Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: Dear readers,I am pleased to present issue 9.2 of Studies in American Humor. Once again, we have an issue that represents the breadth of work being done in American humor studies, with essays focusing on poetry, drama, late-night television, and film comedy. The work in this issue also demonstrates that scholarship on American humor is not only being created by scholars working in the United States, as we have two pieces from scholars out of Europe.First up is Sarah Shermyen’s “Reading Gertrude Stein for Pleasure: Finding the ‘Mere Humor’ in ‘High Modernism.’” Shermyen offers an analysis of Stein’s seemingly impenetrable poem “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso.” However, rather than offering a ... Read More PubDate: 2023-09-21T00:00:00-05:00
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: Editors:While reading Benjamin Schwartz’s excellent essay “‘Making Such Spaces . . . Where None Previously Existed’: Interstitial Wit in Fran Ross’s Oreo,” I was struck most by how Schwartz deftly ties the novel’s use of humor to the notion of community building.1 Schwartz argues that the “power that humor affords Oreo is inextricably related, as the acronym ‘WIT’ suggests, to the fact that as a Black girl she occupies an in-between space, what Hortense Spillers refers to as the ‘interstices’ of American culture” (16). It’s in those “interstices,” Schwartz goes on to suggest, that humor can open up space to communicate shared experiences and create a sense of affinity among minoritized groups.This argument is ... Read More PubDate: 2023-09-21T00:00:00-05:00
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: Modernist poetry may be best known for the difficulty it presents to the reader, particularly in works that elude traditional close reading approaches such as Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons or her “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso.” In her introduction to Humor in Modern American Poetry, Rachel Trousdale opens by acknowledging the perception of impenetrability and suggests that such difficulty may lead “readers to overlook the fact that poets of the modern era are continually joking, mocking, and making puns.”1 Yet even when we know to search for the laugh, it may not always be easy for us to identify the humor in a work like Stein’s “If I Told Him,” given that it is hard to understand the puns, who ... Read More PubDate: 2023-09-21T00:00:00-05:00
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: In 2003, Carl Gutierrez-Jones issued a call to arms of sorts to racial and ethnic studies scholars, encouraging them to redouble their efforts in analyzing the treatment of humor by multiethnic writers.1 “The study of multicultural texts,” he asserts, “has produced readings that invite but do not pursue, a sustained treatment of humor and its significance,” a circumstance he attributes to the fact that “race and ethnic studies has developed [a] complicated relation with humor in part because the cultural and political significance of race and ethnicity has been so intimately tied to the discourse of the law” (112). Literary and cultural critics adopt a seriousness of tone in their work on Chicano writers because ... Read More PubDate: 2023-09-21T00:00:00-05:00
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: On Thursday, March 12, 2020, Stephen Colbert of CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (2015–) clarified why his taping in the Ed Sullivan Theater did not have its live, in-studio audience:Let me explain what is going on. Uh, all of the New York City late night shows were planning on going without audiences starting on Monday [March 16, 2020]. We announced that last night, actually. And uh, that changed because just a few hours ago we got some surprising news: we would be going without an audience tonight! This is absolutely true. We are just kind of winging it. This is rehearsal right now.1At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, The Late Show alongside all the other late-night talk shows in New York City and ... Read More PubDate: 2023-09-21T00:00:00-05:00
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: The notions of community and communal bonds are integral to the genre of comedy. The social aspect finds an apt expression in the concept of the community of laughter: groups of an unforeseeable and fluid nature in which hierarchies and power relations can be temporarily suspended. Being of an ephemeral nature, communities of laughter tend to arise spontaneously; they follow conventionalized practices and ritualized patterns, which allows for their integration into generic forms such as comedy and its various subgenres. In this article, I link the community of laughter to a relatively modern phenomenon or rather to a comic mode that can be traced back to classic literary forerunners but that only turned into a ... Read More PubDate: 2023-09-21T00:00:00-05:00
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: Although some people think of poetry readings as staid, sober affairs, a common sound heard at many readings is laughter, and for too long, humor in modern and contemporary American poetry has not received the serious critical attention that it merits. Thankfully, in the last few years, more scholarship on this topic has been produced, including two insightful monographs, Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry and Lyric as Comedy: The Poetics of Abjection in Postwar America. While both books focus primarily on humor and comedy in early and mid-twentieth century American poetry, each also includes discussion of contemporary poetry. Strikingly, both books explore how humor enables the ... Read More PubDate: 2023-09-21T00:00:00-05:00
