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HUMOR

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American humor of the nineteenth century is characterized by egalitarian values. A reflection of the changes in America's social and cultural landscape as the Republic moved toward greater democratization, the humor is discernibly native, its inception growing out of a decline in the hierarchical social structure that gave way to more attention and voice for marginalized peoples, usually rural or backwoods types. Regional customs, modes of behavior, peculiarities, eccentricities, and anti-intellectuality were reflected in the subject matter as well as in the characterization. As Walter Blair noted in Native American Humor, "American humor . . . [became] a graspable phenomenon" (p. 39).

WASHINGTON IRVING

In the 1820s Washington Irving (1783–1859) was America's best-known and most influential humorist, especially reflected in his two classic tales "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle," both published in The Sketch Book (1819–1820), Irving's first significant work. Though the language of Irving's narrator, Geoffrey Crayon, is formal and ornate, these tales feature and privilege the rustic—Brom Bones and Rip Van Winkle, respectively, who represent stability and harmony and who are admired by the community, even though neither character is particularly exemplary or given significant voice in the narratives. The humor in "Sleepy Hollow" derives from the clash of cultures: the genteel and cultivated as represented in the idealistic, enterprising, and gullible Connecticut schoolmaster Ichabod Crane, an intruder in the rural hamlet of Sleepy Hollow and a harbinger of disruptive change, and Brom Bones, a rambunctious, affable, free-spirited ring-tailed roarer and instigator of practical jokes and pranks, who frightens Ichabod, forcing him to leave, and who in so doing restores communal harmony. Like Brom, Rip Van Winkle is another congenial backwoods type who avoids work, hunts, plays with children, tells stories, and evades civilization, withdrawing to the wilderness for twenty years and escaping time, thereby never having to grow up and live responsibly. In addition to introducing native character types, Irving created scenarios that would be widely used by American humorists in the decades immediately following, especially some antebellum southern frontier humorists who would likewise refashion similar scripts endorsing the triumph of the common person and rural, frontier values over newness and inevitable transformation.

DOWN EAST HUMOR

By 1830 America's native humor had been significantly shaped by a type that had become widely associated with the United States, the comic Yankee, a New England rustic who had been prominently featured in Royall Tyler's 1787 play The Contrast. While Tyler and others helped to popularize the comic Yankee, the election to the presidency in 1828 of Andrew Jackson—a war hero and man without pedigree or high social status who did not favor eastern banking interests and was suspicious of European influences, which he believed threatened American values—was a major stimulus in prompting the development of Down East humor.

Down East humor was initially published in newspapers and magazines, and its practitioners used conventional literary modes, such as mock letters, essays, and poems. Voice was given to common folk characters, who spoke their sentiments in a colloquial idiom and, although lacking the advantages of formal education and cosmopolitan outlook, depended on common sense, traditional values, and practical experience to guide their judgments and observations. Walter Blair and Hamlin Hill define this brand of humor as "reputable," one that "tended to exalt traditional values . . . , upheld order over disorder, decorum over unbridled license . . . , and championed a moral and predictable universe" (p. 163).

In 1830 Seba Smith (1792–1868), the editor of the Portland (Maine) Daily Courier, created the most popular and influential of these unsophisticated rustic Yankees with his Jack Downing, a cracker-barrel philosopher who wrote comic letters in the colloquial mode to his relatives back in the country about current events he observed in the city. (Smith did not invent this comic type: George W. Arnold, the creator of the Vermonter Joe Strickland, did that in 1825.) Smith created his amiable country naïf and wise fool for reasons of expediency: to rejuvenate his failing independent newspaper. Jack's letters initially focused on his simplistic observations to his relatives and friends in Downingville, his rural home, about the politically balanced but ineffectual state legislature in Portland, where political affiliations created a ridiculous impasse. Smith felt these dialect letters would serve as an effective vehicle for satire and would entertain his readers, thereby boosting subscriptions to his newspaper. The letters were actually more popular than Smith had anticipated and were reprinted in newspapers throughout the country. The enthusiastic and national reception of the letters encouraged Smith to continue to write them for twenty-nine years, expanding the correspondents to include some of Jack's Downingville relatives—Uncle Joshua, Aunt Keziah, Cousin Ephraim, and Cousin Nabby. Many of the Downing letters were collected and published in two popular books, The Life and Writings of Major Jack Downing (1833)and My Thirty Years out of the Senate (1859). Typically the humor in the early letters depends on Jack's innocent manner of pointing out foibles of the political process that he only half understands because of his literal-minded, shallow perceptions about the state legislature. In a letter from Portland (18 January 1830) to his cousin Ephraim, Jack naively renders the confrontation between pro-Jackson Democratic-Republicans and the anti-Jackson National Republicans, who have about the same number of representatives, as being like two boys playing on a seesaw. At another point, when opponents protest the seating of a new representative who has apparently been elected unfairly, Jack doesn't quite follow the problem and sympathetically observes, "for they wan't crowded, and there was a number of seats empty." After treating the political scene in Portland, Maine, Jack goes to Washington, D.C., as an adviser to President Jackson and a member of his Kitchen Cabinet, and his letters shift their focus to national issues, such as Manifest Destiny, the nullification controversy, the abuses of the spoils system, and weaknesses in national leaders, such as Presidents Jackson and James K. Polk, Daniel Webster, and General Winfield Scott. Smith's humorous satire is double-edged, not only belittling political parties and their devious ways but also exposing Jack's naïveté and cynicism.

