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  • Southern Frontier Humor: An Anthology
  • John Mayfield (bio)
Southern Frontier Humor: An Anthology. Edited by M. Thomas Inge and Ed Piacentino. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2010. Pp. 360. Paper, $26.95.)

Between 1830 and 1860, a diverse group of southern humorists produced a catalog of tall tales, satires, spoofs, and reminiscences that still ranks as the Old South's major literary contribution. "Serious" writers such as William Gilmore Simms always labored in the shadow of Cooper or Hawthorne, but the amateur humorists had no equal. The tradition began with Augustus B. Longstreet's Georgia Scenes in 1834 and persisted in George Washington Harris's wildly anarchic Sut Lovingood. Clustered around these classics were many more, some well known and some not. The writers drew their characters from all strata of southern society, put them in uncomfortable and often ludicrous situations, and let them speak in their own words. Twain picked up the tradition in Huckleberry Finn, Faulkner developed it in Spotted Horses, and Andy Griffith brought it to television in Mayberry RFD.

There have been anthologies of this humor from its beginnings. William T. Porter of the New York sporting journal Spirit of the Times encouraged the craft, and in 1964, Hennig Cohen and William B. Dillingham issued Humor of the Old Southwest, which has served as the standard for two generations. Now Thomas Inge and Ed Piacentino have produced a handsome new anthology that will carry us through for years to come. The differences between this volume and Cohen and Dillingham's are subtle. The new one has more emphasis on lesser-known wits such as Christopher Mason Haile ("Pardon Jones") or Hardin Taliaferro, and more stories feature blacks and women (although all the tales were written by white men). The editing is superb, the introductory biographies are to the point, and the core is there: Longstreet and his descendants live on.

So does a core question: Why should we take such tales seriously? At one level the answer is simple: They are fun. Who can resist Sut Lovingood's moment of conquest when he slips two wriggly lizards up a revivalist's pant leg and watches the old windbag strip naked before a throng of pious females, hollering "the Hell-sarpents hes got me!" Or when Henry Clay [End Page 551] Lewis's Widow Rugby impulsively decides to horse-race a preacher to church and beats him by stripping to the buff to lighten her load? In this sesquicentennial "celebration" of the Civil War—with all its nostalgia for crinoline ladies and chivalrous gentlemen—it is good to remember that in 1860 the South was an unformed, fluid place where social status was insecure and life was anything but serene and elegant.

The tales also remind us of what literary historian Richard Gray has called the patrician/populist divide in southern identity. Humor is by definition subversive of propriety and social conventions, and we have here what James Justus has called a "riot" of those very conventions. Given the fact that the stories came from literate, well-read gentlemen writing often about the antics of an underclass of plain folk and con men, who exactly was poking fun at whom, and why? An anthologist's selections and the ways in which they are framed are important issues.

Early collections tend to be fondly nostalgic. The humorist is a yarn spinner and cracker-barrel philosopher telling whoppers about a time gone by. The lovable folk bring up visions of Jefferson's virtuous agrarians, and the fact that they whoop and holler and fight is a sign of democratic enthusiasm. Seen from this perspective, southern humor was populist to the core, and the humorist was a fond chronicler of its spirit.

That changed during the 1960s as historians rediscovered the dark and bloody ground of antebellum social relations. There was nothing inherently funny about social stratification, poverty, cruelty, or illiteracy, unless one was using comedy as a shield. Kenneth Lynn's highly influential Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor (1960) regards the storytellers as self-controlled gentlemen using satire to draw a cordon sanitaire between themselves and the bumpkins by mocking them. Lynn's analysis emphasizes class antagonism...

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