Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Note on organization

This article is not strictly chronological in nature, but the mediums are arranged by the date. Each one began to grow in importance as time went on. Literature appears before cartoons although newspaper cartoons in the modern sense began in the 1840s. Radio and film came out roughly at the same time. Film is covered after radio because it led more directly to the television section. Stand-up comedy began to receive renewed attention in the 1970s which is the reason why it was placed directly after television.

Cultural confusions

American humor is a description of humor from the United States that usually concerns aspects of American culture. The extent to which an individual will personally find something humorous obviously depends on a host of absolute and relative variables, including, but not limited to geographical location, culture, maturity, level of education, and context. People of different countries will therefore find different situations funny. Just as American culture has many aspects which differ from other nations , these cultural differences may be a barrier to how humor translates to other countries. That being said there is evidence that American comedies actually perform better in other English speaking, and also German speaking, nations than American action or science fiction films do.[2] Although the study linked to also shows American comedies did noticeably worse in Spanish speaking nations. Furthermore films such as Shrek 2 and Men in Black are among the top-grossing comedies outside the US

American humor

American humor is the conventions and common threads that tie together humor in the United States.

Unlike British humour, American humor has historically tended a little more towards slapstick. There is less emphasis on understatement, and so the humor tends to be a little more open; rather than satirizing the social system through exaggeration, American humor prefers more observational techniques. Further the United States, unlike Britain or most of Europe or even Japan, does not have any history of a nobility. This is actually of some significance due to British or European humor involving inherited class systems. Humor involving class systems in America does not focus on the monarchy or nobility but making fun of stereotypes based on race and social standing are common in American humor as well.

Furthermore, the United States has many diverse groups from which to draw on for humorous material. The strongest of these influences, during the 20th century at least, has been the influx of Jewish comedians and their corresponding Jewish humor, including some of the most influential: The Three Stooges The Marx Brothers, Rodney Dangerfield, Woody Allen, Jerry Seinfeld, Jon Stewart, and Lewis Black, just to name a few. Also significant is African American humor as it has some differences from Black British humor and a higher percentage of people in the United States are of African descent.

Saturday, January 27, 2007

Literature

A candidate for the 'founding father' of American humor is Mark Twain, the man Ernest Hemingway credits with the invention of American Literature. It should be stated that humorists existed in the United States before Twain, for example Augustus Baldwin Longstreet collection of Southern humor came out when Twain was 5 years old, but Twain is seen as a founding figure in creating an "American voice" to humor. That stated, Twain remained conscious of his humor's relationship with European counterparts, commenting in "How to Tell a Story" that, "The humorous story is American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French. The humorous story depends for its effect upon the manner of the telling; the comic story and the witty story upon the matter."

This early definition puts emphasis on the performance oriention of American humor, and thereby necessarily the performer her/himself. Indeed, in his time on the lecture circuit Twain essentially 'performed' many of his works, most notably "The American Vandal Abroad" lecture he gave via the Lyceum Movement before the publication of his breakthrough work The Innocents Abroad. Thus, at the root of American humor is the very concept of stand-up comedy itself, and the shift from textual means of conveying humor to that of performance and performer.

His value notwithstanding, Twain represents only one strain of humor in the United States. Another famous American humorist of the nineteenth century was Ambrose Bierce, whose most famous work is the cynical Devil's Dictionary. Early twentieth-century American humorists included members of the Algonquin Round Table (named for the Algonquin Hotel), such as Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley. In more recent times popular writers of American humor include P. J. O'Rourke, Erma Bombeck, and Dave Barry.

Sunday, December 17, 2006

Cartoons, Magazines and Animation

American cartoons and comics have commented, humorously or scathingly, on American life since Thomas Nast or earlier. Humorous print cartoonists of note include Charles Schulz, Scott Adams, Jim Davis, Gary Larson, Walt Kelly, Johnny Hart, Bill Watterson, and others.