The rich lode featuring the rustic Yankee wise fool that Seba Smith first popularized in the Downing letters was also adapted by other Down East humorists. Charles Augustus Davis (1795–1867), the principal Downing imitator, wrote a series of comic letters, published initially in the New York Daily Advertiser. He subsequently reprinted more than two dozen of them in Letters of J. Downing, Major, Downingville Militia, Second Brigade, to His Old Friend, Mr. Dwight, of the "New York Daily Advertiser" (1834). A writer with a clear-cut political agenda, Davis used Downing as a vehicle to attempt to sway public feeling against Jackson's efforts to destroy the Bank of the United States.

In the 1830s the Canadian Thomas Chandler Haliburton (1796–1865), regarded by his fellow Nova Scotians as the "Jack Downing of British North America," created Sam Slick, a rustic clock maker and shrewdly enterprising peddler from Slickville, Connecticut, whose "go ahead" spirit reflected progressive American attitudes of the time. Haliburton published his Sam Slick pieces, mainly in monologue form, in the Halifax Nova Scotian beginning in September 1835, giving Sam voice to showcase his homespun, aphoristic wit in amusing anecdotes. Between 1836 and 1844 Haliburton wrote several widely popular books, including The Clockmaker; or, The Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick, of Slickville, which appeared in three series in 1836, 1838, and 1840; and The Attaché; or, Sam Slick in England, which appeared in two series in 1843 and 1844. Sam is a Yankee outsider with a cracker-barrel wit, keen insight into human weaknesses, and an equally keen understanding of how to use flattery to serve his personal financial advantage. Haliburton employs him to address slavery, marriage, and English travelers as well as to ridicule Nova Scotians, who waste much of their time raising horses, building expensive houses rather than barns, and bickering over politics rather than moving toward constructive change. Like Sam Slick, Jonathan Slick, his fictive brother and the comic rustic persona of the journalist and prolific author of sentimental novels Ann Stephens (1810–1886), is a likable and unsophisticated outsider from an onion farm in Weathersfield, Connecticut, and an aspiring writer who combines feeling and honesty with common sense and morality. The Jonathan Slick letters, which treat such topics as theater, fashion, parties, and social manners, were first published in the New York Express in 1839; Stephens collected and reprinted them in High Life in New York by Jonathan Slick, Esq. (1843). Like his comic Yankee predecessors, Jonathan Slick employs vernacular discourse. The spelling reflects the spoken word of an uneducated rustic, and the word choice and imagery reflect reference points familiar to the rural world from which Jonathan has come. Stephens has Jonathan chronicle his experiences in the city, where he faces new customs and modes of social behavior that result in a humorous juxtaposition between the world of New York City and Jonathan's rural Connecticut background. Like Smith before her, Stephens employs double-edged satire: Jonathan functions as both the vehicle and the object of ridicule, who unwittingly exposes urban falsity and pretentiousness and at the same time displays ignorance and an absence of sophistication.

