readers surely feel a margin of amusement over the thorny dialect, anachronistic beliefs, and stereotypical characters. They may find the reputed stiffness and practicality of New England in a Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman story, yet they ordinarily smile at the end.

HOLLEY'S INTELLIGENT HEROINE

Though Marietta Holley's "Samantha Allen" consistently inserted arguments for women's rights in her written monologues, she registered most effectively through her interactions with her husband Josiah. Josiah, mild, somewhat inept, holds firmly to the gender stereotypes of the small-town Northeast; yet he is fond of Samantha, his second wife, and appreciates her competence. Samantha, more senior partner than wife to him, continually demonstrates her greater practicality, keen mind, tolerant curiosity, poise, and determination—thus continually undercutting the image of the naive, near-helpless female.

In the following passage, Samantha and Josiah are going through the art gallery at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia. More particularly, they are looking at some classical sculptures of nude women. Samantha shows both her usual backbone of propriety and her open-mindedness while Josiah trails along, intellectually as well as physically smaller than she.

But there was some Italian statutes that instinctively I got between and Josiah, and put my fan up, for I felt that he hadn't ort to see 'em. Some of the time I felt that he was too good to look at 'em, and some of the time I felt that he wasn't good enough; for I well knew when I come to think it over, that human nater wasn't what it once was, in Eden, and it wasn't innocence, but lack of innocence that ailed folks. But whether he was too good, or not good enough, and I couldn't for my life tell which; either way I felt it wasn't no place for him; so I hurried him through on a pretty good jog.

Marietta Holley, Josiah Allen's Wife as a P.A. and P.I.: Samantha at the Centennial (Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Company, 1877), pp. 476–79.

Meanwhile, cities were naturalizing the immigrant and depopulating the farms. Chicago ambitiously supported the publishing of books, magazines, and newspapers. While Eugene Field's impressive following has dwindled away because his columns were so fragmented, the writings of George Ade (1866–1944) and Finley Peter Dunne (1867–1936) can still have a contemporary feel—at least for those with some familiarity with the writing of the period. While Ade was the more versatile, competing demands on the attention of posterity have winnowed him down to the best of his "Fables in Slang" series, which were collected in nine volumes, the first appearing in 1899. Ade's ideal reader, a shrewd yet tolerant city dweller, has seen through many a mental shell game and has encountered enough people to sort them into types. Dunne's Martin Dooley, who runs a saloon in an Irish enclave on the edge of Chicago, reached syndication by 1900. He commented mostly on national politics, starting with the Spanish-American War. Neither saint nor sage, he was resigned rather than outraged when deflating politicians (notably, Theodore Roosevelt) and the catch phrase of Manifest Destiny. Just as Ade's fables revive the social aura of his times and his citified coterie, so Dunne's monologues revivify the issues and the personalities as discussed by the voters rather than the pundits.

Spotlighting a few names can obscure, however, the hundreds of freelancers who strained for professional status and profits as the public indulged its sense of humor. Every kind of success spawned imitators. Meanwhile, the print media kept demanding more copy and the expanding live-entertainment industry always wanted fresh material. The big-city dailies felt off the pace without their byline humorist, and wordplay seeped into their headlines or stories about love triangles and petty theft. Comic verse replaced the lyric as filler for a magazine page. The joke in dialogic form hardened into an artifact, manufactured like tin cans, adaptable for every niche in the market. Life, started by Harvard graduates, claimed sophistication for its gags; its more expensive format also separated it from competitors. Considering itself non-partisan, it did not need the pinpoint cartoons that were found in Puck (Democratic) and Judge (Republican). The success of all three confirmed Matthew Arnold's complaint about the "addiction 'to the funny man'" in the United States.

Whatever its quality, the greatest quantity of humor was hacked out in the 1880s. Expert journeymen who had honed their skills in previous decades continued to work during this period. One was Richard Malcolm Johnston (1822–1898), who reworked his Georgia materials that had appeared previously. Another was James Whitcomb Riley (1849–1916), who brought dialect poetry to its widest popularity, especially when he bonded sentimentality and amiable humor. Still, post-bellum moods and modes would inevitably lose dominance. Changes were driven by the growth of large-scale industry, urban anonymity, and secularism. In order to cater to the metropolitan newspapers, which were increasing in number, humorists presented a middleclass frame of reference and a mainline vocabulary that was spelled conventionally. The writing of Eugene Field (1850–1895), which began to be syndicated in the 1880s, was one sign of this change. When not pandering with sentimental lyrics, Field depended on a whimsy of ideas rather than pratfalls of body or mind.

