American Fun: Four Centuries of Joyous Revolt by John Beckman, and: The Trickster Figure in American Literature by Winifred Morgan (review)

Wars and social conflicts often serve as defining moments of history. More particularly, American history is largely established in a national narrative centered on revolutions and civil rights movements. However, equally important as those big events—in their own ways—are the ways that Americans understood and negotiated such conflicts throughout their national history. And one underexamined way that Americans have engaged with their culture is through humor. Humor is key to the in-depth reflections on the demonstration of American character in Winifred Morgan’s The Trickster Figure in American Literature and John Beckman’s American Fun: Four Centuries of Joyous Revolt. Many oft-ignored factors of American identity are explored through these authors’ engagements with texts and demographics focusing on humor. The two studies alternate grand narratives of American culture featuring tricksters, borderland inhabitants, and paradoxes of rebellious belonging.

John Beckman has created a nuanced definition of American fun as he examines joyous happenings involving risk, participation, rebellion (sometimes implicitly, other times explicitly), and democracy. Furthermore, fun is distinct from entertainment because the former unites Americans through enactments of liberty, freedom, and participation in politically meaningful acts, whereas the latter separates the public based upon gender, class, and ethnicity. Beckman is concerned with how Americans have fun and what fun has meant and still means. He examines fun from American independence to contemporary social circles. While he reflects on a variety of ways Americans have had fun (attending pubs, singing and playing music, attending festivals, attractions, and sideshows), his most salient threads trace dance and hoaxes or pranks as acts of rebellion. Beckman’s work, balancing narrative and analysis, is a pleasure to read. He occasionally provides commentary and quips; he is most definitely not an unbiased historian or cultural analyst of American history. Rather, his amusement in presenting America’s fun history is apparent.

Chapter 1 launches with the quintessential moment of American fun: Thomas Morton’s Merry Mount opposing William Bradford’s Puritan rules and community. Beckman refers repeatedly to Merry Mount in justifying the continued presence of the “essence” of fun in and through rebellion. He explains fun happening in and through political events in chapters 1 through 4: Merry Mount; Jack Tars, John and Samuel Adams, and events during the American Revolution; Pinkster celebrations, African American trickster tales, and dances originating in religious African American settings evolving into Congo Square dance events; and the development of American character in the West through hoaxes, dances, and the democratic policy allowing all to have fun so long as none have their own right to fun impinged. He then shifts to P. T. Barnum, sports and dancing, and the commercialization of fun. Beckman establishes how fun was often a politically meaningful act even when it was commercialized. After reflecting on capitalist endeavors, Beckman recognizes jazz (as music and dance) as the culmination of the past types of fun and describes it as the “American spirit or a warning of civilization’s decline” (164). He discusses major figures and analyzes the risks and rewards involved with jazz, which aided in the rise of the New Negro and the New Woman. This section focuses on how specific celebrities and demographics became more politically focused in their fun as the Jazz Era faded and the Harlem Renaissance arose.

Beckman next examines the passivity of cinema as he begins engaging with contemporary cultural conditions. Cinema and film, he claims, are representations of a popular culture that was invented, not by the media, but by the people as they were having fun—by going to dances, playing with gender and American social norms, and pushing against temperance and strict Christian morality. The Merry Pranksters, the Beat generation, Rock ’n’ Roll, the San Francisco Mime Troop, and the Diggers are all positioned as pranksters, hoax inducers, or tricksters of...