Frances Miriam Whitcher (1814–1890) and B. P. Shillaber (1814–1890) were the first Down East humorists to give Yankee comic women extensive treatment and voice. Whitcher focused on rural home life reflective of a woman's culture, creating several memorable comic characters—Widow Spriggins, Aunt Maguire, and the Widow Bedott—who were featured in the Albany Argus, Neal's Saturday Gazette, and Godey's Lady's Book. Shillaber created Mrs. Partington, whose comic sayings and monologues appeared in the 1840s in the Boston Post and the Carpet-Bag, the latter of which he edited. Mrs. Partington, a character in the mold of Benjamin Franklin's Silence Dogood, is a narrow-minded literalist and user of malapropisms (words that sound like the one intended but are comically misused) whose monologues and witty sayings voice the sentiments of the common people regarding the sociocultural environment of Boston. Whitcher's comic women, like Stephens's Jonathan Slick, are vehicles used to mock shortcomings such as narrow-mindedness, pretense, gossip, and the vulgar provincial tastes of New York village culture as well as to serve as objects of self-deprecating ridicule. The more popular book-length collections featuring these comic women are Shillaber's Life and Sayings of Mrs. Partington and Others of the Family (1854) and Whitcher's The Widow Bedott Papers (1855) and Widow Spriggins, Mary Elmer, and Other Sketches (1867).

James Russell Lowell's (1819–1891) chief contribution to Down East humor is his first series of The Biglow Papers (1848), an anti–Mexican-American War satire in the form of versified letters in untutored New England dialect. Disturbed by the federal govern-ment's decision to bring the country into an unnecessary war that he feared would also extend slave territory into the West, Lowell, who had strong faith in the judgment of the common person, employed as his principal mouthpiece Hosea Biglow, a conservative, moralistic Yankee farmer whose satiric letters in humorous verse convey Lowell's condemnation. Parson Homer Wilbur, verbose and pedantic as well as vain and likable, is another source of amusement who functions as counterpoint to Hosea and to the despicable, disreputable, bogus superpatriot Birdofredum Sawin ("bird of freedom soaring"), who goes to war for his own self-aggrandizement but becomes disillusioned. Lowell subsequently revived these characters for a second series of The Biglow Papers (1862–1867) to support the stance of the North in the Civil War. Through his caricaturing of Birdofredum, who migrates to the South and settles on a plantation, Lowell derides the worse aspects of southern culture.

HUMOR OF THE OLD SOUTHWEST

The humor of the Old Southwest (encompassing North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Missouri, and Tennessee) is also known as frontier or backwoods humor and the humor of the Old South. This form of humor, which flourished between the mid-1830s and the Civil War and reflects many of the concerns of antebellum southern culture, developed concurrently with Down East humor and shares some of the same characteristics. Like its Yankee counterpart, antebellum southern humor features regional types and eccentric local characters, particularly the tall-talking braggart or ring-tailed roarer; vernacular dialect; extravagant and extraordinary situations and activities; and exaggerated, outlandish descriptions. Moreover, it celebrates rural and frontier lifestyles and culture, concentrating on the moment during "flush times" when the civilized and the primitive clash and agrarian and frontier values are being threatened with replacement by a higher standard of life that would foster materialistic and social progress. In contrast to most of the Down East humorists, the humorists of the Old Southwest were amateurs and only writers by avocation. Moreover, all these humorists were white men and professionals—newspaper editors, doctors, judges, lawyers, planters, ministers, officials in local or state government, actors and theatrical managers, and soldiers—who typically wrote to instruct but more often to amuse other men of their class and status, an agenda that is not unusual given the earthy, sometimes raucous subject matter and character types featured in their comedy.

The practitioners of southwestern humor include Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, William Tappan Thompson (Major Jones), Johnson Jones Hooper, Thomas Bangs Thorpe (the Bee Hunter; P. O. F.), Henry Clay Lewis (Madison Tensas), Joseph Glover Baldwin, George Washington Harris (Mr. Free; Sugartail), Davy Crockett, Alexander G. McNutt (the Turkey Runner), Solomon Franklin Smith, James Kirke Paulding, Mason Locke Weems, Henry Junius Nott (Thomas Singularity), George Wilkins Kendall, Christopher Mason Haile (Pardon Jones), Joseph M. Field (Everpoint), Charles F. M. Noland (N. of Arkansas and Pete Whetstone), Hardin E. Taliaferro (Skitt), Matthew C. Field (Phazma), John S. Robb (Solitaire), Phillip B. January (Obe Oilstone), William Gilmore Simms, Thomas Kirkman (Mr. Snooks), William C. Hall (Yazoo), Francis James Robinson, John Gorman Barr, William Penn Brannon, Orlando Benedict Mayer (Haggis), Adam G. Summer (Vesper Brackett), J. Ross Browne, Marcus Lafayette Bryn (David Rattlehead), Joseph B. Cobb, Joseph Gault, William Elliott, Charles Napoleon Bonaparte Evans, Hamilton C. Jones, Bartow Lloyd, Kittrell J. Warren, James Edward Henry, and others who wrote anonymously or pseudonymously and have not been identified. Unlike Down East humor, where the emphasis was on the comic Yankee, the humorists of the Old Southwest focused on a broad range of topics reflective of the interests and the way of life of a culture still largely rural and on the fringes of a frontier threatened with extinction. Fights (between men or between men and animals), horse races, militia drills, hunting excursions, camp meetings, sermons, gambling, primitive medical practices, drunkenness, con artistry and roguery, pranks and practical jokes, courting, dances, dandies and foreigners, horse trading, the rural rube in the city, legal procedure and courtroom activities, and similar subjects are featured in their work, which makes this brand of humor the first flowering of realism in American literature.