As competitors multiplied in a national market, some still used regionalism as the safest base of supply. Southerners are likeliest to remember Opie Read (1852–1939) for his Arkansas shadings; midwesterners best remember George W. Peck (1840–1916), who created the "Bad Boy" stories, or Robert J. Burdette from Iowa. Of course, the fastest road to the national market ran through Manhattan, now the center of publishing. Out of the crowd, Francis Richard ("Frank") Stockton (1834–1902), H. C. Bunner (1855–1896), and John Kendrick Bangs (1862–1922) have had the most enduring appeal. Trying every mode like the preceding generation, they excelled in the short story and the cycle of sketches. While pitched below elitism, they assumed a public that not only could read well but was well-read. Likewise, Edgar Wilson ("Bill") Nye (1850–1896), though he got to the New York World through the Laramie (Wyoming) Boomerang, learned to assume a reader too self-confident to enjoy elementary blunders in language.

MR. DOOLEY ON THE PHILIPPINES

Finley Peter Dunne's "Mr. Dooley" reached national notice with his commentary on the Spanish-American War, especially on the behavior of Colonel Theodore Roosevelt leading the Rough Riders in Cuba. He continued his commentary, to still greater notice, when the United States occupied the Philippine Islands at the end of the war and a vigorous Filipino guerrilla movement opposed the U.S. troops.

Though a wide majority in the United States supported the policy of the Republican administration, an anti-imperialist group kept active, especially for the presidential election of 1900. Increasingly, however, it was attacked as unpatriotic, and even Mark Twain had to cope with charges of being a traitor. Finley Peter Dunne, while using humor more cross-grained than Twain's on this issue, felt that Mr. Dooley's Irish American idiom helped to deflect expansionist outrage, that readers tolerated dissent better when it was swathed in nonstandard English.

But I don't know what to do with th' Ph'lippeens anny more thin I did las' summer, befure I heerd tell iv thim. We can't give thim to anny wan without makin' th' wan that gets thim feel th' way Doherty felt to Clancy whin Clancy med a frindly call an' give Doherty's childher th' measles. We can't sell thim, we can't ate thim, and we can't throw thim into th' alley whin no wan is lookin'. And 'twud be a disgrace f'r to lave befure we've pounded these frindless and ongrateful people into insinsibility.

Finley Peter Dunne, Mr. Dooley at His Best, edited by Elmer Ellis (New York: Scribners, 1938), p. 65.

MARK TWAIN

By far, the humorist of the late nineteenth century who has had the most prolonged appeal is Mark Twain, the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910). If Twain's innate genius or the quality of his humor explain his staying power, his career nevertheless exemplified three patterns for ongoing success: a spread of forms and outlets; the manipulating of different personae, coalescing in a complex personality; and appeal to a range of attitudes, sometimes contradictory.

People with little patience for print may know only about the Tom-Huck novels and, perhaps, one or two short stories, but Twain wrote or compiled a shelf of works, including, naturally, Mark Twain's Library of Humor (1888). He began as one of many journalists with a byline who spun tales, sketches, hoaxes, and anecdotes. Moving up to the magazines, he predictably ground out a monthly "department," if only for a year. Meanwhile, he was refining his stagecraft as a "lecturer" so effectively as to get constant pleas for speeches at banquets and ceremonies. All along, he worked at any promising deal—a self-pasting scrapbook, low-cost pamphlets, calendars, postcards, and comic poetry, especially parody. Tenacious bibliographers still have not tracked down his every printed word or every witness to his skill as a yarn-spinner. In 1908 the incorporation of the Mark Twain Company confirmed that his pen name had prospered into a trademark, a logo. He himself marveled at his sustained popularity, which he had worried about since the early 1870s, alert to overexposure.