Mad is an American humor magazine founded in 1952 which offered satire on all aspects of American life and pop culture. With its first issue (October-November, 1952), Mad was a comic book, and part of the line of EC Comics. It became a slick magazine in 1954. Throughout the 1950s and continuing until today Mad featured parodies focusing on the familiar staples of American culture, exposing the fakery behind the image. The magazine has leant its name to the current television program MadTV.

Other U.S. humor magazines of note include Humbug, Trump and Help!, as well as the National Lampoon, and Spy Magazine.

National Lampoon began in 1970 as an offshoot of the Harvard Lampoon. The magazine regularly skewered pop culture, the counterculture and politics. The magazine was at its height in the 1970s, and its influence spread to films and comedy programs. In the mid 1970s, some of the magazine's contributors left to join the NBC comedy show Saturday Night Live (SNL). The magazine stopped publication in 1998, but films and other programs attributed to "National Lampoon" continue.

In the twentieth-century film allowed for animated cartoons of a humorous nature. The most notable of these perhaps being Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry. Chuck Jones, Tex Avery, Mel Blanc (as a voice) and Friz Freleng playing critical roles in this. Humorous animated shorts like What's Opera, Doc?, Duck Amuck, and One Froggy Evening garnered critical enough appeal to be inducted into the National Film Registry. The Warner Brothers cartoons often dealt with themes beyond US culture or society, but did involve a great deal of commentary on American life. Although many of the American winners of the Academy Award for Animated Short Film are not examples of American humor a significant percentage would qualify as such. On television noteworthy American cartoons include The Flintstones and The Simpsons.

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Theater and Vaudeville

A popular form of theater during the 19th century was the minstrelsy show, arguably the first uniquely American style of performance. These shows featured white actors dressed in blackface and playing up racial stereotypes.

Burlesque became a popular form of entertainment in the middle of the 19th century. Originally a form of farce in which females in male roles mocked the politics and culture of the day, burlesque was condemned by opinion makers for its sexuality and outspokenness. The form was hounded off the "legitimate stage" and found itself relegated to saloons and barrooms, and its content mostly raunchy jokes.

Vaudeville is a style of variety entertainment predominant in America in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century. Developing from many sources including shows in saloons, minstrelsy, British pantomimes, and other popular entertainments, vaudeville became one of the most popular types of entertainment in America. Part of this entertainment was usually one or more comedians. Vaudeville provided generations of American entertainers including George M. Cohan, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Mae West, Fanny Brice, and W.C. Fields, among others. Vaudeville grew less popular as movies replaced live entertainment, but vaudeville performers were able to move into those other fields. Former vaudeville performers who were successful in film, radio and television include: Buster Keaton, Marx Brothers, Edgar Bergen, Three Stooges, and Abbott & Costello.

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Radio and recorded

Early radio shows include what is labeled as the first situation comedy, Sam and Henry, which debuted on WGN radio in 1926. It was partially inspired by Sidney Smith's popular comic strip The Gumps. Amos & Andy began as one of the first radio comedy serials which debuted on CBS in 1928. This was a show written and performed by white actors about black farmhands moving to the big city. The show was successful enough that in 1930 a film was made with the characters and in 1951 it became a television sitcom. The film starred the white actors in blackface. The television show starred African American actors.

Radio in its early years was a showcase for comedy stars from the vaudeville circuit. Jack Benny being among the early comedy stars in this medium. When Jack moved to television in the 1950s, his time slot was filled by Stan Freberg a voice actor, and comedian. Stan began in 1950 to produce records of his comedy routines which involved parodies of popular tunes and spoofs of modern entertainment personalities and on political topics. He was also on radio from 1954-1957.

Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding were an American comedy team who began in radio in 1946 with a daily 15-minute show titled Matinee With Bob and Ray. Their format was typically to satirize the medium in which they were performing, such as conducting interviews, with off-the-wall dialogue presented in a generally deadpan style as though it were a serious interview. They continued on the air for over four decades on radio and television, ending in 1987.

In more recent times the medium fell out of favor as a source of humor with Garrison Keilor being perhaps a rare modern example.

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Film

The very first movie to be produced was Thomas Edison's kinetoscope of his assistant Fred Ott in Record of a Sneeze. This could also be considered the first to show a comedic element.