The popularity and wide dissemination of Down East humor, with its comic rustics, vernacular discourse, and emphasis on common sense and traditional values, may have provided the most immediate impetus for the humor of the Old Southwest. And like Down East humor, the humor of the Old South had its precursors. The Drunkard's Looking Glass (1812) by Mason Locke Weems, a book peddler and preacher, is a collection of humorous observations, anecdotes, and replications of vernacular speech that he had accumulated during his travels on the southern frontier. James Kirke Paulding's Letters from the South (1817) comprises epistles recording the humorous manners and customs of Virginia backwoodsmen, while his The Lion of the West (1830) features a tall-talking Kentucky frontiersman. The opening section of Henry Junius Nott's Novellettes of a Traveler (1834) depicts the comical misadventures of Thomas Singularity, whose knavery anticipates that of Johnson Jones Hooper's rogue Simon Suggs. These represent the trailblazing efforts of the writers who first experimented with themes, subject matter, and character types that became staples in southern antebellum humor. Davy Crockett's autobiography Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee (1834), possibly edited by Thomas Chilton and featuring humorous anecdotes about Crockett's hunting adventures and skirmishes with the Indians, also anticipates the kinds of materials that later and more significant southwestern humorists would similarly exploit.

Yet it is the widely popular Georgia Scenes (1835) by Augustus Baldwin Longstreet (1790–1870) that can be considered the first book of southwestern humor. This collection of eighteen sketches and tales, which he had previously published pseudonymously in 1833 and 1834 in the Milledgeville (Georgia) Southern Recorder and the Augusta States Rights Sentinel, provided the major stimulus and generated widespread appeal for the southern brand of frontier comedy. Edgar Allan Poe, who reviewed Georgia Scenes for the Southern Literary Messenger in March 1836, confidently predicted that Longstreet's book was "a sure omen of better days of the literature of the South" (Poe, p. 29). Among the most amusing tales in the collection are "Georgia Theatrics," "The Fight," "The Dance," and "The Horse Swap," which combine two levels of discourse—the formal and standard language of the educated and refined gentleman and the frontier vernacular of the uninhibited yeomen and backwoodsmen—in which the reserved and genteel behavior and judgmental attitudes of the former humorously clash with the unrestrained actions and sometime amoral values of the latter.

This clash of civilized and backwoods cultures, which Longstreet prominently featured in Georgia Scenes and which would be variously adapted, modified, and rejected by other southern humorists of the period, depended on contrived structural control: the frame device was used as a means of separating and distinguishing between the rural folk and the dignified gentleman-outsider, who spoke in formal discourse, establishing the circumstances that occasioned the tale before shifting the emphasis to the colloquial-speaking rustics. The gentleman-outsider, as a moral arbiter, would sometimes interject his judgment on what has transpired and would close the tale. Kenneth Lynn, in Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor (1959), who used Longstreet's Georgia Scenes as a focal point and who viewed southern antebellum humor generally as a criticism of Jacksonian democracy, claimed that the "morally irreproachable Gentleman" of Southwest sketches and tales formed a cordon sanitaire around himself, placing him "outside and above the comic action" (p. 64). In doing so, Lynn further observed, the "Self-controlled Gentleman" was able to restrict and to condemn satirically the excesses of the yeoman characters. Lynn's thesis, an affirmation of the Whig ideal of an order in which the wealthy, educated, moderate, and genteel were at the top of the social ladder, has subsequently been challenged because it is not widely applicable to the large and diverse body of southwestern humor that has emerged through later studies. What Lynn failed to note is that most of the humorists willingly chose to live in the Southwest, primitive, deficient, or lacking in culture as it may have been. Moreover, in many southwestern humorous texts, backwoods vernacular characters are apportioned major space and emphasis and granted extensive, mostly uncensored voice. Rarely in southwestern humorous texts do the authors consciously disparage or belittle yeomen; instead, they often make their rustics appealing, thereby affording readers the opportunity for a temporary vicarious release from order, formality, and responsibility so that they can laugh comfortably with the yeomen.