Twain enjoyed continuing appeal because he steadily experimented with his persona, facing up to failures and adapting to the turns in his highly visible life. Most contemporaries who made a sudden hit stuck with their original approach and so coasted toward satiating their public. While the "I" persona in Twain's first novel, The Innocents Abroad; or, The New Pilgrims' Progress (1869), was already complex, it changed with each of his travel books, especially as Twain became famous, wealthy, and urbane. In the short pieces from Nevada and San Francisco, the Twain persona began as politically and civically engaged; then, working toward a national appeal, he muted his partisan invective. But he could resurface as a fervent independent—close, actually, to the Republican's middleclass core—when not building around basic human predicaments, topically staged. He most often used what the literary critic Walter Blair considers the then dominant strategy of humorists: posing a persona between the fool and the sage, between comically wrong thinking and horse sense, between exuberant joking and livable principles. But Twain, flexible to the end, moved with his times and his fortunes. His uniqueness comes from the fact that he achieved more cross-grained growth than most other writers.

Cutting across the timeline, Twain always appealed to a spread of attitudes. Casual readers, going by The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures ofHuckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer's Comrade) (1885)—especially as illustrated later by Norman Rockwell—consider him quintessentially nostalgic. As early as the 1870s older Americans could yearn for a community nestled in the village, superior to the heartless, noisome city (a grungier place then than now). But another of Twain's publics saw him as urbanized, moving toward a modernizing future and toward an improved human nature. Already in his early days, fellow journalists had called him a moralist, just partly kidding. Showily yet sincerely, he acted out the ideal of the responsible citizen, local and national. But even as his sketches increasingly displayed him as both family man and entrepreneur, he could again droll as prodigal, lazy, irresponsible, and hostile to the thickening bureaucracy. The various publics paid their money and took their choice of Mark Twains. In spite of bursts of appreciatively quoted invective, like his most enduring competitors he laughed with people more than at them—a distinction that was becoming explicit. He was amused as well as amusing, more sympathetic than satiric. Nevertheless, skeptics could quote supportive texts from Twain, agnostics felt comfortable with him, and pessimists inferred a kindred mind.

Twain's use of language encapsulated his multiplicity. Some of his sketches came close to the literary comedians' farfetched similes and slang, but even then he showed respectful affection for colloquial rhythms. Readers of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn admired its flowing yet vigorous cadence more than they chuckled at the boy's fumbling grammar or Pike County dialect. Before and after that novel Twain also showed respect for the correctness set by eastern academia. Especially after 1895 he worked primarily through sanctioned English so precise and graceful as to seem beyond any markers for class. But he would still delight his lifelong admirers by downshifting into slang and regional metaphors. Invoking Americanisms much less than his admirers then or now, his demotic undertones protected him from charges of going high-hat after hobnobbing with the wealthy and the mighty. Aspiring humorists who may not have comprehended the intricacy of Twain's appeal could see the efficacy of his style. Today, novelists who clash among themselves over sociopolitical principles emulate it openly.

TWENTIETH-CENTURY ARRIVALS

Although Twain reigned as king of the humorists until his death in 1910, tastes pointed consciously toward the new century after the severe depression of the 1890s eased. Alongside the carryovers, the cartoon character Abe Martin created by Frank McKinney "Kin" Hubbard (1868–1930) rates as a throwback. A bumpkin who started shucking his kernels of a fool's wisdom in 1906, Hubbard held to a daily, syndicated readership, slowly grooming himself into an impish small-towner. But the top-paying newspapers wanted fresh talent with metropolitan themes and characters. O. Henry, a pseudonym used by William Sydney Porter (1862–1910), moved to New York City in 1902. Don Marquis moved there in 1909, soon doing a column for the Evening Sun. As the low-priced, general monthlies recognized how much female subscribers counted, female humorists got more acceptances in more genres. Carolyn Wells (c. 1869–1942) set the standard for updated professionalism, displaying versatility and writing with cerebral irony on mainstream themes rather than gendered ones. But movies were already luring the less literary; after 1910 the Mack Sennett Keystone comedies leaped many cuts above primitive sight gags.

World War I quickened the self-imagings that would energize the witty clique clustering in Greenwich Village and then around The New Yorker, which was founded in 1925. Most of the magazine's first contributors were already well known—especially Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, and James Thurber. When Ring Lardner (1885–1933) gravitated to New York in 1919, he was already known as a sportswriter with a twist that hurt. His sardonic humor, close to nihilism, which now seems to belong to the 1920s, had early surpassed that of Baltimore's H. L. Mencken (1880–1956). Mencken had been charming readers since 1908 with his inventive sarcasm, whatever its real-world salience. At their kindest, Mencken and the early-twentieth-century humorists ignored the small-town's morally ribbed eccentrics, its fading crackerbox philosophers, and its fool in overalls stumbling onto a pebble of sagacity; at their meanest they ridiculed the nouveau bourgeoisie straining for a veneer of suavity. Nevertheless, the acerbic urbanite would attract a smaller audience than the developing persona of the "little man"—the apartment dweller or new homeowner trapped in a white collar, trying to cope with puzzling neighbors, servants by the day or just the hour, panhandlers, and low-level bureaucrats.

