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Humor Studies Caucus
Past and Present Panels
2012 Panels
Teaching Race, Empire, and Humor
Sponsored by the Humor Studies Caucus, this roundtable will explore the pedagogy of race and 19th century American humor. The panel will address the ways in which humor was used to both create and resist racist stereotypes that supported Jim Crow, continental expansion, and imperialism. Each presentation will address key issues through specific texts, grounding theoretical insights within the practical challenges of teaching race and humor in the classroom.
Tracy Wuster will discuss Thomas Nelson Pageâ(tm)s âMarse Chanâ (1884), a story that stands as a key foundational text of the plantation literature of the Lost Cause. This story demonstrates the need to teach how humor was used in Southern local color fiction to diminish the importance of the black experience by making black characters âfun.â Teaching Pageâ(tm)s story illustrates the importance of addressing racist humor directly by understanding how humor was used to construct and support racial inequality in Jim Crow America.
John Lowe will discuss teaching the drama of Edward Harrington (1844-1911) as a means of teaching the dynamics of race and ethnicity. After the floodtide of immigration in the late 19th century, playwrights responded to the heightened curiosity and fear citizens experienced regarding their newly arrived neighbors. While Harrington certainly fostered stereotypes, his interest in showing ethnic mixing helped relieve fears of immigrants and fostered democratic communion. This neglected area of our ethnic history and literature fits in with recent âwhiteness studies,â which variously examine the ways in which groups such as the Jews, Irish, and Italians âbecame white.â
Judith Yaross Lee will discuss race and empire in the vernacular humor of Mark Twainâ(tm)s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurâ(tm)s Court (1889). Twainâ(tm)s use of vernacular humor and the bookâ(tm)s transnational clash of cultures makes it an ideal text for classroom explorations. Textual details and biographical research highlight how Twain was not only directly complicit in Manifest Destiny through his roles in the Nevada Territories, but also expressed an enduring racism toward Native Americans. The Yankeeâ(tm)s contempt for the backward âwhite Indiansâ of Arthurian Britain, like his Americanization project based on the Indian boarding schools, helps students see links among humor, empire, and race in Americaâ(tm)s vernacular tradition.
Gillian Johns will discuss Charles Chesnuttâ(tm)s The Conjure Woman (1899)â“focusing on the shifting roles of figured, historical, and/or hypothetical reading. Humor often features the aggressive disruption of norms, and when the commonly naturalized racial discourse comes to cognitive consciousness, students might experience an uncanny incongruous sense. Students who âseeâ such dynamics in Chesnuttâ(tm)s tendentiously competing speech acts, characters, and world views will become better implied readers and learn to tolerate ambiguities or conception beyond (racial) binaries. The play of humor, comedy, and irony strikes them as expressly intellectual labor, and they hence learn to take not-so canonical authors seriously as thinkers who may not reiterate western aesthetic models.
This roundtable will be chaired by Jennifer Hughes and will leave ample time for the audience and panel to discuss the relationship between humor, race, and empire in pedagogy.
The âPost-Racialâ Panopticon? Reflexivity, Race, and Resistance in Comedy Kimberly Springer, John Howard, Lanita Jacobs, Linda Mizejewski, Mary BeltrĂĄn
Session abstract
This session explores the themes of the broader ASA 2012 meeting by critiquing contemporary comedic encounters with national identity. The three papers presented for this session will each explore how assumed national identities function within the U.S. empire and within assumed nations. Do these comedians and comedic programs subvert the dominant ideals of race and racism in post-capitalist America? How do the comedy acts and programs cited here challenge or lend efficacy to the ideological discourse of âpost-racialâ America?
Mary BeltrĂĄnâ(tm)s presentation, âBlacking Up for Laughs: Televisual Blackface and âPost-Racialâ Cultural Memoryâ critiques the apparent increasing acceptability of blackface in contemporary sitcoms, such as Itâ(tm)s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and 30 Rock. BeltrĂĄn argues for the centrality of historical context in understanding enactments of blackface minstrelsy and audience reactions to it. Linda Mizejewskiâ(tm)s ââWhite people are looking at you!â(tm): Wanda Sykes and the Comedy of Bodily/Bawdy Resistanceâ uses the comedy of black, lesbian comedian Wanda Sykes to argue for Sykesâ(tm) various forms of race, gender, and sexuality rebellion against traditional notions of black womenâ(tm)s sexuality as subject to dissemblance and silence. Equally defiant is the comedy of Katt Williams who, Springer argues, both negates the importance of the dominant cultureâ(tm)s surveillance of black bodies and behaviors, but advocates and embraces a new type of black panopticon situated in the hypervisibility of raced and gendered materiality as manifest in hustle, pimpinâ(tm), and having haters (i.e. jealous onlookers).