Among the texts that create these circumstances most favorably are the letters of an untutored rustic, Major Joseph Jones, authored by and initially published in 1842 in Georgia newspapers by William Tappan Thompson (1812–1882) and subsequently reprinted in Major Jones's Courtship (1843); and the letters of Pardon Jones, authored by the journalist Christopher Mason Haile (1814–1849), who published the majority of them in the New Orleans Picayune between 1840 and 1848. Both Joseph Jones and Pardon Jones are fashioned in the mold of Seba Smith's Jack Downing, and their letters exclusively feature dialect-speaking rustics. Other texts in which the vernacular voice dominates are the humorous tall tales recounted by Surry County, North Carolina, storytellers and the comical dialect folk sermons of the Reverend Charles Gentry, an African American slave preacher—all of whom the author Hardin E. Taliaferro (1811–1875) portrays approvingly in his book Fisher's River (North Carolina) Scenes and Characters (1859). An even better example of authorial indulgence of a yeoman are the sketches and tales featuring George Washington Harris's (1798–1882) Sut Lovingood, the fun-loving, conscienceless, sensually oriented East Tennessee mountaineer who recounts—with little or no interruption from the authorial narrator George—his encounters and scrapes with and triumphs over doctors, preachers, sheriffs, adulterers, and other frauds and hypocrites deserving of his pranks.

The most famous tale of southern frontier humor is "The Big Bear of Arkansas" by Thomas Bangs Thorpe (1815–1878), which William Trotter Porter, the editor of the New York Spirit of the Times, published on 27 March 1841, calling it "the best sketch of backwoods life that we have seen in a long while." A hunting tale that has been compared to Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and William Faulkner's "The Bear," both of which, like Thorpe's tale, give the hunt a ritualistic and mythical dimension, "The Big Bear" is the masterwork in southwestern humor. It employs the key ingredients of the genre, the frame device, vernacular dialect, exaggerated figurative comparisons reaching tall tale proportions, and contrasts the civilized audience of auditors with an enthralling backwoods raconteur, Jim Doggett. In the story within the story, Jim hyperbolically describes crops and game in Arkansas of incredible size. His litany of whoppers culminates in an engaging, imaginatively embellished yarn of his unceasing hunt for and eventual killing of an "unhuntable" bear, an event most Thorpe critics perceive as representing the sad fate of the vanishing American wilderness.

In addition to the frame-tale format, the southwestern humorists employed other forms: sketches; tall tales; turf reports; almanac pieces; essays on outdoor sports such as horse racing, hunting, and fishing; profiles of local characters; mock sermons; letters; burlesques; and mock historical accounts. Southwest humor also featured a wide gallery of characters, the most memorable and entertaining being storytellers (Uncle Davy Lane, Larkin Snow, and Oliver Stanley in Taliaferro's Surry County sketches and tales; Simms's Bill Bauldy in "Bald-Head Bill Baudy"; and Jim Doggett in Thorpe's "The Big Bear of Arkansas"); hunters and adventurers (Mikhoo-tah in Henry Clay Lewis's "The Indefatigable Bear Hunter" and the mythologized Davy Crockett in the Crockett Almanacs); half-horse, half-alligator types, otherwise known as screamers and roarers (Nimrod Wildfire in James Kirke Paulding's The Lion of the West, the keelboatman Mike Fink, and the "shemales" Lotty Ritchers and Sal Fink in the Crockett Almanacs); and con artists, pranksters, and rogues (Ned Brace in Longstreet's "The Character of a Native Georgian," Simon Suggs in Hooper's "The Captain Attends a Camp-Meeting," Sut Lovingood in "Parson John Bullen's Lizards," and Ovid Bolus in Joseph Glover Baldwin's "Ovid Bolus, Esq.").