During the era of silent films in the 1920s, comedic films began to appear in significant numbers. These were mainly focused on visual humor, including slapstick and burlesque. In America, prominent clown-style actors of the silent era include Charlie Chaplin (although he was born in England), Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. Oliver Hardy (of Laurel and Hardy) (Stan Laurel being British), Fatty Arbuckle, the Marx Brothers and other names were significant in the first decades of American cinema humor.

Many early film directors in the US were born elsewhere. This is true of one of the most noted early comedy directors in Hollywood, Billy Wilder. That said American born directors like Howard Hawks, Preston Sturges and George Cukor also were major film comedy directors in the 1940s. In the 1960s to 1970s Woody Allen and Mel Brooks gained note becoming two of the most appreciated of American film comedy directors. In the 1980s Christopher Guest, Carl Reiner, and the Coen brothers emerged as significant directors or writers in American film comedy. Added to this several "brother duos" have been of significance in American film like The Zucker brothers, the Coen brothers, and The Farrelly brothers. In the last ten years Kevin Smith, Jay Roach, Tom Shadyac, and Alexander Payne have garnered notice as film directors whose work is often humorous; if at times darkly so in the case of Payne. Although some of the names mentioned above, particularly Woody Allen and the Coen brothers, also do other genres of film besides comedy.

See also AFI's 100 Years... 100 Laughs and 50 Greatest Comedy Films as in both lists the majority of the films were American made and directed.

Sunday, September 24, 2006

The Decline of American Humor

“What, sir,” said Boswell, notebook in hand, “is the principal virtue?” “Whereas, sir,” said Sam, “you know, courage is reckoned the greatest of all virtues; because unless a man has that virtue, he has no security for preserving any other.”

When Bob Hatch wrote and suggested we have a piece on the decline of American humor for the Nation’s Spring Book Issue [1957], I said fine, we can use Columbia’s new collection of Vance Randolph and somebody else’s selection of Finley Peter Dunne as pegs to hang it on; few things are funnier and fewer things today are anything like them. Unfortunately, the books never came, so this story will have to be more general and sort of anticipatory.

I don’t know about the new selection of Mr. Dooley. Just recently I read some professor who said he was an Irish dialect comedian, so, since this editor is probably a professor too, it may be a pig in a poke. But there is no doubt about Vance Randolph. He has never published a book that wasn’t thoroughly satisfying, and he has done some five or six I know of: Who Blowed Up the Church House?, The Devil’s Pretty Daughter, We Always Lie to Strangers, Ozark Superstitions, all with Columbia, and Down in the Holler (with George P. Wilson), with the University of Oklahoma Press. Get them all, and the new one, too. This isn’t TV hillbilly humor, it isn’t even Al Capp or Erskine Caldwell. It is a last lingering contact with an older and better world, a thin red umbilicus still attached to what Sherwood Anderson would have called the American Earth. I am well aware that the reason for the popularity of the cultural survivals of the Southern Highlands on the New York stage is that barefoot girls and one-gallus, corncob-bearing males give the subway Neanderthals somebody to look down on — no mean accomplishment. The real thing is something else again. Vance Randolph is not a professor, but an uncorrupted amateur folklorist. This is a great tradition, all the best folklore we have has been collected by doctors (of medicine, not philosophy), clergymen, schoolmarms, and plain people. There is something about the methodology of scholarship that blights folkspeech.