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: When is a joke “just a joke”' This question is one of the central themes in Raúl Pérez’s The Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy. In his nuanced examination of the history of racist humor and controversies surrounding race-based jokes, Pérez takes a sociological approach to study how racist humor has developed in the United States over the past two centuries. Specifically, his critique of race-based humor centers on a concept he defines as “amused racial contempt,” which is a “shared emotional state” that emerges in communities who are “laughing at non-whites” (8). According to Pérez, amused racial contempt continues legacies of white supremacy in the United States in ways that dehumanize ... Read More PubDate: 2023-09-21T00:00:00-05:00
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: Teresa Milbrodt’s Sexy Like Us: Disability, Humor, and Sexuality makes a vital contribution to the intersections of humor research and disability studies. Its strength lies in the fact that Milbrodt is a member of the disability community, which helps the book succeed with its stated goal of “expand[ing] the definitions of disability, humor, and sexuality in ways that help us reconsider what it means to be in a body” (xiii). The book thus adds a much-needed interdisciplinary disability lens to scholarly work on American humor as well as on sexualities. Sections of Sexy Like Us are well suited for use in courses in disciplines as diverse as women’s and gender studies, disability studies, sexuality studies, and ... Read More PubDate: 2023-09-21T00:00:00-05:00
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: If you’re looking for an approachable, compact history of stand-up comedy, Wayne Federman’s The History of Stand-Up is it. In addition to being an active stand-up comedian, writer, and actor, Federman is an adjunct lecturer at the University of Southern California where he teaches courses in the School of Dramatic Arts. His History of Stand-Up cobbles together material gathered during his career as a stand-up and comedy writer, his History of Stand-Up pod-cast (with Andrew Steven), and several articles written for Vulture. Along the way it introduces readers to the form’s genesis in the lecture circuits of the mid-nineteenth century while addressing a series of major transformations as the form responded to ... Read More PubDate: 2023-09-21T00:00:00-05:00
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: Lanita Jacobs’s To Be Real: Truth and Racial Authenticity in African American Standup Comedy investigates how the comedy club provides a space for performers and audiences to explore what “real” Blackness means in the early twenty-first century. Jacobs ponders this question of racial authenticity from the seat of the stand-up comedy fan and from the perspective of the curious and detailed ethnographer. The subjects of the book are Black comics (both mainstream and not) who frequent Los Angeles comedy clubs and who use the stage to untangle the complexities of Black citizenship in the United States. The chapters of To Be Real are, for the most part, divided by catastrophe—in either the United States or, on a ... Read More PubDate: 2023-09-21T00:00:00-05:00
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: Robin Murray and Joseph K. Heumann’s book Film, Environment, Comedy: Eco-Comedies on the Big Screen seeks to map the history of ecocomedies over a period of about eighty years of film produced and presented in English. The book is broad in scope and is billed as a companion to Nicole Seymour’s Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age (2018). The authors thus focus on the comic in ecocinema as a special means of amplifying environmental issues. The authors maintain that the “nature attacks human” conceit has been replaced by a “human attacks nature” orientation, which is illustrated throughout the book.Film, Environment, Comedy is divided into three parts. The first chapter of part 1 ... Read More PubDate: 2023-09-21T00:00:00-05:00
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: Significant art is provocative. It drives the spectator to thought or action otherwise deemed too costly. This foundational tension between creator and consumer inevitably leads to dueling interpretations of challenging artistic artifacts. The Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, epitomize the artist as provocateur. They use their work to interrogate the humanity of their characters and play at the intersections of drama, comedy, and violence. In short, as Joseph McBride suggests, the Coens “recognize that the quest for answers in life is all we have to hold onto besides the saving grace of laughter and that artists . . . are not obligated to provide answers, only to raise provocative questions” (40). The Coens ... Read More PubDate: 2023-09-21T00:00:00-05:00
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: The all-too-familiar questions “Are women funny'” and “What’s it like to be a woman in comedy'” have generated a plethora of works in humor studies about women in comedy. The collection Hysterical! Women in American Comedy contributes several brilliant essays on the topic. Shawn Levy’s In on the Joke: The Original Queens of Stand-Up Comedy serves as a popular press version of this turn toward highlighting women in the history of comedy. It also supplements a body of well-crafted journalistic work on the history of stand-up comedy, which includes Kliph Nesteroff ’s The Comedians, Gerald Nachman’s Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s, and Richard Zoglin’s Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-up in ... Read More PubDate: 2023-09-21T00:00:00-05:00
Subscription journal