As a group these three papers have in common a concern with the historical vestiges of racism that resonate in particular expressive gestures and articulations of race. However, Beltran, Mizejewski, and Springer argue collectively that contemporary comedians across race negotiate racial politics in ways that seek to challenge vigilance over bourgeois respectability and propriety. Their examples also demonstrate resoundingly that the U.S. is far from inhabiting a post-racial era and, instead, it remains necessary to critique comedic practices for the ways in which both dominant and subjugated cultures resituate themselves in a continually shifting terrain of claims to racial equality.
While not an official Humor Studies Caucus panel, the following roundtable will certainly be of interest…
Awkward Black Comedy 2.0: A Roundtable Discussion
Chair: Danielle C. Heard, Assistant Professor of English, UC Davis
Roundtable Panelists:
Issa Rae,The Mis-Adventures of Awkward Black Girl
Elon James White, This Week in Blackness, Blacking It Up
Baratunde Thurston, Jack and Jill Politics, The Onion
Glenda Carpio, Associate Prof. of African and African American Studies and English, Harvard University
Bambi Haggins, Associate Professor in Film and Media Studies, Arizona State University
Ralina Joseph, Assistant Professor of Communication, University of Washington
âAwkward Black Comedy 2.0â brings together Issa Rae, Elon James White, and Baratunde Thurston, three popular web-based comedians who explore issues of black identity in a distinctly twenty-first century landscape, into a roundtable discussion with three scholars whose recent scholarship theorizes current modes of African American humor and examines questions of representation, âpostâ identities, and resistance, Glenda Carpio (Laughing Fit to Kill), Bambi Haggins (Laughing Mad) and Ralina Joseph (Speaking Back, forthcoming). The panelâ(tm)s three comedians exhibit what can be described as a âBlack-Alt,â or black alternative, vibe by gravitating toward unexplored material and resisting the conventional expectations of their respective audiences. In the mode of what critics might term a âpost-soulâ or âpost-blackâ aesthetic, they explode stereotypes about blackness found both in dominant and minority cultures alike with their particular comedic logics and embodied performances of alternative, quirky blackness. They rely on web-based communities forged through Twitter and other social networking websites, as well as special interest blogs like The Root, Colorlines, and The Feminist Wire to find the natural audiences for their work, recognizing as well how the web provides a certain possibilities for creative expression and distribution that television and other traditional media foreclose. By putting these cutting-edge, popular internet comedians in conversation with experts on the topic of African American humor and with an audience of scholar-fans, this panel aims to unveil the aesthetic, political, and social dimensions of the âtechnological turnâ in black comedy emblemized by these internet stars.
Comedic politico Elon James White is the creator of the award-winning web series This Week in Blackness, which satirically examines race, politics and pop-culture in a âpost-racialâ America, as well as Blacking it Up, which earned White the 2011 Black Weblog Award for Best Podcast. He is also the founder of the Black Comedy Experiment, a collective of Black-Alt standup comedians, and a member of âLaughing Liberally,â the comedic arm of the New York-based grassroots progressive community-building network known as Living Liberally. White contributes regularly to political blogs like The Huffington Post, The Root, and Salon.com. Heâ(tm)s been dubbed by Princetonâ(tm)s and MSNBCâ(tm)s Melissa Harris-Perry as “The perfect comedian for the Obama era, talking race while exploding racial stereotypes” and at the same time one of the “Top 50 Politcos to Watch.”
Baratunde Thurston, co-founder of the black political blog Jack and Jill Politics and director of digital for the satirical news publication The Onion, calls himself a âpolitically-active, technology-loving comedian from the future.â Also a member of Laughing Liberally, Baratundeâ(tm)s Black-Alt standup intersects with his progressive community activism. Baratunde also has a significant media presence, writing for Vanity Fair, The Huffington Post, and the UK Independent and appearing regularly on the cable news circuit as a commentator. The Root named him one of the 100 most influential African Americans of 2011 and Tony Norman of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette dubs him âThe funniest black guy on the Internet.â Sure to cause a buzz on the âtwitosphereâ and beyond, How To Be Black, Baratundeâ(tm)s first book, is slated to come out within the next month. In it, the author interviews âtop blackness experts,â as he calls them, about their experiences.