As an exclusively male enterprise, the humor of the Old South was expectedly a patriarchal genre restricted by gender and racial politics. Therefore, in these humorous works it is understandable why women and African Americans typically did not play major roles or rarely transcended their marginalized status. Several of the humorists, however, did challenge the conventional attitudes and assumptions toward race. The best texts exhibiting these transgressions include James Edward Henry's "My Man Dick," John S. Robb's "The Pre-Emption Right," Taliaferro's folk sermons "The Origin of Whites" and "Jonah and the Whale," and Francis James Robinson's "Old Jack' C—." Others transgressed the barrier of gender, notably Thompson's "Supposing a Case" and "A Runaway Match," Orlando Benedict Mayer's "The Corn Cob Pipe," Harris's "Dick Harlan's Tennessee Frolic" and "Blown Up with Soda," Solomon Franklin Smith's "The Consolate Widow," and Lewis's "The Curious Widow" and "A Tight Race Considerin'." Humorists of both groups, though not radically subversive in defying minority stereotyping, nevertheless encouraged the inclusion and a less-constricted representation of African Americans and women, empowering them by liberating their voices and expanding their race- or gender-circumscribed roles. The diversionary tactics these humorists employed created a safe ambivalence: the comedy provided a noncontroversial means for legitimating increased freedom for women and African Americans through greater emphasis, more complex characterization, and more verbal freedom than minorities customarily enjoyed in canonical texts authored by men during the antebellum period.

The humor of the Old Southwest was mainly a newspaper enterprise. While many of these materials were published in small-town newspapers, such as the Greenville (South Carolina) Mountaineer, the Columbia South Carolinian, and the Lafayette East Alabamian, others were printed in big-city dailies, such as the New Orleans Picayune, the St. Louis Reveille, and the Cincinnati News, and occasionally in literary magazines, such as the Southern Literary Messenger, the Magnolia, and the Southern Literary Journal. The most important outlet for Southwest humor, however, was the New York Spirit of the Times, edited by William Porter, who, during his twenty-five-year editorship, encouraged numerous correspondents from the South to contribute humorous materials to his paper. Among Spirit's southern contributors were Joseph M. Field, Matthew C. Field, Haile, Harris, Hooper, Phillip B. January, Hamilton C. Jones, George Wilkins Kendall, Thomas Kirkman, Lewis, Alexander G. McNutt, Robb, Sol Smith, Adam Summer, Thompson, Thorpe, and Charles F. M. Noland (who contributed over two hundred sporting papers and humorous letters, making him the Spirit's most prolific contributor). Because Porter's Spirit enjoyed wide circulation, his paper gave these humorists greater exposure than they might have ordinarily expected. Porter subsequently collected some of the better pieces previously printed in the Spirit and published them in The Big Bear of Arkansas, and Other Sketches (1845) and A Quarter Race in Kentucky, and Other Tales (1847).

A number of other southwestern humorists collected and reprinted their comic sketches and tales. These collections include Hooper's Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs (1845) and A Ride with Old Kit Kuncker (1849), Joseph Gault's Reports of Decisions in Justice's Courts, in the State of Georgia, from the Year of Our Lord 1820 to 1846 (1846), Thorpe's Mysteries of the Backwoods (1847), Robb's Streaks of Squatter Life and Far-West Scenes (1847), Joseph M. Field's The Drama in Pokerville (1847), Thompson's The Chronicles of Pineville (1845) and Major Jones's Sketches of Travel (1848), Lewis's Odd Leaves from the Life of a Louisiana "Swamp Doctor" (1850), Joseph B. Cobb's Mississippi Scenes; or, Sketches of Southern and Western Life and Adventure (1851), Baldwin's Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi (1853), Robinson's Kups of Kauphy (1853), Kittrell J. Warren's Ups and Downs of Wife Hunting (1861) and Life and Public Services of an Army Straggler (1865), and Sol Smith's Theatrical Management in the West and South for Thirty Years (1868).

FANNY FERN

The satirist and proto-feminist Sara Payson Willis Parton (1811–1872), who wrote under the pseudonym Fanny Fern, represented a new departure from the Down East and southern frontier brands of humor. Her humorous sketches, critiques on social manners and conventions, particularly patriarchal attitudes resulting in the oppression of women, were Fern's assertive and ironic responses to erroneous or absurd public claims. Though many of these sketches first appeared in her weekly newspaper columns in the Boston True Flag and in the New York Ledger, she reprinted some of the best of them in Fern Leaves from Fanny's Portfolio (1853). Fern's derisive barbs are bluntly disparaging and outspoken; her persona speaks in formal English rather than in dialect and displays a demeanor that is neither self-effacing nor respectable, thus distinguishing her humor from that of her female predecessors, Frances Whitcher and Ann Stephens. In representative sketches—"Aunt Hetty on Matrimony" and "Hints to Young Wives"—Fern forthrightly attacks the inequities of married life, warning young women to beware of male duplicity and ridiculing wives who sacrifice their identities by foolishly catering to their husbands' whims and desires.