Everybody knows that the Southern Highlands are the last refuge of the American frontier, and, from before our own, of the marches of England and Scotland and of the Scots and North Irish. But there is more to the Ozarks than Toynbee’s “external proletariat.” This is the home of the Green Corn Rebellion, the land where, in the evenings, around the stove in the crossroads store, one literate farmer read aloud the words of Oscar Ameringer and The Appeal to Reason, slowly and painfully, to the leg-slapping approval of a tobacco-chewing audience. Here, if anywhere in America, was the focus of a purely indigenous agrarian anarchist-socialism. I have run hounds, swapped lies, and drunk tiger piss with men who would have been happy fighting with Makhno. Unruly, utterly skeptical, absolutely fearless, bawdy free-thinkers — very different indeed from the originals of the term “square” — the square-headed agrarian Progressives of the northern Middlewest. These are the key words of great — classic — epic — Homeric — humor. A sense of the consistent principle of incongruity on which Nature, for all our science and philosophy, really operates. The realization that the accepted, official version of anything is most likely false and that all authority is based on fraud. The courage to face and act on these two conclusions. The appreciation of the wonderful hilarity of the processes of human procreation and elimination. The acceptance of the prime fact that nobody made it that way — it just happened. I find it hard to bust into roars of laughter over the long-winded racket of the majority of the old-time humorists Constance Rourke writes about. I am not a passionate devotee of Sut Lovingood. But from those days to Mencken — or even Westbrook Pegler, Damon Runyon, or Will Rogers at their best, these were the qualities that made American humor American. It was just plain lack of style that made it, in so many cases, tedious.

This, once, was the blood and meat and bone of our very own life. Out of it came our one epic hero, the only American who can walk with Ajax and Odysseus — Huck Finn. What happened to this heritage? I’ll tell you what happened to it. Not long ago, in the Vaticide Review, a college professor who, of all things, teaches the children of cowboys in a university in the mountains of the Wild West, wrote a “paper” conclusively demonstrating by patient, laborious research that Huckleberry Finn was a homosexual romance. This came about, not because the professor was himself a homosexual, but because he was moribund with the ultimate corruption of human self-alienation. He just didn’t know what the word “work” meant. He had never done any. He never knew anybody who had done any. Huckleberry Finn is our example of one of the three or four basic epic plots — maybe there are really only two. It is about the devoted comradeship of men at grips with a “morally neuter” — frivolous, the Greeks called their gods — environment, the inchoate and irresponsible flux of the universe, on which men, working in comradeship, impose the order of their virtues and their reason. And the first of these is courage.

Life is all a great joke — but only the brave ever get the point. When James, W. not H., said, “It is true if it works,” this very frontier, American sort of thing, is what he meant. He meant, “If you can do work with it.” Only truth can impose order on the environment of disorder. Our professor at a cowtown university undoubtedly thinks it means “if you can ‘work’ some kind of finagle with it.” The reason pragmatism got such a bad name is that it came to be taught by people who did not work their way through school at jobs, but as teaching assistants. Incongruity? Yes — but laughter comes with the mastery of incongruity, like handling logs in a spring river, tossing sacks of wheat into a box car, making babies, or cutting a cam that works right on your own machine. When August Kekule saw his benzene ring, he laughed. In the Lankavatara Sutra, Buddha laughed at the vision of compound infinitudes of universes. The great Turner picture is of “Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus.” The tiny figure on its gaily caparisoned boat is laughing at the bellowing man mountain. The Odyssey is a comedy.

Once these qualities go from humor it becomes sicklied o’er with the pale cast of effeminacy. Compare Dorothy Parker or Ogden Nash with Lear:

There was an old man who said, “Hush,
I think there’s a bird in this bush.
” When they said, “Is it small?
” He replied, “Not at all.
It’s three times the size of the bush.”

Whimsy, like black lace underwear, is all right in its place. Great humor has a savagery about it. This is why British humor stands up better than American in this century — particularly British bawdry. All the great dirty limericks, like detective stories, have English settings. It’s like English cooking, which is still that of Boadicea’s day. True conservatives, the English have yet to wash off all their woad. It is for this reason that, however subversive of the established order, so many great humorists, especially satirists, Roman or British, have been Tories. The revolutionary action of humor is a deeper thing than any current politics, and the humorist tends to adopt these social attitudes which at least claim to ensure him the strongest connections with the oldest, most fundamental, most human behavior.

