Dark Laughter: Humor and Pathos in the Old Southwest

In Following the Equator (1897) Mark Twain grouses, "Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of Humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven." Having fully entered the curmudgeonry of his later years, Twain approaches the level of facile truism in drawing a connection between humor and pathos. The relationship is at least as old as Juvenal himself. In the three books under consideration in this review, however, this truism is to varying degrees called into question. For Andrew Silver it seems that pathos is all. With particular focus on nineteenth-century racial violence and the human distortions and degradation that attended the Reconstruction era, Silver envisions humorous writing from Augustus Baldwin Longstreet to Charles Chesnutt in essentially tragic terms. In contrast, Ed Piacentino and James Justus approach this literature with all of the acumen but none of the gravity of Silver. Especially for Justus, old southwest humor occupies literary territory in which there is little occasion for pathos. While these differences will prove significant, the debate itself bodes well for the field. The publication of three major studies in as many years would seem to indicate that these are indeed flush times for fans of the old Southwest. However, these three books—in their thoroughness and thoughtfulness—demonstrate that the humor of the old Southwest was more than just a diversion; it was a significant cultural bellwether that reveals much about its creators and their audience, then and now.

In Minstrelsy and Murder: The Crisis of Southern Humor, 1835–1925, Andrew Silver determinedly contextualizes his study of southern humor within the troubling racial history of the nineteenth century. Silver's study is nothing if not humorless, and even though he draws on three writers who typically are grouped with the old southwest humor tradition, he chooses to designate his subject as a "southern" one. Such a designation is historically and culturally evocative in a way that suggests Silver's larger purposes. His study is keenly concerned with race, and for him the crisis of southern humor is largely a crisis of race.

In addition to chapters on Longstreet and Chesnutt, Silver devotes one chapter to George Washington Harris and two to Mark Twain. The divide between Longstreet and Harris on the one hand, and Twain and Chesnutt on the other, is important to note. Silver credits the latter pair with "creating a dark new vein of southern humor which succeeds by calling attention to the ways in which its own humor fails." In other words, southern humor in the 1880s becomes self-conscious: "Anti-empathic comic discourses clash uneasily with empathic tragic discourses in their texts, creating a discomfiting friction for the reader which, at key moments, upends traditional assumptions."

Silver's voice is steady and astute throughout, but he is at his best in his analysis of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in which he accomplishes the remarkable feat of saying something new about Twain and race, particularly in his analysis of Jim. Silver views Twain's portrayal of Jim as a pivotal moment not only in Twain's career but in southern humor generally. In trying to solve the quandary that the last third of Huckleberry Finn has long presented to readers, Silver sees in Twain's minstrelization of Jim a deliberate "self-ironizing" in response to the popular forms (sentimentalism and minstrelsy) available to him for the depiction of black characters. "Twain's multidiscoursed conception of Jim," Silver writes, "which draws upon the frantically contradictory entertainment of minstrel comedy and sentimental pathos to create its final jarring effect, marks an important transformation in the history of southern humor." Twain's characterization has transformative...