LITERARY COMEDIANS

The humor of the Old Southwest, like Down East humor, proved that native American comedy was marketable and paved the way for the emergence of the nation's first professional humorists—the literary comedians or "phunny phellows"—and Mark Twain. The major humorists of this school—Charles Farrar Browne (Artemus Ward), Henry Wheeler Shaw (Josh Billings), David Ross Locke (Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby), George Horatio Derby (John Phoenix; Squibob), Robert H. Newell (Orpheus C. Kerr), Edgar W. Nye (Bill Nye), and Charles H. Smith (Bill Arp)—initially published their work in local newspapers and gained even greater public exposure when their work was reprinted through the newspaper exchange system and in books, such as Browne's Artemus Ward: His Book (1862), Smith's Bill Arp, So-Called: A Side Show of the Southern Side of the War (1866), and Locke's Swingin Round the Cirkle (1867). In addition, most of the literary comedians turned to the lecture circuit, discovering that the public humorous performance was financially lucrative. The multiple outlets for their work brought their humor to a larger, more diverse audience than their predecessors had enjoyed, "permeating," as Jesse Bier observes in The Rise and Fall of American Humor, "the national mind as never before" (p. 77).

Though the literary comedians employed some of the same forms as the Down East and southwestern humorists—letters, dramatic monologues, and anecdotes—the conscious intent of their humor, Walter Blair has noted in Native American Humor, was on "continuous amusement," with comic ingredients contained in every sentence and generated by using ludicrous verbal discourse and techniques. In the preface to his first and most popular book, Doesticks: What He Says (1855), Mortimer Neal Thomson (1831–1875), one of the pioneers in employing verbal humor, described his basic strategy for enlivening his language for a comic effect, stating that he "dressed up" his thoughts "in a lingual garb . . . quaint, eccentric, fantastic, or extravagant," fabricating in the process a "trick of phrase, [an] affectation of a new-found style" (p. vi). In his meshing of words and phrases into amusingly clever, figurative syntactical configurations, Thomson clearly anticipated the mode of humorous wit employed by Browne and other

literary comedians. Their humor is the comedy of phrase and sentence, a burlesque of the spoken word and the consequence of the deliberate defiance of grammatical and syntactical correctness and logic, as manifested in misspelling (a quasi-phonetic spelling), mixed metaphors, misquotations, anti-proverbs, neologisms, puns, non sequiturs, malapropisms, anticlimaxes. Because their comic materials mirrored the social and historical concerns of their times and because of the fractured grammar, malapropisms, eccentric sentences, dominance of dialect discourse, and other distorted verbal concoctions, the humor of the literary comedians creates difficulty for contemporary readers who do not regard it as particularly amusing. Also, because of the oral qualities of this humor, it seems to have been better suited to performance on the lecture platform.

As comic lecturers, Browne and other literary comedians found a new venue for their comedy. Adopting the poses of their homespun, semi-illiterate personae as their mouthpieces, they successfully transferred to the stage the amusing "lingual garb" they had first tried out in print. As performers they amused large audiences, assuming a dim-witted demeanor and exhibiting a dead earnestness as they slowly meandered through their droll, digressive, and ludicrously absurd routines.

MARK TWAIN

Samuel L. Clemens (1835–1910), who adopted the pen name Mark Twain and who became America's most famous humorist, was the principal beneficiary of the brand of humor popularized by the humorists of the Old Southwest and the literary comedians, a dual legacy that would reach the pinnacle of artistic achievement in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). Recognizing the potential of the humorous story as a distinctive American art form, one reflective of his preferred improvisational manner of storytelling, Twain wrote in "How to Tell a Story" (1895) that "the humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that . . . there is anything funny about it. . . . To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities is the basis of the American art" (Selected Shorter Writings, pp. 239, 241).