In America, by and large, this has not been true. You can, or at least T.S. Eliot can, create a “myth of conservatism,” but it is pretty damn hard to work up any myth of the American business community. Henry Luce has spent billions trying and is still working at it, but all the progress reports are negative. We do not usually think of Damon Runyon as a radical, but go back and read the workingstiff dialect poetry he wrote when the century was young. “It pays to git a plenty while you’re gittin’.” And I will never forget the time I heard Will Rogers say, “I hear the Standard Oil Company has adopted the motto, ‘We Serve the Public.’ Havin’ growed up on a farm, I know jist what they’re a’ gittin’ at.” We forgive Mencken his beer-cellar Nietzscheism. We forget that years ago, Pegler was hired by Scripps-Howard for the same reason Heywood Broun was — he was a “fearless independent,” not a gutta-percha bottle of corrosive rancors. By and large, though, American humor until well into this century has been “radical.” All humor must be in the etymological sense. Ours was also in the political. Out of the Masses, old and New, came the major cartoonists of the period. Still unsurpassed, many of them are famous today. The whole lithograph crayon technique, so closely identified with Buck Ellis and Bob Minor, and originally developed for the IWW press, has about it the very essence of completely autonomous, completely autochthonous, American workingstiff defiance.

Finley Peter Dunne (Mr. Dooley) is the author of: “Wan iv th’ strangest things about life is that th’ poor, who need th’ money th’ most, ar-re th’ very wans that niver have it.” “Don’t ask f’r rights. Take thim. An’ don’t let anny wan give thim to ye. A right that is handed to ye fer nawthin’ has somethin’ the mather with it. It’s more thin likely it’s ony a wrrong turned inside out.” “’Tis a sthrange thing whin we come to think iv it that th’ less money a man gits f’r his wurruk, th’ more nicissary it ’tis to th’ wurruld that he shud go on wurrukin’. Yer boss kin go to Paris on a combination weddin’ and divorce thrip an’ no one bothers his head abouth him. But if ye shud go to Paris — excuse me laughin’ mesilf black in th’ face — th’ industhrees iv th’ country pine away.” “Mebbe ’tis as bad to take champagne out of wan man’s mouth as it ’tis to take rround shteak out of anather’s.” “It takes vice t’ hunt vice. That accounts f’r polismen.” “I care not who makes th’ laws iv a nation, if I can get out an injunction.” “Laws are made t’ throuble people, and th’ more throuble they make th’ longer they shtay on the shtachoo books.” “If me ancestors were not what Hogan calls regicides, ’twas not because they wan’t ready an’ willin’, ony a king niver came their way.” “A constitootional ixicative, Hinissey, is a ruler who does as he damn pleases an’ blames th’ people.”

What happened? Where did this kind of humor go? Don’t forget, Dunne wrote this stuff for what they call the capitalist press. It went the same place the manual spark lever and the choke went on cars. They were dangerous because women used them to hang their purses on. Think of the environment in which Mr. Dooley was appreciated. Who rushes the growler today? How many people chew Piper Heidsieck? How many smoke Five Brothers in a corncob pipe? Humor must be about the basic verities.

The distinguishing mark of our contemporary humor, what has come to be called “New Yorker humor,” is that it is of, for, and by the great bulk of our population who live in interminably busy idleness, who are never at grips with their environment, but who live by delegated powers and vicarious atonements. They are surrounded by the gadgets that appear in the advertising columns alongside; when they have to do something as elemental as driving a nail or mowing a lawn some whimsical disaster always takes place. Like the movies, nothing ever happens that would offend any conceivable group or section of the population, or in any way interfere with the sale of any commodity whatsoever. Nothing important must happen — it would be bad for business.

A few comic strips linger on, Moon Mullins, The Katzenjammer Kids, Williams’s Out Our Way. I wonder what the TV generation thinks of them? A few towns still permit emasculated burlesque shows, but the comics are not allowed to distract from the interminable parade of strippers. Chaplin is self-exiled. American radicalism lost its sense of humor long ago. And of course “the media” chew up everything, songs, jokes, “personalities” — 365 days times 24 hours — this is a forest fire which consumes all in its path. What is wrong with American humor is what is wrong with American life. It is commercialism. True humor is the most effective mode of courage.

KENNETH REXROTH
1957