TEXTS OF TWO ADDRESSES DELIVERED AT THE SECOND
ANNUAL MEETING OF THE AMERICAN HUMOR STUDIES ASSOCIATION
OF THE MLA CONVENTION IN SAN FRANCISCO
IN DECEMBER 1975.

A "WANT-LIST" FOR THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HUMOR

My assignment for this session is to produce a sort of "want-list" for the study of American humor. When I was given the assignment, my thought was that the task would be a simple one—just ask Walter Blair, or if he were not on hand, ask Ham Hill, whether there is anything that will not be covered in the history of American humor they are writing. My guess is that a list of what will be missing from that book will not be long. But on second thought I decided I’d have to do more to meet my present assignment than wait for that book or ask its authors for the list that’s called for.

When I asked the editor of Studies in American Humor whether I might promise publication for any manuscripts I could stir up, he replied in phrases like "any good manuscript," and of course "no one ought to expect publication of a bad piece of scholarship," and so I fear I must hedge a bit on the contract for publication I wanted to offer you today. But there is surely an encouraging abundance of avenues to publication in Studies in American Humor, the American Studies Newsletter, the folklore journals and the historical journals across the country, and the non-specialized journals as well. The lead article in a recent number of the journal American Literature is by Leo Lemay, "The Text, Tradition, and Themes of ‘The Big Bear of Arkansas.’" The article has in it the depth and the breadth of learning suggested in its title; the journal would welcome other such articles. We are seeing more symposia or collections of essays these days, like the one Louis Rubin edited for the Voice of America and the Rutgers University Press, entitled The Comic Imagination in American Literature, one edited by Harry Levin three years ago, and another that Thomas Inge brought out a few weeks ago on the frontier humorists—and we are likely to see more such books in the future. But I must resist the temptation to recite what has been done already and how much can be expected in the future in an area that has a national association of its own, and two journals of its own.

Since humor and the humorists became topics for scholarship later than other comparable segments of our literature, it is not surprising that there is still, relatively, much to be done. it was about 1930 that Constance Rourke, F. J. Meine, and Napier Wilt discovered the native humor and began dusting it off for others to

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study, notably Walter Blair, who followed second in what has become a dynasty of scholars working in this humor at Chicago. When Blair’s Native American Humor became available as a text book in 1937, I began teaching a course in American humor, and I have had courses or seminars at close intervals since. During that period I have been aware of how much the published research has broadened our knowledge. I have stood close by, as it happened, when some of the most interesting new information was brought to light—when, for one instance, Milton Rickels got on the track of Thomas Bangs Thorpe, followed him from one Louisiana plantation and parish newspaper to another, to New Orleans, to the Mexican War, into various political ventures, and in doing so, added significant new items to the list of Thorpe’s works and to our understanding of the frontier humor; and when, for another instance, John Q. Anderson discovered, in a most unlikely way, that there was actually a Henry Clay Lewis and that he was indeed the Madison Tensas who published Odd Leaves from the Life of A Louisiana Swamp Doctor, and was able to follow Lewis’s tracks from South Carolina to a Mississippi River steamboat, to an apprenticeship with a doctor at Yazoo City, to medical school in Louisville, to medical practice in Madison, Louisiana, where he published the Swamp Doctor, not in 1846 but in 1850, the year in which he was drowned in a bayou off the Tensas River.

Let me not seem to imply that there are great numbers of others among our humorous writers who will yield as much new and important information as Mr. Rickels and the late Mr. Anderson discovered. I suspect, though, that useful results would grow from full investigation of a number of the lesser humorists against the backgrounds from which they wrote. Joseph Glover Baldwin, Richard Malcolm Johnston, William Tappan Thompson, and Bill Arp are by no means unknown, but they seem important enough to invite more study than they have had. A considerable list of lesser humorists could be compiled.

It seems to me that Constance Rourke, about forty-five years ago, pointed to humorous elements which are important in the works of major literary authors, not primarily humorists, that have not yet been fully explored. I remember hearing Joseph Jones read a paper, about 1950, published later, which began by remarking how odd it was that no one had written on the humor of Moby Dick. He was aware, of course, that no one had written much on Moby Dick until recently and that other aspects had demanded attention first. To think of studying the humor in Melville or Hawthorne or Poe or

Whitman or Emily Dickinson, to name some of the most likely ones, all mentioned by Constance Rourke, I believe, is to be reminded of the need for clear definitions and clear distinctions among categories. Perhaps new terms are needed, but the effort of E. H. Rosenbery in his book Melville and the Comic Spirit was not so successful as could be hoped. Cannot someone give us help in this matter? The need is less, I believe, for dealing with humor in the abstract or in theory or in its bearings in philosophy and psychology than on the practical level of dealing with the purpose, the means, and the effects of humor in a particular context.