Knowledgeable of the work of his predecessors who exploited the vernacular and prominently featured rustic, semiliterate characters, Twain, in some of his own early humorous pieces, drew freely from the comic devices they had popularized. Twain's first sketch, "The Dandy Frightening the Squatter" (1852), published in Shillaber's The Carpet-Bag, re-creates the familiar plot of the clash of civilized and backwoods cultures and the triumph of the back-woodsman. Twain likewise drew on the conventions of southwest humor in three humorous letters he published under the pseudonym Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass in the Keokuk Post on 1 and 29 November 1856 and 10 April 1857 while working as a journeyman printer. Snodgrass, an innocent, dialect-speaking country bumpkin, like Thompson's Major Joseph Jones, is duped during his adventures in the city. Several other of Twain's apprenticeship pieces—including his letter to Annie Taylor (25 May 1856), featuring a "great mass meeting" of bugs, and "A Washoe Joke" (1862), an account of a petrified man found in the West and a mockery of serious scientific papers reporting incredible findings—reflect his assimilation and application of the tall tale genre widely used by antebellum southern humorists.

Published on 18 November 1865 in the New York Saturday Press, "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog" (subsequently published as "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County") masterfully merges some of the conventions of southern frontier humor and the narrative strategies of the literary comedians. A frame story juxtaposing a naive, genteel easterner, who is also the frame narrator, and an affable westerner, an old miner named Simon Wheeler who feigns earnestness and recounts in the vernacular an amusing, rambling, outlandish narrative, the "Jumping Frog" tale features Jim Smiley, a compulsive bettor who becomes the victim of a stranger's deception as Wheeler's eastern auditor becomes the dupe of the old miner's fanciful narrative ruse. Actually the easterner, who retrospectively introduces and closes Simon Wheeler's story, employs a dead-pan pose too, both in his ironic comment about Wheeler's "monotonous narrative" and his pretended boredom and abrupt departure after Wheeler, who is momentarily interrupted, returns to continue his story. This sudden ending, which is not a resolution at all but rather an unexpected comic reversal, illustrates Twain's application of anticlimax, a favorite device of Artemus Ward and other literary comedians.

Mark Twain extended his humorous repertoire to encompass the experience of American travelers in Europe and the Holy Land in a series of letters he wrote principally for the San Francisco Alta California during a five-month cruise he took in 1867 aboard the steamship Quaker City; he then revised and expanded the letters for inclusion in his first book, The Innocents Abroad (1869). Combining humor and burlesque, Twain ridicules American provincialism, cultural inferiority, chauvinism, and barbaric manners (the latter exemplified when American tourists, desirous of bringing home souvenirs, vandalize revered monuments). An equal-opportunity satirist, Twain likewise debunks European snobbery, exploitation of dubious relics for commercial purposes, irritating guides, and even the conventions and rhetoric of travel books, particularly those deceptively describing venerable places in the Holy Land.

Roughing It (1872), Twain's second book, which like The Innocents Abroad is fictionalized autobiography, is based on the five and a half years Twain spent in the Far West and Hawaii during the early 1860s. In a manner similar to much of his earlier humor, in Roughing It, Twain employs verbal and physical exaggeration of details, formal and vernacular discourses, and the frame device to juxtapose different cultures, represented by a naive young man who retrospectively recounts his amusing experiences in his encounters with western life. The familiar script in "Bemis's Buffalo Hunt," "Jim Blaine and His Grandfather's Old Ram," "The Genuine Mexican Plug," and "Lost in the Snow"—the most amusing pieces in the book—involves the misadventures of a young greenhorn whose inexperience and naïveté make him look ridiculous. For instance, in "Jim Blaine and His Grand-father's Old Ram," the narrator, who is deceived into believing that, when drunk, Jim would recount the story of his grandfather's ram, never actually hears this tale but instead hears a shaggy dog story, a string of rambling irrelevant digressions about a cast of unusually amusing characters.

CONCLUSION

The brand of comedy that emerged between 1820 and 1870, the golden age of American humor, celebrates the subject matter of the evolving democratic nation, features a memorable gallery of rustic characters, and employs a colloquial vernacular that mimics the oral speech of the uneducated and semi-literate. This tradition, especially the humor of the Old Southwest, left a rich legacy to Mark Twain and to some of Twain's contemporaries, female local humorists such as Mary Noailles Murfree, Idora McClellan Moore, Sherwood Bonner, and Ruth McEnery Stuart. This same style of humor has also had its inheritors among moderns—William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Fred Chappell, Ishmael Reed, and numerous others from both literary and popular culture—all of whom in their comedy have drawn on some of the properties of nineteenth-century native American humorous traditions, reconfiguring and giving them a renewed vitality.

See also "The Big Bear of Arkansas"; "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County"; Dialect; Satire, Burlesque, and Parody; Short Story; Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs

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Ed Piacentino