American Humor. Constance 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 backwoods.

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 were in a hurry, educated at full speed, high pressure spirit, life like a shooting star and surprised by death. "Those evasive dialogues by which the Yankee tried to learn everything and tell nothing."

Backwoods profusion vs. Yankee spareness. Lincoln combined the ebullience of the backwoods with the laconic economy of the Yankee. Humor in America is essentially about American character and there are many types of character in America.

Some sample ideas in the book:

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.

"An emotional man may possess no humor, but a humorous man usually has deep pockets of emotion." "Character had always been the great American subject." "Nor has a single unmistakable type of American emerged; the American character is still split into many characters." "in a sense the whole American comic tradition had been that of social criticism." "Jack Downing [Seba Smith]...beneath the placid stream of talk ran a drastic criticism of the Jacksonian democracy."

Jack Downing: "Uncle Joshua always says, in nine cases out of ten it costs more to rob an orchard than it would to buy the apples." "A steamboat captain, once a flatboatman, finding that one of his men had been badly treated in a house on the river near New Orleans, fastened a cable round the pier on which the house rested, and starting the steamer, pulled it into the river, drowning the inmates." "Probably the backwoodsman always kept a large blank gaze fixed upon the stranger as he polished his tales." "If a fellow is born to be hung he will never be drowned." "...strange new words came rolling out of the West...absquatulate, slantendiclur, cahoots, catawampus, spyficated, flabbergasted, tarnacious, rampagious, concussence, supernatiousness, rumsquattle." "The feller looked as slunk in the face as a baked apple."

Quote: "Brother Jonathan, an out-at-elbows New England country boy with short coat-sleeves, shrunken trousers and a blank countenance [was the origin of the Yankee]."

Quote: "The comic says Bergson, comes into being just when society and the individual, freed from the worry of self-preservation, begin to regard themselves as works of art."

Quote: "...the Briton, still wicked, still mannered and over-polished, either rich or nefariously seeking riches, and always defeated by simple rural folk to the accompaniment of loud laughter."

Quote: "Yankee speech was not so much a dialect as a lingo: that is, its oddities were consciously assumed."