Issa Rae writes and stars in the new viral sensation The Mis-Adventures of Awkward Black Girl, a web series about an unglamorous yet admirably authentic black female nerd character, Jay. Aspiring to be âthe black Tina Fey,â Rae plays upon the faults and follies of her protagonist who exhibits the âtwo worst things you could beââ“awkward and blackâ“in her quotidian experiences with co-workers, an awkward bunch in their own right. A major subplot of season one is Jayâ(tm)s navigation of her office crush, Fred, alongside her growing interest in âWhite Jay,â a white guy who Jay meets at a party and who, besides his race and gender, has a surprisingly great deal in common with her. Much of the humor in the web series derives from racially-tinged absurd situations as well as the unexpected incongruencies in Jayâ(tm)s personality. For example, while passive-aggressive at work, Jay experiments with composing aggressive rap lyrics in the privacy of her own apartment. Unlike, 30-Rock or The Office, two comparable sitcoms, ABG is mediated through the protagonists voiceover narration whose sardonic and self-deprecating tone rings of Charlie Brownâ(tm)s insecurity and self-doubt yet nonetheless seems to effectively interpellate a salient community of fellow awkward black girls who can relate to Raeâ(tm)s unabashed representation of twenty-first century black womanhood.
2011 Panels
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 âSirâ: 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 Stylinâ(tm)(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 âenter laughingâ 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 âParty Album,â 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 âblueâ comedy created by black performers played a major role in breaking down the stiff ârespectabilityâ standards that had been used for decades as a bar against entertainers of color. John Lowe will show how Thomas Kingâ(tm)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 âbrowning of Americaâ 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 âChicano Everyman.â
These papers provide an unexpected but necessary approach to the conferenceâ(tm)s theme of âCrisis, Chains, and Changeâ 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 stylinâ(tm) 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 âYou So Funny: Satire, Wit and Political Critique in the Art of Michael Arcega,â 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 âan AK-47 made entirely of riceâ creates a visual and verbal pun on humanitarian aid stolen by guerillas wielding this type of gun, which arrived as military aid. Philip Nelâ(tm)s âThe Hope in the Joke: The Politics of Laughter in Dr. Seussâ examines the tension between Seussâ(tm)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 childrenâ(tm)s âspontaneousâ laughter as more authentic than adultsâ(tm) âconditioned laughter,â Seuss fashions a child activist whose laughing voice challenges grown-upsâ(tm) authorityâ but he fails to note that his idealized child usually excludes girls and non-whites. In âThe Visible Punchline: Laughter, Anger, and Affect in Animation,â 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
 Â
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 âcomical grotesque.â 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 Chaplinâ(tm)s Little Tramp in Modern Times. In his study of Robert Zemeckiâ(tm)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 Mitchellâ(tm)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 âWar on Terrorâ that followed. And finally, drawing on sources as varied as a Donald Duck cartoon, a Kurt Vonnegut novel, and the âClimate-gateâ 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 âHumor Studies as American Studiesââas 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 Caucusâ(tm)s mission statement:
âHumor 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.â
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. Â
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
ââI Donâ(tm)t Get Itâ: Incorporating Humorous History into American Studiesâ
Janice McIntire-Strasburg, St Louis University.
Brave New World: Teaching Humor in Academe
âThe Assault of Laughterâ: The Meanings of Humor in Mark Twainâ(tm)s America
Chair:Â Bruce Michelson, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Will a day come when the race will detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at themâ 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 Twainâ(tm)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 Twainâ(tm)s humor, and of humor in general, too often take âhumorâ 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 periodâ(tm)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 Twainâ(tm)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.  Â
Taken together, these three papers reveal the historical constructedness of American humor by considering the contexts of its forms, production, and reception.   Tracy Wusterâ(tm)s paper, â âThe Plague of Jocularityâ: Mark Twain and the American Humorous Character,â examines the ways in which literary critics in the 1880s and 1890s attempted to define Mark Twainâ(tm)s place in a literary realm in terms of his humorďż˝(tm)s connection to American national character, rather than in terms of literary merit. Jennifer Hughesâ(tm)s paper, âMark Twain, History, and the Legacies of Laughter,â 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.
2008âThe Roundtable from which the Caucus was bornâŚ
American Humor in Theory and Practice: A Discussionâ¨
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)
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