WHIMSY I: The Language of Humor: The Humor of Language ed. by Don L.F. Nilsen and Alleen Pace Nilsen (review)

264Rocky Mountain Review DON L.F. NILSEN and ALLEEN PACE NILSEN, eds. WHIMSY I: The Language of Humor: The Humor of Language. Tempe, Arizona: Western Humor and Irony Membership (WHIM), 1983. 412 p. Scholarly meetings are rarely memorable for their humor, but the annual conferences of the Western Humor and Irony Membership (WHIM), which meets on or about April Fools' Day, are a delightful exception. A kind of western Feast of Fools, WHIM allows academicians to let their professional hair down without incurring the displeasure of the Pecksniffs in the administration. The Language ofHumor: The Humor ofLanguage is a collection of excerpts from each of the almost four hundred papers presented at the 1982 conference, which was attended by 1,000 people from the United States and eleven other countries. Each excerpt was edited with the intent of maintaining the tone of the paper from which it was taken, illustrating the kind of humor discussed, and reflecting the methods used by the presenter to exemplify that humor. The book, like the conference, is organized around eighteen topics: American literature, Arizona authors, bilingual humor and translation, British literature, children's literature, editorial reactions to humor, education , feminism, foreign languages, linguistics, newspaper humor, philosophy , poetry, popular culture, prose style, psychology, religion, and sciences. Each selection is headed by the author's name and professional affiliation, the title of the paper, and a list of authors, critics, and rhetorical devices mentioned. A handy and complete index has thoughtfully been provided. Topics covered during the conference ranged from the fairly conventional, such as O.M. Brack's paper on Samuel Johnson's humor and William S. Fry's on cognitive processes in relation to humor, for example, to more intriguing ones like Dowling G. Campbell's "Flatulence from Chaucer to Salinger" and Kristine Hanson's "The Anals of History: Unintentional Humor from Freshman Compositions." And where else but at such a meeting would one find conventional authors such as Shakespeare, Homer, Twain, Swift, and Schopenhauer rubbing elbows, so to speak, with modern comic companions like Johnny Carson, Mort Sahl, Erma Bombeck, Sid Caesar, and Mae West? The broad range of these papers reminds us of the truth of G. K. Chesterton's statement that humor "is meant, in a literal sense, to make game of man; that is, to dethrone him from his official dignity and hunt him like game. It is meant to remind us human beings that we have things about us as ungainly and ludicrous as the nose of the elephant or the neck of the giraffe." And WHIM, we hope, will always be around to remind us that the elephants and giraffes are as important to our culture as the literary and linguistic fossils we hunt in the groves of Academe. ROBERT C. STEENSMA University of Utah ...