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Humor Studies Caucus

Past and Present Panels

2011 Panells

Ethnic Humor: Pleasures and Problems

CHAIR:
Holger Kersten, Otto-von-Guericke University of Magdeburg, Germany

PAPERS:
Caroline Kyungah Hong, City University of New York, Queens College (NY)
Claiming an Asian American Comedic Tradition: The Case of Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle

Albert Sergio Laguna, Columbia College (IL)
Listening to Change: Radio, Humor, and the Future of Cuban Miami

Nick Marx, University of Wisconsin, Madison (WI); Matt Sienkiewicz, University of Wisconsin, Madison (WI)
Beyond a Cutout World: Ethnic Humor and Discursive Integration in South Park

COMMENT:
Holger Kersten, Otto-von-Guericke University of Magdeburg, Germany

Humor as Reparation and Representation

CHAIR:
Leah Dilworth, Long Island University, Brooklyn (NY)

PAPERS:
Ellen J. Goldner, City University of New York, College of Staten Island (NY)
Against All Odds: Imagination, Transformation, and Humor after the Dred Scott Decision

Scott Hamilton Suter, Bridgewater College (VA)
Stop Addressing Us as “Sir”: Women, Imagination, and the Humor of the World Wars

Fran McDonald, Duke University (NC)
Supreme Laughter: The Reparative Function of Laughter in the American Courtroom

COMMENT:
Thomas Ferraro, Duke University (NC)

2010 Panels

Subversive Stylin’(tm): Ethnic Humor and Social Change

Chair: Gillian Johns
Throughout United States history, ethnic citizens have used the comic conventions of their particular ethnic group to “enter laughing” as they have negotiated the myriad barriers to full citizenship. Ethnic humor has been used to facilitate group bonding, but also to foster intimacy and understanding with both other ethnic groups and dominant culture. In this panel organized by the Humor Studies Caucus, participants will examine manifestations of ethnic humor in stand-up comedy, records, ethnic literature, and television, exploring key figures and texts from African American, Native American, and Latino American cultures. Justin T. Loris will explore the comic contributions of Nipsey Russell and the politics of the “Party Album,” a popular genre of the fifties that was used by African American comedians to circumvent racial club restrictions. His analysis will probe the sexual and racial politics of the early civil rights era, demonstrating that “blue” comedy created by black performers played a major role in breaking down the stiff “respectability” standards that had been used for decades as a bar against entertainers of color. John Lowe will show how Thomas King’s brilliant postmodern novel, Green Grass, Running Water employs Native American comic traditions in tandem with the devices of the avant-garde novel, employing tricksterism, Native religious traditions, pastiche, parody, and satire to reveal the struggles of Native people to establish both ethnic and national identities, even as they resist governmental encroachment on Native lands. Phil Scepanski proposes a survey of African American TV Comedy from Rodney King to O.J. Simpson, exploring the ways in which topical issues generated humor that fueled popular black television series. His discussion will demonstrate the connections between the outcome of the Simpson trial and developments in comic TV performance afterwards, as in the work of Chris Rock. Finally, Jennifer Alvarez Dickinson will analyze the humor of pioneering Latino comedian George Lopez, who has made the so-called “browning of America” a mine of subversive humor, using his autobiographical approach to the comedy of reversal to establish intimacy and acceptance, while simultaneously working to effect change through the mask of the “Chicano Everyman.”

These papers provide an unexpected but necessary approach to the conference’s theme of “Crisis, Chains, and Change” in that all the speakers address moments of crisis for the ethnic groups treated, moments that coincide with dramatic national events. The chains of racial oppression, governmental abuse of Native rights and claims, and restrictive codes for national media - be it in the recording industry, nightclub circuits, or television - were often broken through the subversive use of ethnic humor, a stylin’ out that continues to break boundaries, create bonds, and foment change.