At least since Bernard DeVoto’ s Mark Twain’s America, we have known that later humorists have learned much from earlier ones, and Norris Yates had as a main thesis of his book The American Humorist: Conscience of the Twentieth Century (1964) that the influence of nineteenth-century humor reached into the present century. I suspect that additional investigation of continuity and influences will be profitable. And with others as well as with William Faulkner, as has been shown, the continuity may have been in part through oral channels, lore, and traditions. And even the earliest and most remote of the frontier humorists may have had their grandfathers too. We can readily suppose that the European rogue tradition, and the books belonging to it, had reached Hugh Henry Brackenridge and entered into his bogtrotter Teague O’Ragan; but we have learned over and over that it is a mistake to underestimate an author’s literary acquaintance; and the creators of Ransy Sniffle, Ovid Bolus, Simon Suggs, Bill Arp, and even Sut Lovingood—not to mention Huckleberry Finn—were men of some learning. Willard Thorp suggested some years back that many novelists late in the nineteenth century and in the present century as well have known the tradition of the backwoods humor; he saw possibilities for research to follow out his suggestion. And I’d think the pop culturalists (or pop cultists?) among us might trace out in fuller detail the ancestry of the hillbillies of the movies, radio, TV, the comics, and the New Yorker.

Joel Chandler Harris wrote once that Americans have a habit and a gift for humor, in contrast to Europeans, that they can accept the worst possible turns of fortune with a wink and a nod and face the future in good spirits. Harris thus raised the question of international relations and comparisons. If the native humor is the most distinctive—perhaps the one distinctive—type or sub-genre America has contributed to world literature, comparative studies and speculations would seem to be called for. A lecturer on this

humor in Australia, to mention one possibility, finds his audience uncomprehending, as if hearing a strange phenomenon described for the first time. The Australian out-back produced some parallels to the American frontier, but it did not produce a literature of frontier tall-tales. It may be that we can learn more about the response to American humor as an export commodity. Did it appeal to the British ib the nineteenth century for the same reason that Joaquin Miller appealed to their taste for the strange and the remote and the extravagantly exhibitionist? Has Mark Twain’s popularity in various countries been due most to his humor, or to his comment on God, man, and society in his time, or to qualities he had in common with Joaquin Miller?

Might we not know more also about attitudes toward this humor at home? William Gilmore Simms enjoyed, obviously, the volumes of coarse backwoods humor that came to his editor’s desk at the Southern Quarterly Review; they were fine for reading on a train or a steamship, but would of course not be brought into the house at the end of a trip. Had the public attitude changed, or did he think it had changed, before he published his yarn of Sharp Snaffles late in his life? There’s Poe, also, who once remarked that he was not of the merry sort—that surely one of the meagerest understatements to be found on all his pages—but he took pleasure in Longstreet’ s Georgia Scenes; and whether we take Poe straight or take him as an ironist, he gives us room to demonstrate our sophistication in dealing with types and gradations of the comic. The raucous masculine humor of the last century stood outside the borders of polite literature, but the books sold (we could know more than we do about how well they sold), and as Eugene Current-Garcia learned while studying the Spirit of the Times, many of the roughest sketches had authors like A. B. Longstreet and former governors of two Southern states, and others in the ministry and in a variety of public occupations. Here would seem to be points where lines of literary taste, social acceptability, and moral compulsion intersect in patterns that might be investigated.

My notes thus far have touched chiefly on the humor of the nineteenth century, on which there exists a considerable library of history and criticism. For the humor of later times, more of the needed history and criticism is yet to be written. I can believe, too, that interesting new angles and new questions have appeared to modify the attitudes and expectations that faced Washington Irving, Johnson Jones Hooper, Bill Arp, the creator of Mr. Dooley, and others who have made us laugh at the peculiar ways and the outlandish

speech of particular regions, nationalities, and races. What new limits and prohibitions, perhaps what new possibilities, apply in ethnic humor in recent times? What have been the effects, or will probably be the effects, as nudity becomes commonplace?—Think of how much of the comic in Sut Lovingood derives from the exposure of bare skin. What a handicap it would have been to Mark Twain if he could not have alluded to his cussing and to Olivia’s objection to it; and if he could not have said toward the end of a social evening that it was time to go home, since he could think of nothing more to say that was decent. It’s a safe bet, though, that such a handicap would not have weighted Mark Twain down for long. Has James Thurber changed, another query might be, or has our reading of Thurber changed, as sex and the implements of sex have become public matters? Perhaps I can say, as privates have ceased to be private. Special interest and special questions relate to the distant and numerous progeny of Edgar Allan Poe, George Washington Harris, Herman Melville, Ambrose Bierce, and Mark Twain, who have worked in the dark and negative ranges of the comic spectrum, reflecting various types and gradations of cosmic gloom and nihilism.

My want-list has grown long; and I’m afraid my specifications need to be more exact to be useful. I can be firm and certain, though, in saying I believe that there is a wide field in which to work, that the research already published affords both examples and guides, and that ample means of publication exist. How could an invitation to scholarship be made more attractive?

DUKE UNIVERSITY

RESEARCH NEEDS IN NON-LITERARY AMERICAN HUMOR

Making a report on research needs and scholarly opportunities in non-literary American humor could be very simple and brief or complicated and lengthy. To describe the situation in the briefest way, I can state that there are unlimited research opportunities and that nearly everything remains to be done. To fully outline the needs in this subject area, however, would require several hours. I will opt for a middle ground, strongly inclined towards brevity.