Only a fearless critic will round off humor from 1870 to 1920 neatly or, if wary of committing to a master theme, will draw a sharp contrast with antebellum modes and then with those of the 1920s. How can the career of Will Rogers (1879–1935) fit into any dovetailed survey? A cautious historian can at least assert that the most humor in the widest spread of forms was the most self-admiringly enjoyed between 1870 and 1920. With the growth of movies and then radio in the 1920s, the amount of humor printed per capita surely declined. More important, humor grew so ubiquitous that it was devaluing toward common currency, no longer a self-conscious gift from the American character to itself. In the late nineteenth century, some British and American critics decided that the flowering of humor had sprung out of democracy, out of the alleged primacy of English-speaking peoples in establishing human rights; by ignoring much, the literary historian can compile a supportive anthology. Still, the soundest perspective is to frame 1870 to 1920 as the era when the job of humorist became a profession because the idea of and the term for a sense of humor cohered to designate a talent worth having and exerting on humankind.

See alsoAdventures of Huckleberry Finn; Periodicals; Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Ade, George. Ade's Fables. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1914.

Billings, Josh. Josh Billings: His Works, Complete. New York: G. W. Carleton, 1876.

Dunne, Finley Peter. Mr. Dooley at His Best. Edited by Elmer Ellis. New York: Scribners, 1938.

Holley, Marietta. My Opinion and Betsey Bobbet's. Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Co., 1872.

Lardner, Ring. You Know Me Al. New York: George H. Doran, 1916.

Nye, Edgar W. Bill Nye's History of the United States. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1894.

Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 1885. Edited by Victor Fischer and Lin Salamo. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

Secondary Works

Bier, Jesse. The Rise and Fall of American Humor. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968.

Blair, Walter. Horse Sense in American Humor, from BenjaminFranklin to Ogden Nash. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942.

Blair, Walter. Native American Humor (1800–1900). New York: American Book Company, 1937.

Blair, Walter, and Hamlin Hill. America's Humor: From PoorRichard to Doonesbury. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Blair, Walter, and Raven I. McDavid Jr., eds. The Mirth of aNation: America's Great Dialect Humor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.

Gale, Steven H., ed. Encyclopedia of American Humorists. New York: Garland, 1988.

Hudson, Frederic. Journalism in the United States from1690 to 1972. New York: Harper, 1873.

Inge, M. Thomas. "Comic Strips." In The Greenwood Guide to American Popular Culture, edited by M. Thomas Inge and Dennis Hall. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002.

Mintz, Lawrence E., ed. Humor in America: A ResearchGuide to Genres and Topics. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988. See especially David E. E. Sloane, "Humor in Periodicals," and Zita Dresner, "Women's Humor."

Nilsen, Don L. F. Humor in American Literature: A SelectedAnnotated Bibiliography. New York: Garland, 1992.

Sloane, David E. E. The Literary Humor of the UrbanNortheast, 1830–1890. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983.

Trachtenberg, Stanley, ed. American Humorists, 1800–1950. 2 vols. Detroit: Gale Research, 1982.

Walker, Nancy, and Zita Dresner, eds. Redressing the Balance:American Women's Literary Humor from Colonial Times to the 1980s. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988.

Wallace, Ronald. God Be with the Clown: Humor in AmericanPoetry. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984.

Watkins, Mel. On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying, andSignifying—The Underground Tradition of African-American Humor That Transformed American Culture, from Slavery to Richard Pryor. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994.

Wickberg, Daniel. The Senses of Humor: Self and Laughter inModern America. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998.

Williams, Kenny J., and Bernard Duffey, eds. Chicago'sPublic Wits: A Chapter in the American Comic Spirit. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983.

Yates, Norris Wilson. The American Humorist: Conscience of the Twentieth Century. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1964.

Louis J. Budd