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Events
Apr. 7 | MAASA Joint Conference—April, 2011
Joint conference on material culture, April 7-11, 2011, UW-Madison
Events
March 25, 2009
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. John Pascal’s paper, “Artemus Ward: The Gentle Humorist and His Lecture Influence on Mark Twain,” examines the influence of Artemus Ward, the first major popular humorist in America, on Twain’s early development as a lecturer and humorist. 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’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, Pascal, 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.
Event of the Humor Studies Caucus
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