• 229 • N O T E S Prologue 1. Daniel Kurtzman, “Laura Bush Video: White House Correspondents’ Dinner,” About.com, April 30, 2005, politicalhumor.about.com/od/multimedia/v/laurabushvideo .htm (accessed April 25, 2008). 2. Ibid. 3. Victor Turner, The Anthropology of Performance (New York: PAJ Publications, 1988), 25; Richard Schechner, The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance (London: Routledge, 1995), 1. 4. Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, Performance Studies Series (New York: PAJ Publications, 1982), 30–44. 5. Ibid. 6. BrianSutton-Smith,“GamesofOrderandDisorder,”paperpresentedtothesymposium “Forms of Symbolic Inversion,” sponsored by the American Anthropological Association, Toronto, December 1, 1972, quoted ibid., 28. 7. See Joseph Boskin, Rebellious Laughter: People’s Humor in American Culture (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997); Arthur Power Dudden, ed., American Humor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); and Jesse Bier, The Rise and Fall of American Humor (New York: Octagon, 1981). 8. Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, news release, “What Americans Know: 1989–2007: Public Knowledge of Current Affairs Little Changed by News and Information Revolutions” (Washington, DC, April 15, 2007), 13; Pew Research Center, Trends 2005 (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2005), 46–47; Heritage, posting to Common Ground Common Sense forum, May 1, 2005, www.commongroundcommonsense.org/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t27905. html (accessed April 28, 2008); Frank Rich, “Laura Bush’s Mission Accomplished,” New York Times, May 8, 2005. 9. Rogers branded himself a “ropin’ fool” in the film of that title, which he wrote and produced in 1921. 10. For the rise of commercial television and consumer culture, see Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003); and Lynn Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). For a discussion of the heroic quality of the standup comedian in postwar America, see David Marc, Comic Visions: Television Comedy and American Culture, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997), 10–15. 11. Arthur Power Dudden, Pardon Us, Mr. President! American Humor on Politics (South Brunswick, NJ: A. S. Barnes, 1975), 83. • 230 • n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 1 – 2 1 12. Artemus Ward, Artemus Ward, His Book (New York: Carleton, 1862), 176, 79. 13. Hal Erickson, “From Beautiful Downtown Burbank”: A Critical History of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, 1968–1973 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000), 167–68. 14. Sheldon Cherney, “An Analysis of the Use of Humor in Presidential Campaign Speeches, 1940–1952” (Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California, 1956), 1–2. 15. Bedřich Smetana and Karel Sabina, The Bartered Bride: A Lyric Opera in Three Acts (London: Boosey and Hawkes, 1945); Joseph Boskin, Rebellious Laughter: People’s Humor in American Culture (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997). 16. Louis D. Rubin Jr., “The Great American Joke,” South Atlantic Quarterly 72, no. 1 (1973): 83. 17. E. B. White and Katharine S. White, eds., A Subtreasury of American Humor (New York: Coward-McCann, 1941), xvii. 1. An American Company of Comedians 1. Ward, Artemus Ward, His Book, 179–85. 2. Ibid., 186; John J. Pullen, Comic Relief: The Life and Laughter of Artemus Ward, 1834–1867 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1983), 3. 3. Daniel Wickberg, The Senses of Humor: Self and Laughter in Modern America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 41–45. 4. Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communication (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 130; Walter Blair and Hamlin Hill, America’s Humor: From Poor Richard to Doonesbury (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 30–31; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. and extended ed. (London: Verso, 1991); Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger, Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989). 5. Wickberg, The Senses of Humor, 74–84. 6. See Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence, 1st ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1966); Mary P. Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); LeRoy Ashby, With Amusement for All: A History of American Popular Culture since 1830 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 21; Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in...