American Humor. Rourke.

American Humor: A Study of the National Character
Constance Rourke
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc., 1931.

Why read it? Two types of American humor: the Yankee and the backwoodsman.

American humor begins with the Yankee who told stories without any apparent point, answered questions with questions and never talked loud. The oddities of Yankee speech are conscious. People saw the Yankee as a self-image. Yankees: in a hurry, educated at full speed, high pressure spirit, life like a shooting star, surprised by death. The Yankee tried to learn everything and tell nothing.

The Backwoods profusion vs. Yankee spareness. Yankee low key, backwoods rhapsody. Lincoln combined the ebullience of the backwoods with the laconic economy of the Yankee.

Humor is related to emotion.

The rural American defeats the mannered, polished Briton.

The Negro could not triumph over circumstance, but the Negro’s humor was his triumph.

Americans enjoy seeing themselves deflated. American humor joined with the American habit of storytelling. The comic is concerned not with the individual but with types.Tragedy often mixes with comedy. There is comedy in Moby Dick and comedy in Hawthorne. The American humorous tradition of social criticism. For Twain, the humorous story required the ability to act in a deadpan manner; witty stories, on the other hand, were based on subject matter and anybody could tell them. The comic in America was closely joined with localism. Humor in America is essentially about American character and there are many types of character in America.

Best Sentences:
“An emotional man may possess no humor, but a humorous man usually has deep pockets of emotion.”

“The low key of the Yankee was maintained against the rhapsody of the backwoodsman.”

“In Lincoln two of the larger strains of American comedy seemed to meet…the Western ebullience…but his economy of speech and his laconic turn seemed derived from the Yankee strain.”

“Character had always been the great American subject.”

“Nor has a single unmistakable type of American emerged; the Amereican character is still split into many characters.”