Laughing at Power: Subversive Humor in American Visual Culture

Chair: Judith Yaross Lee, Ohio University
As this Humor Studies Caucus panel shows, humor can create political change or suppress it, inviting us to laugh at those in power or to make jokes that uphold the status quo. Taken together, these three papers examine the ways in which visual humor offers and forecloses upon viable strategies for ideological critique. In “You So Funny: Satire, Wit and Political Critique in the Art of Michael Arcega,” Lorraine Morales Cox contends that the work of Filipino-American artist Arcega strategically deploys comedic representational strategies to expose the hypocrisies of U.S. foreign policy. Terrorice “an AK-47 made entirely of rice“ creates a visual and verbal pun on humanitarian aid stolen by guerillas wielding this type of gun, which arrived as military aid. Philip Nel’s “The Hope in the Joke: The Politics of Laughter in Dr. Seuss” examines the tension between Seuss’s theories and practice of humor, finding that, though he satirizes intolerance, his reliance on caricature sometimes reinforces the ideas he intends to criticize. Further, in positing children’s “spontaneous” laughter as more authentic than adults’ “conditioned laughter,” Seuss fashions a child activist whose laughing voice challenges grown-ups’ authority“ but he fails to note that his idealized child usually excludes girls and non-whites. In “The Visible Punchline: Laughter, Anger, and Affect in Animation,” Nicholas Sammond treats cartoons as ambivalent objects, their excessive violence an intentionally juvenile rebuke to the civilizing process. Laughter at battles such as those between Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd, then, is as childish as the violence itself, and both production and reception offer occasions for abject and celebratory responses to the constraints of adult social norms. From three different disciplinary approaches (Art History, Literary Studies, and Cinema Studies), these papers examine how the humor and laughter generated by visual representations may signal the potential for change or forge ideological chains that repress it.

Cracking Up: Comedy and National Crises

Chair: Amy Ware

Despite the trauma, the anxiety, and the human suffering, national crises have always inspired and fostered a comedic response. Of course, grief and stress need catharsis, but the slapstick, the buffoonery, and the burlesque that arise from a world in seeming collapse have more nuanced and often problematic functions and intentions, those that the papers of this panel explore. We discover, when we look more closely, that our laughter serves to structure and imagine the crisis. The four papers on this panel focus on watershed moments of crisis in US history: the economic collapse of the Great Depression, the protests of the Vietnam War, the terrorist attacks on 9/11, and the increasingly acrimonious debates over climate change. The papers also speak across disciplines, drawing upon examples from film, painting, literature, editorial cartoons, and stage performance to demonstrate how a study of the comic response to national crises can illuminate and sometimes transform the narratives endemic in the fields of philosophy, political science, environmental studies, and cultural history.

In her paper, Bryna R. Campbell argues that during the Great Depression, modern capitalism deformed representations of the proletarian body in what she terms the “comical grotesque.” Raising questions about social realism, she explains that the distorted workers work of realist painter Philip Evergood and New Masses cartoonist Gardner Bea offer a conscious correlation to the absurd figure of Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp in Modern Times. In his study of Robert Zemecki’s Forrest Gump, Charles D. Martin analyzes the comical intrusion of the grotesquely uncomprehending title character into archived documentary footage of seminal crises during the 1960s, the iconography of the liberal historical narrative of social change. Not only does the transformation of the footage change the cultural memory, the vacuous stupidity the figure of the idiot represents frustrates any epistemological certainty in the very idea of a historical record. Immersed in the history of ventriloquism as stand-up performance, Rick Mitchell’s paper examines how ventriloquist Jeff Dunham transformed crisis into comedy in the aftermath of 9/11, voicing through his skeletal dummy Achmed the Dead Terrorist the ethnic stereotypes and jingoism spawned by the traumatic attacks and the so-called “War on Terror” that followed. And finally, drawing on sources as varied as a Donald Duck cartoon, a Kurt Vonnegut novel, and the “Climate-gate” emails, Jim Fleming shows that our obsession with climate change has a long history that precedes the current anxious debates. The comedy that intentionally or unintentionally generates from the need to control and manipulate nature assists a new vision of US environmental and cultural history. In each instance, the four presenters of this panel demonstrate the work that comedy does to recalculate, reform, and revise the narratives we live by as we strive for agency and comprehension in times of national crises.