In speaking of non-literary American humor, I am referring to humor as expressed through film, radio, television, comic art, and the stage or live performance; or humor as found in science, theology, music, education, the professions, folklore, and oral traditions.

The most immediate and primary need is in preservation and the building of archives. It is shocking to consider that the majority of materials reflecting our humorous history and heritage are no longer in existence. While accurate and dependable statistics are hard to come by, it has been estimated that of the television programs aired by at least one network between 1947 and 1972, less than twenty-five percent of them were preserved in the company archives and only ten percent of them in a complete form. Since the networks give top priority to saving news, sports, and specials (in hopes of later market use), and since comedy was an important broadcast staple for those years, it can be easily seen that very little primary data remains whereby the future historians of television can reconstruct the past and the part comedy played in it.

Film historians have estimated that of the motion pictures made in the United States before 1930, approximately eighty percent have not survived, and of those made since that date, perhaps fifty percent still exist. If these estimates hold true for television and film, the losses in radio broadcast tapes must be extremely high, and of course recorded stage performances have always been rare. Comic strips and comic books are designed to be read quickly and thrown away, and billions of pages of such graphic humor have been burned and destroyed.

Fortunately, efforts from various quarters are underway to retrieve and preserve what does survive. The Popular Culture Library at Bowling Green State University, in its effort to collect a wide spectrum of cultural materials, is also thereby preserving much material in the humorous line. Bill Blackbeard’s San Francisco Academy of Comic Art is now compiling and making available to

researchers complete runs of all the major and many of the minor comic strips in what will become a major research center, and the recently established Museum of Cartoon Art in Greenwich, Connecticut, is gathering similar materials with an emphasis on original art. Film materials are being gathered at the American Film Institute and the Library of Congress in Washington, D. C., in a systematic fashion. Perhaps of greatest potential interest to scholars of American humor is the American Academy of Humor recently begun in New York under the auspices of comedian Alan King and its first curator, film historian Leonard Maltin. While its archival efforts are embryonic at the moment, as funds and time permit, a major effort will be made to encourage its professional performing membership to contribute scripts, films, recordings, books, letters, documents, and memorabilia to the academy for the use of students and scholars of comedy.

The next most pressing need is the creation of research tools for managing the available primary and secondary materials. There are no guides to existing collections of primary material and no trustworthy checklists or bibliographies of the secondary comment and criticism. I am currently engaged in compiling an annotated checklist of books on American humor for the Gale Information Guide series, but I will not have the space to begin to deal with periodical and journal pieces. The various bibliographic projects underway on film criticism will be of great help, but no one to my knowledge appears concerned with recording published articles, reviews, or essays on radio, television, or stage comedy. We are making a beginning and modest effort at recording and annotating significant articles in the checklists published in each issue of American Humor: An Interdisciplinary Newsletter, and we hope to devote more space to such information, as we did with the special issue for fall 1975, a sixty-page annotated audio-videography of sociopolitical humor and satire by Brownlee Corrin. Also, our efforts to review briefly or at length every new book in American humor will serve as a record of current publishing activity. There are thousands of bibliographic and indexing projects waiting at any nearby library for the patient soul who wishes to contribute to our small store of knowledge in this field.

There are also many things that need to be done in the line of commentary, criticism, history, and biography. An overview of the books I have seen and annotated so far for my checklist suggests the current shade of published work. Thirty percent of the books deal specifically with literature—over half of them critical anthologies

and the remainder critical and biographical studies—and seventy percent are devoted to non-literary topics. Of the total number of non-literary titles, 36percent are biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, and collected letters; twenty-six percent are joke collections, dictionaries, handbooks, and anthologies; twenty percent are historical surveys; and eighteen percent are theoretical, critical, philosophical, and psychological studies. Most of these books tend to be superficial and merely suggestive rather than sound or definitive, and most of the books in the biographical category are devoted to film comedians and are mainly picture books with a minimum of text. With perhaps the exception of Chaplin, there are no thorough, sound, and carefully researched biographies of comedians and non-literary humorists. There are no authoritative, detailed histories of humor in films, radio, television, and popular entertainment. Very few efforts have been made to evaluate and criticize the quality of the comedy in these media, and little is available for study in an anthology format.

One would think that the immense popularity of American humor in the mass media would have generated much more serious scholarship and commentary than has been accomplished. From Aristotle to Robert Maynard Hutchins, however, the academy has demonstrated little enthusiasm for taking on the elusive study of wit and humor, more often than not backing off with lame apologies about killing comedy in the process of dissection. Perhaps this is the last great frontier in rational inquiry, now that we have conquered the human psyche, natural law, and the universe. All of these accomplishments have brought despair rather than delight, so it may be out of the need for the saving grace of laughter that we should begin the study of our most precious national treasure—the American sense of humor.

VIRGINIA COMMONWEALTH UNIVERSITY