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  • “Sorrowfully Amusing”The Popular Comedy of the Civil War
  • Jon Grinspan (bio)

Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby was the funniest character of the Civil War. Comedian David Ross Locke dreamt up Nasby to mock Confederate sympathizers in the North, and readers devoured his published letters throughout the conflict. In them Locke caricatured Nasby as an ignorant pontificator, a virulent racist, and a drunken, thieving hypocrite. He bragged: “No man hez drunk more whiskey than I have for the party” and swore he never learned to read to avoid becoming an abolitionist. He argued that he could not be drafted into the Union army because of his dandruff. Eventually, his character deserted into the Confederacy but returned to the Union, unhappy with the rebel uniform of “holes with rags around ’em.” Locke frequently used Nasby to mock the opportunistic racism of many Democrats. When asked how to prepare for the 1864 presidential campaign, Nasby responded simply: “Lern to spell and pronownce Missenegenegenashun.”1

Eliza Frances Andrews, a young woman in Georgia, also found fragments of humor mixed in with the brutal Civil War. Andrews and her sister shared “good laughs at the makeshifts we resort to” when feeding civilians dislocated by the fighting. In her diary she recorded a “standing joke” with her sister, in which they burlesqued a passionate “fondness for whatever happens to be most abundant, which is always sure to be cornfield peas.” Even as Georgia howled in the wake of William Tecumseh Sherman’s army, the Andrews sisters enjoyed the “comedies mixed up with our country’s tragedy.”2

The professional humorist and the Georgia girl were not the only Americans laughing during the conflict. Many met the grisly events with bold and honest comedy. Bored soldiers in camp and anxious relatives back home filled their letters with nervous laughter. Prisoners of war joked about their desperate search for blankets, and nurses snuck “comic papers” under the pillows of wounded soldiers. Cabinet members noted that Abraham Lincoln read those same papers aloud in meetings, opening [End Page 313] their discussion of emancipation with a bit “which he thought very funny.” By the second half of the conflict, even polite newspapers printed “Off-Hand” amputation puns and reported pranks played on battlefield gravediggers. Though some stoics viewed the conflict with unblinking seriousness, a surprising number of Americans proved willing “to laugh and joke even at calamities.”3

While the jokes made by 31 million Americans over half a decade veered off in innumerable directions, they often shared a purpose. For the most part, Civil War comedy confronted suffering with humor. Jokers mocked their darkest experiences to manage the horror of war and squeeze some laughter from their tragedies. As the fighting grew heated, and hope of easy victory or battlefield glory melted away, Americans increasingly relied on comedy to cool their growing despair. Bill Arp, Georgia’s equivalent of Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby, articulated this use of confrontational humor as a coping mechanism. Explaining his unflinching satire of the foibles of besieged soldiers, fleeing civilians, and looted homes, Arp wrote: “I must explode myself generally so as to feel better.”4

Popular humor enriches the story of the Civil War. Historians like Drew Gilpin Faust, James McPherson, and Alice Fahs have recently pointed to the growing cloud of sorrow and sentimentalism that cast a shadow over Americans’ initial visions of glory and honor.5 Civil War humor seems to contradict this morose turn. The popularity of cheeky jokes about grim subjects like burials, sometimes played on “sentimentalists,” shows that no subject was too solemn for America’s comedians.6 Yet, while sorrow was clearly not the only response to the conflict, the willingness to joke about suffering actually supports these scholars’ narrative. The same society that created a culture of “shared suffering” to “confront” its tragedies also built up a shared comedic culture with distinctly confrontational jokes.7 As their experiences with the realities of warfare highlighted the uselessness of dramatic bluster, Americans tried to cope through sentimentalism, sorrow, or comedy. Though humor and sentimentalism were opposing expressions, they grew from the same need and narrative.

Soldiers and civilians eventually chuckled at “the comical aspect of terror,” but only after a...

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