2009 Panels

Humor Studies as American Studies

The newly-formed Humor Studies Caucus of the ASA is pleased to sponsor this roundtable entitled “Humor Studies as American Studies”“as the sponsored panel of the caucus. The goal of the Humor Studies Caucus is to bring together scholars from a number of disciplines and fields to discuss the importance of humor as part of American culture and American Studies, in a broadly defined sense. This roundtable was organized to inaugurate the discussion of humor studies as a field, as discussed in the Caucus’s mission statement:

“Humor studies has been a central part of American Studies since its inception, as marked by early scholarly contributions from Constance Rourke and Henry Nash Smith, who underscored the importance of humor as a key aspect of studying American character and ideology. The study of humor within American Studies is evolving from the nationalist paradigm of earlier scholarship to a post-nationalist paradigm based on connections between local communities and international mass media; on cross-cultural comparisons and contrasts; and on multi-lingual and multi-ethnic comic practices as central to understanding American humor. The study of humor is also increasingly informed by interdisciplinary modes of inquiry that pay close attention to textual construction, historical context, and cultural norms and the dynamics of race, gender, class, region, sexuality, and other valences of positionality.”

Each participant will expand on a methodological, pedagogical, or theoretical question in the study of humor as an approach to American Studies, ending with discussion and debate with audience members and other roundtable participants. We hope the roundtable will create a community of scholars who come together for a lively discussion of the significance of humor studies within American Studies.

Chair and Commentary: Judith Yaross Lee, School of Communication Studies, Scripps College of Communication, Ohio University

Presentations:
Nerissa Blace, State University of New York at Stony Brook
Race, Laughter and Governmentality: Notes on Racial Violence and Postcolonial Humor

Raul Rubio, City University of New York
Ethnic Humor: Queer Stand-up Comedy and American Studies.

Amy Ware, The University of Texas at Austin
“‘I Don’t Get It”: Incorporating Humorous History into American Studies”

Janice McIntire-Strasburg, St Louis University.
Brave New World: Teaching Humor in Academe

“The Assault of Laughter”: The Meanings of Humor in Mark Twain’s America

Chair: Bruce Michelson, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Will a day come when the race will detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them“ and by laughing at them destroy them? For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution these can lift at a colossal humbug push it a little weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.

Satan, in Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger

This panel takes Mark Twain as its subject not merely due to his overwhelming popularity as a humorist during the Gilded Age, but because Twain did much to originate, transform, and popularize new definitions of humor and its cultural place in America. Studies of Twain’s humor, and of humor in general, too often take “humor” as a static category of analysis, rather than as a dynamic historical term full of contradictions and possibilities. This panel starts from the theoretical position that in order to understand a period’s humor, a scholar must pay close attention to both the textual and cultural definitions of humor. Since our goal is to understand the meanings of humor in Mark Twain’s America, each paper will not only look at writing by Mark Twain, but also pay close attention to his connections to other writers and thinkers, as well as to how others defined him.

Taken together, these three papers reveal the historical constructedness of American humor by considering the contexts of its forms, production, and reception. Tracy Wuster’s paper, ” ‘The Plague of Jocularity”: Mark Twain and the American Humorous Character,” examines the ways in which literary critics in the 1880s and 1890s attempted to define Mark Twain’s place in a literary realm in terms of his humor�(tm)s connection to American national character, rather than in terms of literary merit. Jennifer Hughes’s paper, “Mark Twain, History, and the Legacies of Laughter,” places Twain in a history of laughter that shows how humorists at the turn of the century were interested in redefining how the meanings of laughter should be understood in terms of new meanings of citizenship, race, and gender. By focusing on situating the figure of Mark Twain within a dynamic history, this panel pushes toward a better understanding of the contested terrain of humor in the Gilded Age. In their presentations, Wuster and Hughes all reflect upon the striking ability of humor to engage questions of American belonging and citizenship by conveying either inclusion or exclusion through laughter.

2008“The Roundtable from which the Caucus was born…

American Humor in Theory and Practice: A Discussion 

CHAIR:
Tracy Wuster, University of Texas, Austin (TX)

PANELISTS:
Lanita Jacobs-Huey, University of Southern California (CA)

Gillian Johns, Oberlin College (OH)

Judith Yaross Lee, Ohio University (OH)

Amy Ware, University of Texas, Austin (TX)